How to design a successful eParticipation Strategy
How to design a strong approach
The principles of good project management apply to the design and delivery of successful engagement strategies. The Office of Government Commerce website provides a good source of advice on managing successful projects.
Each participation exercise is unique and requires careful design and oversight of delivery to ensure that the intended benefits are delivered.
Three factors are particularly important.
- Political leadership needs to be demonstrably evident throughout the process, preferably through active participation. Participants prefer this kind of "hands-on" approach that can provide confidence that views will be heard and acted on.
- The degree of devolved decision-making involved in each case needs to be clear, so people know how far decisions have been taken or are open to influence.
- You need to understand the motivation and preferences of your audience.
Good design lies at the heart of effective participation. As each situation will be different, each participation exercise needs an individual design to match its needs. For example, the design of a project to get the views of older people on health care provision in their area is likely to be very different from that of a project dealing with young drug-users.
Effective design doesn't need to be a complex process. An example list of design principles are explained further in this section. The extent to which you implement each suggestion, will depend on the scope of your own project. No matter how large or small, we hope the underlying concepts explained in this section help you to design strategies right for your organisation and stakeholders.
- 1. How to design a strong approach « You are here
- 2. Leadership and Resources
- 3. Forming a team and defining roles and responsibilities
- 4. How do I deliver a successful participation strategy?
- 5. Scoping the issues
- 6. Setting objectives and critical success factors
- 7. Designing a new online space
- 8. Integrating different channels
- 9. Evaluating your projects
- 10. How do I effectively manage participation across the organisation?