Aligning online and offline participation

We're of course big advocates for online participation, but if you want to reach a maximum of people from your community, you should be giving them the opportunity to organise real-life participation opportunities too. Combining online and offline methods helps you reach a more diverse audience. Luckily, many governments have found ways to align the offline and online aspects of their participation projects. The idea is to actively transfer the ideas and arguments from one domain to the other, to ensure that the conversation includes all of your community’s suggestions.

How to integrate your online and offline community engagement processes

Here are some of the best practices the Go Vocal community has used to maximise its community engagement efforts both online and offline.

At your offline events:

  • Capture speakers on a video to easily share their opinions online with other community members via your platform.
  • Make note of the feedback, stories, and ideas shared by community members at the event and share these in the online discussions. This can help you measure whether the ideas that are popular during an event also receive broader support from a (potentially) more diverse audience.
  • Did the project already launch online? Share a summary of the discussion that has happened on the platform and which ideas have been exchanged. Is the offline event kicking off your online participation? Promote the online platform by saying that the conversation will continue there, or by publishing the results of the event there.

On your online platform:

  • Ask for input on the agenda of your offline event.
  • Use online surveys or polls to gather broad community feedback as a starting point for offline discussions.
  • Give a clear recap of the main topics and challenges that came up during offline talks to ensure the conversation can build upon this and evolve further.

An example of combining online and offline community engagement

Wokingham Borough chose to take a blended approach to its waste strategy consultation

Increasing financial pressure, due to skyrocketing inflation and soaring energy prices, made it impossible to continue business as usual. At the same time, the council needed to nudge more residents to recycle in order to reach the 70% recycling rate it committed to in its 2030 climate emergency action plan. Following extensive research, analysis and modelling, the council selected the two options that would give the best environmental and financial benefits and asked its residents in a consultation, both on their Go Vocal platform ‘Engage Wokingham Borough’ and through paper surveys, how each of these would impact them, and what they thought of the options.

“We were able to reach more residents in a more cost-effective way”

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Over 9,000 people responded to the online survey —more than they had anticipated! With a population of about 177,500 and 77,000 households, they were satisfied with the reach into the community: 85% of these responses came from new users. We had paper copies available upon request and residents could also call our customer services team to take a telephone-assisted survey or stop by a library for help. 1% of the total responses used one of those methods.

Learn more best practices and guidelines for community engagement

Today, community members want to participate on their terms and on their preferred platforms. This 360° participation trend is rapidly turning hybrid engagement from an innovative practice to a standard expectation. In the first part of this guide, we'll be exploring what a blended engagement strategy entails theoretically, how to pick the right methods and illustrate it with examples.

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