Understanding the right community consultation success measures is crucial for effective engagement in modern planning projects. Successful community consultations go beyond participant numbers, focusing on qualitative improvements and early identification of key issues. Digital planning consultation tools, like PlaceChangers, help streamline community consultation success measures, providing actionable insights that lead to long-term project success. 

Community engagement in planning projects allows local authorities, housing associations, and developers to exchange information with residents and evaluate proposals. Digital engagement and consultation go beyond raising participant numbers and can promoting a qualitative improvement in design responses. This approach helps identify key issues and ideas early, ensuring the long-term success of the project.

The 2020 UK Government White Paper ("Planning for the Future") recognised that individuals affected by development decisions have the right to be involved in the decision-making process. This engagement should incorporate digital tools to maximize the inclusion of local stakeholders. A transparent approach ensures residents are informed about how their input will be utilized in shaping decisions.

A note on community consultation success measures in planning and construction

Community engagement practices can vary widely. Smaller projects often face limits in the extent and depth of consultation, and there are few commonly agreed-upon measures for success.

Sebastian Weise, founder at PlaceChangers, added:

“Many organisations don’t have defined KPIs for engagement yet. The most common success measures we see stated in Statements for Community Involvement for housing projects are the number of people at a consultation event, or the number of surveys received. These indicators typically provide a very limited view on engagement success.”

As a general note, the rationale for engagement should be clearly stated from the beginning. This includes things like the choices available, how community feedback can be provided, and what is negotiable versus fixed. Starting with a hidden agenda will negatively impact the consultation process and ongoing satisfaction with the proposed development or changes in the community.

Planning organisations, councils, developers each need to find their own policy on what success means and outline community consultation success measures they wish to support.

Sebastian Weise, founder at PlaceChangers noted:

“With adoption of digital planning tools, we can start to look at expansive success criteria, such as the value our community engagement has had to actually affect tweaks to a site layout and other details, such as types of homes, and impact mitigation plans.”

Essential Community Consultation Success Measures for Planning Consultations

In today’s planning landscape, the use of digital platforms, such as PlaceChangers, allows for an expanded set of community consultation success measures. These tools help local authorities, developers, and housing associations track engagement across multiple proposals and geographic areas, providing essential insights into how well consultations are performing. 

Below are observations from us and our clients on various metrics that can be used to evaluate online engagement performance so that you deliver a consultation that residents appreciate and enables useful conversations for your planning project.

You might also be interested in our article on planners measures of success from community consultation. What do town planners see as a successful planning consultation?

Promotional reach

Let's start with promotional reach. Successful consultation relies on reaching the intended audience. Promotional reach measures how many people see or hear about the consultation. Advertising firms use metrics like OTS (opportunities-to-see) to quantify visibility. Using trackable metrics like QR codes and short links enables precise tracking of promotional reach, allowing organisations to evaluate how well they are engaging potential participants.

Find out about different promotional activities, their impact and effort from community consultation. How to promote your online planning consultation

Response rate

A successful consultation doesn't just rely on the number of participants but also on the response rate. Your consultation response rate measures the number of participants vs the number of overall visitors to your consultation. It is not uncommon to receive response rates of 8% and 12% in a planning context (PAS discussion forum). The response rate tells you how engaged the audience is with the consultation. 

Treat this measure with care, as no consultation can be compared like for like. To boost response rates, it’s crucial to ensure ease of access to the consultation and ensure you reach relevant audiences, especially when using online platforms. The response rate rises with the ease of accessibility, levels of interest, and how targeted your promotion is. For instance, consultations advertised on social media generate broad attention, but will lower response rates. 

Diversity and representativeness

Inclusive community consultation is essential, particularly in diverse urban areas. To ensure that all voices are heard, including those from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) communities, consultations must track demographic data and compare it to census information. This helps organisations ensure that their community consultation success measures are comprehensive and inclusive. Be prepared that you might need to arrange special sessions for harder to reach groups, such as children and younger adults, if your project requires it. 

Number of responses and coverage

Track the number of responses received per planning proposal or topic, and the number of pins and comments added to the consultation map. An engaged audience will actively share thoughts and ideas and engage in ongoing conversations. User-generated content is a key measure of audience engagement. Fine-grained analytics can reveal which issues respondents interact with the most, highlighting topics that generate excitement or concern among residents.

Engagement over time

For long complex projects, you might want to establish a good relationship with residents over a long timeframe. Here, registrations or ‘sign ups’ for email updates are an essential component as it allows to continue the conversation and understand if respondents reengage. However, it is still necessary to enable people anonymity if they prefer to respond as guests rather than registrants. Even guests can be asked to complete some demographic information or whether they have been involved in earlier stages.  

Balance of sentiment

Real-life consultations will rarely see undivided support. A successful consultation invites critical voices, too. Balance of sentiment is an exciting component of the consultative process. With the advance of technology in artificial intelligence and machine learning, grouping similar views provide a way to quantify these qualitative elements and "humanise" the reporting. Close analyses of the responses can also help identify outliers or duplicate responses; even where unique email addresses are required, people are adept at finding ways to influence outcomes they care about. 

Actionable responses and turning feedback into results

Perhaps the most important community consultation success measure is the number of actionable responses. These are the responses that influence the planning process directly, such as suggestions that lead to design modifications or additional impact mitigation strategies. Consultation platforms like PlaceChangers, which offer advanced proposal maps and guided tours, empower design teams to easily gather and understand feedback. These tools also streamline tracking project queries, helping to identify unclear areas, address questions, and highlight aspects that need further explanation or improvement. A consultation process can serve to assess the process itself and the ease of communication between the authority or firm and the community. It will also highlight how well the project team can communicate their ideas and proposals to the public. 

Find out about the value of interactive proposal maps for better community consultation feedback. The benefits of interactive proposal maps in planning consultations

Conclusion: Going further with clear public consultation success measures

Measuring the success of community consultations is critical for achieving meaningful engagement and project success. By incorporating clear and comprehensive community consultation success measures, such as promotional reach, response rates, diversity of respondents, and actionable feedback, planners and developers can ensure that their consultations lead to improved project outcomes and stronger community relationships.

Digital platforms like PlaceChangers, make it easier to gather, analyse, and document these success measures, ultimately improving transparency and trust in the consultation process and help organisations refined community engagement programmes over time. 

Sebastian Weise, founder at PlaceChangers added:

“Clearer and expanded success measures are good for everybody. Developers and councils can document the impacts their engagement has had. Planners and architects find it easier to finalise their designs. Community members and residents can see that consultation has a purpose.”