Visibility is so important in a noisy world. And there is nothing worse than people coming forward at the end of a consultation claiming they knew nothing about it. Worse still, few public bodies who consult on a regular basis have any cash resources for boosting eyeballs on these opportunities.
Granted there are some salient consultations which sail without a boost, typically those with sensitive or salient issues. In this case, campaigners and the press do most of the heavy lifting. That said, very few consultations actually start with a press release.
Trouble is, to do this well you must first know your audience. For example, if the consultation concerns margianlised groups then you might imagine your approach would be quite different to one focused on engaging staff. For true success you must engage amplifiers – people and organisations that will convey and relay your message in a trusted and impartial way.
Some high profile consultations (such as devolution deal consultations) go big on printed materials – but that doesn’t sit well with cost or environmental credentials. Other consultations invest heavily in social media marketing – helping to target audiences but cost with potentially eye-watering costs per interaction.
Increasingly the more traditional methods are more interesting – door knocking, letter drop, radio etc. Not in a scattergun way – instead using insights such as MOSAIC or ACORN data to determine who should be targeted in a marketing campaign. For example, sending households that are likely to be digitally excluded paper copies of a consultation questionnaire.  We’ve come a long way in this regard, using QR codes or adverts on street furniture is pretty much mainstream in place-based consultations.
Technology has a big role to play. In particular, there are tools to help identify stakeholder groups in a given geography and tools to help identify online influencers in a given issue. Posting an advertorial in a hyperlocal Facebook group, corporate Twitter feed or Parish magazine is pretty much a free lunch. Creating an embeddable widget for others to put on their corporate website or email footers might be a way of directing traffic to your consultation website.
Slightly more overlooked is the concept of re-engagement. In other words, using the known characteristics of previous respondents to nudge forward more participation (for this it helps if you have a stakeholder database and if past consultees have told you what they’re interested in).
Our takeaway on this is slightly more nuanced. While our gut feeling is that more can be done, we can’t help feeling the answer is to involve more comms and marketing professionals in the design and delivery of consultations. Â
There is one job that is vital, however. That is, tracking who has and hasn’t responded based on an initial stakeholder mapping with enough time to make rectifications. Only via active steering will you gain equal representation and arguably that’s much more important than raw numbers or respondents.