What to Look For When Investing in Community Engagement Software

Community engagement software offers a range of options for businesses and government agencies. From engagement platforms to full featured stakeholder data management systems, here are the top 3 things to look for when investing in community engagement software.

1. An Easy-To-Use and Accessible System

Team adoption is a major challenge when new software is introduced. and of course you need the system to be use user-friendly for the community, increasing the likelihood of engagement.

To ensure positive team adoption, check that the software provider offers training and support resources, and has a team of developers working to consistently support, update, and upgrade the system.

A look at the software interface itself should give you a good idea of how simple the system will be to use.

Before setting on which community engagement software you’ll use, you should find out from the developer:

• How quickly they can set the software up for your organization to use
• How often they update the software with new features, releases, and bug fixes.

Finding the answers to these questions are important for project planning as you set timelines and deadlines for the implementation and roll out of you community engagement software, but also an infrequent update cycle is often a sign of a system that is not keeping up to date with user feedback or latest developments in technology.

2. Quality of Analysis and Reports

Capturing reports and feedback for your community engagement program is an essential component, so make sure the software has the capacity to organise real time integrated reporting. Dashboards should give you important information at your fingertips and deliver meaningful reports that you can act on.

Good quality stakeholder data analysis includes:

• Immediacy: Data should always be up-to-date and easily accessible.
• Granularity: Positive action is easier when you can down or cross-tab to get additional information. It should go beyond the ‘tick the box’ approach to analysis.
• Relevance: Reports generated by community engagement software must give meaningful information that’s actionable and informs your decisions, rather than a basic list of stakeholders and interactions. Any spreadsheet can do that.
• Consistency: Rules, automations, and AI deliver consistently and accurately analysed data. One of the challenges is to minimize subjectivity in how data is treated. (Find out how Simply Stakeholders uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to improve consistency and efficiency of data analysis.)

3. Track a Range of Consultation Processes

The range of consultation processes you can track and record is also an important consideration when it comes to finding the right community engagement software.

Using a single engagement method or consultation is no longer adequate. Ensuring your project reaches the engagement levels needed so it’s useful and relevant to your project, you should offer a variety of effective stakeholder meeting styles and engagement opportunities in order to satisfy community and stakeholders needs.

Sending out information, workshops or town hall style meetings, deliberative processes, online engagement, map based engagement, social media engagement… These are all components that make up a holistic community engagement program, but each on its own doesn’t deliver an adequate engagement process.

Incorporating feedback and data from multiple engagement tools used in your project keeps your community engaged, and allows you to understand every stage of your consultation.

Community engagement software lets engagement officers and project managers create a single source of truth. Centralized data lets those who need it, view the engagement across all the different channels in the one place, and include that data in the one consolidated report.

4. Integrated systems

The number of software and other tools we use in our work lives seems to grow year on year. With this proliferation of engagement tools and data, it’s essential to have a stakeholder engagement system that integrates with other systems, easily.

Simply Stakeholders is pioneering new levels of integration in the stakeholder management software field with a super easy way to integrate with lots of other software. Real time integrated reporting within the software allows you to capture all the activity in one place, so you can be productive like never before.

When You’re Ready to Know More About Community Engagement Software

Making the switch to specialized community engagement software, rather than relying on legacy systems of software options designed for commercial organizations can feel like a big leap. But we’re here to help.

Simply Stakeholders has been built with community engagement in mind. It comes with ready-to-use templates to fast-track your community engagement resources, and includes the support, detailed analysis options, and system-integrations needed to support positive adoption.

Before taking the plunge, check our case studies to find out how government, corporate, and non-profit organizations are using our software for community engagement. And then use our detailed pre-implementation checklist to find out to prepare your team for new stakeholder management software.