In the latest release of Citizen Space, you’ll find a whole heap of new things to improve work-flow for Citizen Space admin users. Each of these are in response to customer requests.
What’s new
Consultation preview link for anonymous users
Now, you’ll be able to share a draft consultation with someone who doesn’t use Citizen Space. Customers often ask us if this is possible, with the purpose of review or approval by colleagues or senior team members who don’t have Citizen Space access.
How? You should be able to see an additional action link from your Consultation Dashboard, which says ‘Generate Preview Link’. From here, you’ll be asked to set an expiry date for the link (24 hours, 3 days, 1 week). There’s also the option to make the link invalid immediately. It’ll work exactly like the current preview mode – so you’ll be able to see it in Forthcoming, Open and Closed states and it won’t be possible to submit responses.
You can read about full functionality in this article.
Response removal
Customers have reported a number of valid reasons to remove individual responses – for example, clearing duplicates when adding responses manually.
Delib have given a lot of thought as to how they implement this while ensuring that the integrity of responses is preserved, and that the consultation stands up to scrutiny and review. So the new response removal works like this:
> When viewing individual Responses by Respondent, there will be a Remove Response link;
> You’ll be asked to confirm the action and provide a reason for removal (providing an audit trail);
> At this point, any removed responses will be omitted from reports, exports and analysis;
> The reason, timestamp of removal and the user who performed the removal will all be recorded;
> You’ll be able to view the list of Removed Responses from the Consultation Dashboard;
> From here, you can easily view and re-instate a removed response, as well as view details about why and when it was originally removed.
For a more detailed walk-through of this feature, visit this Knowledge Base article.
Total responses at a glance
Now, in the Manage Consultations table view, you’ll be able to see the total number of completed responses for each consultation. This will also appear as a new field called ‘Responses’ in the CSV export of Consultations.
Editable ‘Call-to-Action’ link text
When an Online Survey is open, you’ll always see this ‘call-to-action’ text:
In this release, Delib are making it possible for you to change the ‘Online Survey’ wording. From the Consultation Dashboard, go to ‘2. Online Survey’ – here, you’ll find a new field labelled ‘Call to Action’. There’s no character limit either! This field will continue to default to Online Survey if you don’t want to change it. Full instructions can be found in this article.
Likewise, this functionality has been added to email/postal consultations too, to allow you to present downloadable files with very long filenames in a more readable manner.
Improved user management speed
For those of you with large numbers of users in your Citizen Space, there have been a number of significant performance improvements made to the system which will allow you to add new users, move users between departments and promote/demote users without seeing timeout pages.
Improvements to the speed of adding responses
Some of you have had some problems lately when manually adding (or analysing) responses to very large consultations (e.g. over 200 questions). Delib have made performance improvements here too, so timeouts should no longer occur when adding responses to consultations of this type.
PDF report generation
You may have encountered a ‘stuck’ PDF report on a consultation (this happens more frequently than we like, as the PDF generation process is quite complex). Delib have been monitoring and logging these issues to find the causes and fix them. This release contains fixes that should make reports up to three times less likely to get stuck.
In other news…
Featured Citizen Space Customer
Stroud District Council have been capturing respondent demographics by linking the final page of each consultation to a single separate private consultation. This means that not only is demographic data entirely isolated from consultation responses, and therefore anonymous, but it can be analysed as a single data set more easily. It also minimises drop-out rates from those who just want to respond to a consultation without providing demographic data.