THE CHALLENGE
Every three years New Zealand councils must prepare Long Term Plans (LTP) to outline their key focus areas for the next 10 years. An important part of the process is to provide an opportunity for the community to get involved in the decision-making processes.
The focus for the Hutt City Council (HCC) 2018-2028 LTP was continuing the vision of making Hutt City a great place to live, work and play. A LTP document was made available by Council on their website, Council’s main building, libraries, community hubs, Council facilities and at public information events. From the 3 April to 3 May 2018 nearly 200 submissions were received via the Councils online submission form. This process generated over 480 comments.
To ensure that feedback was received from a broader voice, HCC decided to commission a survey of the wider community. The results from this survey would complement the response to the formal consultation process.
The challenge for PublicVoice was to analyse a large amount of diverse qualitative data that was generated by the consultation process. We also needed to turn the Consultation Document into an online survey that would capture the views and opinions of the wider community. This would include those that would not typically respond to a formal consultation process.
THE SOLUTION
PublicVoice managed the coding and analysis of all open-ended responses received by the HCC 2018-2028 LTP process. The PublicVoice team of qualitative researchers used dedicated statistical analysis software to quickly uncover the key insights hidden within the consultation responses. These insights were provided to HCC in the form of a report which was easily incorporated into the Councils reporting processes.
In addition, PublicVoice created an online survey and sent it to the Councils citizens’ panel (managed by PublicVoice). A shareable link to the survey was posted on the Councils Facebook page, and respondents were given a link to share on their own Facebook page. This was done to increase the Councils online presence, create more awareness of the work being consulted on and generate more responses.
THE RESULTS
PublicVoice took over 480 comments from the public consultation process and translated them into easy to understand insights. This enabled HCC staff to focus their efforts on producing the final report which was presented to Council.
The PublicVoice panel survey collected over 500 responses from Hutt City residents. This included feedback from those considered generally “hard to reach” e.g. youth, ethnic minorities and those that would not generally respond to consultations. The results from the consultation were presented to Council alongside the results from the citizens panel. This process enabled HCC to proceed with their LTP secure in the knowledge that they had taken into consideration the insights and knowledge from a wide range of Hutt City residents.
