Each year, we explore trends in online community engagement and forecast what the next 12 months might hold. At the end of the year, we reflect on how how we did. By engaging with our clients, potential customers, and professionals across the community engagement field—ranging from local and state governments to industries and not-for-profits—we gain valuable insights to help us understand how community engagement processes are used in their decision-making.
Social Pinpoint’s close connection to the “frontline” allows us to identify what’s trending and to anticipate future shifts. Check out our ‘2024 Trends for Online Community Engagement‘ for a deeper dive into these insights.
As 2024 comes to a close, let’s take a moment to look back on our trend predictions from earlier this year and see how we did.
Here were our top 5 online community engagement predictions for 2024:
- Hyperlocal Engagement
- Elevated Data Transparency
- AI Adoption at the Organisation Level
- Community Empowerment in (Private) Digital Workspaces
- Low Barrier Engagement
1. Hyperlocal Engagement
As mentioned in our 2024 community engagement trends blog, communities are becoming familiar with public engagement. Since COVID, they have become increasingly hyperlocal in their thinking and acting.
In 2024, we predicted that organisations would need to adapt. This is by offering tailored information and conducting consultations to better engage specific communities on hyperlocal projects.
While we don’t think we have seen the biggest shift yet to hyperlocal consultations – say at a street level, we have noticed a growing trend, particularly within Local Government in Australia. They aim to help communities gain a clearer understanding of what is happening in their local areas while encouraging residents to participate in engagement activities to foster trust. This is by giving people the chance to raise issues or questions with their local ‘neighbourhood officer.’
By using a digital community engagement platform like Social Pinpoint, several councils, including those from cities such as the City of Melbourne (VIC), City of Adelaide (SA), and City of Port Adelaide Enfield (SA), as well as regional councils like Alpine Shire Council (VIC) and Gladstone Regional Council (QLD), have embraced the growing trend of neighbourhood portals or community hubs.
This is when an organisation creates a project space that’s dedicated to a specific group of neighbourhoods, wards, or communities within its site. In most cases, by using our ‘project map’ tool, organisations can showcase projects happening in specific local areas and connect people with local staff, such as neighbourhood or placemaking officers working in those communities. This trend appears to have been initiated by the City of Melbourne, which uses the ongoing data collected to create a knowledge database that benefits the entire city council.
2. Elevated Data Transparency
Similar to the above, while it’s difficult to observe publicly and at the scale we initially anticipated, we have seen a noticeable increase in requests for API access in Social Pinpoint. This helps organisations leverage and utilise the data collected on the platform in various ways.
Organisations in Australia, like the Cities of Melbourne and Casey are just a handful of Social Pinpoint users who have continued to access high levels of data via our open API. They use this data to feed into PowerBI tools, creating custom dashboards for internal use and charts on their project pages, particularly when closing the loop.
Reporting back after a consultation has closed, or ‘closing the loop’ as we affectionally call it, is certainly a big driver for this trend and is a key for building trust. Customers like the City of Port Adelaide Enfield clearly highlight in their engagement summary reports, using the Facts Card tool, things like who they heard from, how many responses they received, the themes they took away from the data and bits of relevant quantitative data relevant to showing how decision-making processes were made.
While the Northern Beaches Council use the data they collect to manually update a submission response number on open projects which we think creates a bit of FOMO for those who have not yet participated but also clearly show the community the numbers of people they are engaging.
3. AI Adoption at the Organisation Level
We stated earlier this year that AI is here to stay and evolve, and so far, we believe we’re right. Following the rapid adoption in 2023, 2024 has focused more on strategising and asking key questions about who, what, why, where, when, and whether it is safe.
Organisations have been evaluating the risks and benefits of AI applications, with some of the groups we work with even developing policies to define what can and can’t be used, and for what purposes. Although we can’t see this publicly, we’ve observed it through the increase in requests to our support desks and customer success teams. These requests focus on how we’re doing with our products and AI. They also check which potential plug-ins are compatible with both Social Pinpoint and Consultation Manager.
We’ve seen a significant increase in product requests related to reporting options and how we’re adopting AI to enhance capabilities such as qualitative summarizing, theming, and auto-tagging.
Without explaining too much, our product roadmaps for 2025 will focus on reporting, particularly within Social Pinpoint. This will likely include updates to features like our assisted analysis capability, as our Product Manager has recently spoken with several customers who emphasized the need to simplify their work processes.
4. Community Empowerment in (Private) Digital Engagement Workspaces
We predicted growth in open dialogue models being applied both in private and semi-private workspaces to facilitate citizen panels, strategic planning and budgetary processes. Again, while we can’t show you how this happens, as it’s private, we do know that the private and password protected functionality in Social Pinpoint has had a large increase in use.
We’ve seen many Social Pinpoint users continue to leverage private projects to create mini-collaboration and empowerment spaces that are specific to one issue or community group. This includes favourites like Mini Frankston City, a city wide representative group to more specific use cases around drug and alcohol recovery groups with some of our Local Health District customers. We have also seen an increase in questions about how to do this from current and potential customers looking to add deliberative groups to their engagement processes.
The private functionality is also helping more customers support decision makers within the organisation as we have heard specifically from councils using it with newly elected members and landscape boards/natural resource management boards using it with their elected boards. This is important as it means users are able to share data from public consultations within one system easily and also have decision makers use tools the community members are using for public participation.
5. Low Barrier Engagement
At Social Pinpoint we expected this to be a trend in 2024 and we were certainly right. Organisations have shaken of the shackles of the last few years under covid restrictions and have started to offer a much wider array of ways to engage and not just online. This mixture of different digital, hybrid and in-person engagement options and indicate how much time each will require has helped lower the barrier to entering a community engagement process.
We have seen more projects using timing on their digital tools as well as advertising events such as pop-ups where those with more time or those who prefer face to face interaction can come along and have their say on the project that interests them.
There has also been an increase in using bite-size relevant information to help people access the key elements of a project without the barrier of needing to download a heavy-weight document. More design using tools that help a project page flow better (using our quote tool used in a different way to attended to create flow through a project is a hot trend in this space) and sometimes this has also been through a short video introduction format.
This is clearly demonstrated by the City of Darebin’s Community Vision Review, where they utilized one of our coaching sessions to enhance the project’s user experience. The artwork on their site was created specifically for the project and is featured in the project banner, video flows, hotspots, and the survey
By using the tabs and the quote tool block we get a great flow through the project while Darebin also offered those in the community a number of low barrier options to get involved. You can read a case study about this project, which showcases how our coaching sessions helped show a positive impact to increase and empower meaningful engagement.
So, while we were maybe not 100% on the button, we have certainly seen some elements of the five predicted trends appear more widely used in 2024 for successful community engagement approaches. Hyperlocal engagement and more data transparency have clearly increased in the public sphere with examples like neighbourhood hubs and the uptick in visual closing the loop projects is on the rise to empower community engagement and build connections.
While it’s also been hard to prove a number of these as they do often occur in private work spaces that we cannot share or the trend data comes through conversations we have had with both customers and potential customers.
We do hope you trust that they are there and they are happening especially with the number of requests we receive about AI and the private workspaces that are on the rise.
