This case study features Social Pinpoint’s legacy platform SPP Classic.
Background
Mara Consulting is focused on creating vibrant communities through constructive and empowering conversations. As a leading provider of consultation and urban design services, Mara’s ability to craft compelling and engaging narratives is greatly supported by their use of Social Pinpoint. Over the last three years, Mara have been utilizing Social Pinpoint across various community and stakeholder engagement projects to drive successful outcomes for their clients.
When 2020 saw a significant increase and adoption of digital engagement, Mara’s reliance on Social Pinpoint grew substantially. Social Pinpoint allowed Mara to remain nimble during this period with rich customization and flexibility to deliver tailored engagement projects to the specific needs of each client.
Nimble Engagement Strategy
Throughout 2020 there were few industries that were able to continue on in a “business as normal” environment without any shift in strategy. In an industry that traditionally relies on face-to-face meetings and in-person activations, the community engagement space rapidly adopted online engagement methods to keep leaders and communities connected and informed.
At the start of COVID-19, Mara was able to pivot their traditional hybrid community engagement strategies to only online with the support of Social Pinpoint to ensure communities had an accessible two-way communications platform. Mara found that creating a bespoke engagement site using Social Pinpoint’s powerful page-building tools, enhanced overall project participation. For all intents and purposes, these tailored pages are built to behave as a professional website, which allows for seamless integration with client branding and promotion.
Mara is able to push the boundaries of Social Pinpoint to make projects as visually appealing as possible, regardless of the project scope which can vary from; State Significant Development applications that rely on technical consultation to sensitive topics- Mara is able to tailor Social Pinpoint for every client.
Collecting Community Ideas and Driving Participation
Hunter and Central Coast Development Corporation (HCCDC), a NSW Government agency, engaged Mara Consulting to gather feedback about the community’s future aspirations for the remaining land in the Honeysuckle precinct. With a special focus on environmental, social and economic outcomes, Honeysuckle Ideas was used to guide the future development and divestment of the site.
Mara created a comprehensive and COVID-19 safe engagement strategy to talk with a broad section of the community. The team at Mara focused on digital engagement to generate ideas and feedback via a Social Pinpoint Ideas Wall.
The Ideas Wall provided participants with the opportunity to share suggestions and join discussions with other community members’ ideas, pictures and suggestions. The wall was populated with three visual guides that reflected the three pillars; social, economic and environmental to stimulate a discussion. This highly visual space amplified the collaborative nature of the project, allowing the community to contribute their insights clearly. Overall, 794 people visited the Social Pinpoint project page 3055 times, which resulted in 132 comments and over 240 ideas.
With Social Pinpoints data and analytics, Mara was able to easily determine the positive sentiment and project performance with Social Pinpoint’s analytics. Furthermore, Social Pinpoint’s intuitive word cloud identified key themes and objectives for HCCDC, ensuring that all feedback gathered was truly reflective of the community’s engagement.
From here, Mara was able to conduct additional online focus groups and workshops to confirm these themes and objectives were consistent. This engagement approach allowed Mara and HCCDC to collectively refine the scope of each engagement phase until their confidence in the community’s feedback was optimal. This fine-tuned level of feedback can be easily accomplished with the suite of Social Pinpoint’s tools.
HCCDC and Mara were shortlisted for Excellence in Community Engagement in the Urban Developer Awards 2021 for the Honeysuckle Ideas project.
