Staff Pick: Let's Talk Halton Hills, Ontario, Canada

Let's Talk Halton Hills uses a good mix of projects to appeal to a wide community audience.

The Good: Having a good mix of projects makes the site more appealing to a wider audience. Understanding that library's are the centre of the community positions the site well for increased awareness.

For Consideration: Ensuring the public are aware of the site is essential. Placing promotional material in each library branch and also informing customer service staff is a great way to start a conversation about their site.

Overall: Let's Talk Halton Hills is a great example of a site that uses a mix of consultations to appeal to a broad section of the community. Their focus on the library service should have a positive impact on overall awareness and engagement with future projects.

Let's Talk Halton Hills is a great example of how to launch a new online engagement space for your community.

Combining a broad range of projects, multimedia and integrated social media feeds, Halton Hills has successfully created an active community vibe and an inviting site to visit.

The has been helped by the inclusion of a short introduction video encouraging people to get involved, the use of Twitter and Facebook feeds to help bring existing conversations into the site as well as easily visible and inviting prompts to sign-up and get involved.

By going live with a broad-range of projects such as Active Living Strategy, Public Art Master Plan and Trucking Survey, Halton Hills have showcased a number of different conversations and used them to create "value" for any first-time visitor to the site.

This will help reinforce the benefits of signing up for the site and is a great showcase of the types of conversations members of the community can expect in the future.

We particularly like the way Halton Hills has decided to tap into their library community to raise awareness about the site, but also to engage on important issues for library operations and service delivery.

Your Library and You, is a great example of the types of community conversations, which help establish a commitment to collaborative service delivery.

Since library's are considered the centre of communities, with large active databases of members and natural places for people to meet, create, share and learn, they provide a unique opportunity for online engagement. 

Utilising Libraries to help drive engagement is a master stroke and great advice for any local government looking to access their communities.

On this project, you can see the inclusion of forum conversations and stories, quick surveys for service delivery improvements and engaging with young people as well as a guest book where members of the community can leave comments about their experience.

By incorporating a Who's Listening widget, this project also has  a human touch to it and members of the community can get in direct contact with key staff for questions or queries.

Beyond this project, we really like the setup of the registration form, as it captures highly relevant information that will make the PRM far more useful, the inclusion of a dedicated FAQ page which is linked via the header and the focus on capturing views on public engagement via the Public Engagement Survey.

Including a Public Engagement Survey is another great way to capture important data about communication preferences and will also aid in capturing benchmarking data that can be analysed against future preferences.

Overall, Halton Hills have shown us how to successfully setup and launch an EHQ site, which feels lively and honest. Great job!

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Summary

Client: Halton Hills, Ontario, Canada
Template: Torquay
Project: Let's Talk Halton Hills
Publish Date: July 2017
Project Details: The City of Halton Hills has recently launched their new online engagement site, Let's Talk Halton Hills.
Widgets: SignUp Banners, FAQs, Document Libraries, Photo Gallery, Who's Listening, Register, Custom Widgets
We love: 
1. Using Library's as important meeting places of community members to help drive online engagement.
2. Making simple site introduction videos, explaining the benefits of the site/project to the community.
3. The mix of tools used on the Your Library and You project page.

For further consideration:
1. Some of the feedback questions for each of the priority themes sound like they might also be fit for use in Ideas or forum discussions instead of open ended survey questions.

NOTE: The article above is based on a visit to the site on 17th July 2017. Changes made to the project after that date may have altered the appearance of the project.