Future Ready Brampton is an engaging single project site with heaps of opportunity to get involved.
Sometimes keeping things simple can be the most effective way to deliver complex projects. That's exactly what the City of Brampton has done with Future Ready Brampton.
By using a single project page to house all of their important conversations, Future Brampton has made a complex site work without over thinking it.
Below are some of the reasons we think this site is great.
Single Project Page
Using a single project page is a great way to build a site around a single project. As you can see in the image below each of the three engagement opportunities are available directly from the project page. These include places, ideas and stories, which we think are a fantastic combination of tools to use for visioning projects as it allows for ideation, spacial information gathering as well as deeper empathising and understanding through story telling.
On this page you can also see a list of the upcoming event that are scheduled as part of the Future Brampton project as well as a range of videos and photos.
One of the most interesting features of this single project page project is the noticeable lack of text on the project page.
By minimising the amounts of text for people to read you encourage their focus on getting involved in the conversations.
Here you can see that instead of having written text in the project description, Future Brampton has instead opted for a designed image graphic which acts as a call to action.
This is a great device for projects when you're not needed to explain project information, but rather your main goal is to encourage participation.
We think this works great for visioning projects such as this.
Video and Photo Gallery
Another great feature of the Future Brampton site is the use of the photo and video galleries to present information and help bring a sense of liveliness to the consultation.
We also like how they have linked directly to these widgets from the header navigation menu, to enable their community to quickly jump to the rich media sections of the site.
More importantly, the content of these videos and images speak directly to the project at hand, especially the videos which detail a collection of "bright ideas" from people within the Brampton community.
This acts as a engaging starting point for others to get inspired and feel motivated to join in the conversations.
Selection of Tools
Future Brampton has also chosen a great mix of tools that allows them to capture personal stories and empathise with their community as well as get spatial information and ideas from their community.
As you can see below, the Places tool has been used very effectively to capture spatial ideas from the community about what they love and would like to improve in the City. As part of a visioning project the Places tool is a great tool to use because it allows the community to interact with each others contributions and provides instant gratification of seeing their idea go onto the map, which helps to create a sense of inclusion in the project.
The Stories tool has also been used effectively to allow people who have something to contribute that is "too big to box in" and there has already been some really great contributions. The stories tool also allows for the contribution of video and longer form text contributions meaning the community has greater scope to discuss their idea or concern.
The stories tool has the added benefit of allowing other community members to comment and start discussions around the contributions.
Finally, the Ideas tool is an essential inclusion in any visioning project and has worked extremely effectively in capturing community ideas for the Future of Brampton. It also has the added bonus of being a great tool to take to the streets on a tablet and ask community members to enter their ideas directly into the system.
Capturing face-to-face community input into EngagementHQ in this way, is the best way to ensure you have all of your contributions in one place in order to make your analysis and reporting much simpler.
Overall
Future Ready Brampton is a great example of using a single project to create an easy to manage and engaging online engagement space.
The project collects community feedback in a number of ways making it accessible to more people and the project branding gives it a cohesive visual appeal.
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Summary
Client: Brampton, Canada
Template: Whitehaven
Project: Future Ready Brampton
Publish Date: Sept 2017
Project Details: The City of Brampton is running a visioning project to gather community input into establishing a Future Brampton city plan.
Widgets: Key dates, videos, photos, stay informed, FAQ's, sign-up banner and custom (Googel Translate widget)
Tools: Places, ideas, stories.
NOTE: The article above is based on a visit to the site on 15 Sept 2017. Changes made to the project after that date may have altered the appearance of the project.