Bang the Table: Professionalizing Online Engagement Tools

As the reach of technology across the government and public sector has simplified processes and streamlined workflows, better tools and platforms that facilitate higher levels of engagement from the public and communities are becoming available. Matthew Crozier, CEO, Bang the Table believes an important market trend is that, “Modern CIOs are looking to choose specialist cloud solutions to deliver high quality and tailored services. In the past, we saw organizations attempting to ‘build their own’ or choosing from generalist tools for engagement that were either poorly configured or provided as a non-specialist add on to a CMS or broader government platform, these tools lacked focus.” Bang the Table with its focus towards enabling online citizen engagement builds software for government organizations by blending its practice knowledge with technical expertise. “Today the major challenge in the citizen engagement space is recognizing the opportunity afforded to government organizations by online citizen engagement,” says Crozier. “Our platform, EngagementHQ is configured specifically to meet the needs of the government sector.”

Bang the Table’s EngagementHQ platform delivers eight community feedback tools and multiple infor-mation sharing tools in a single platform ensuring a suitable tool is available for any project, or project phase. EngagementHQ has been built to compliment mainstream face to face engagement techniques and to provide an integrated online element for engagement projects—helping clients to build community and to target groups for engagement. Specialist automated reporting tools help clients to listen effectively and to understand the real breadth of views in the community, not just the views of those turning up to meetings.

Additionally, Bang the Table offers a number of integrations that include deep branding so the site appears as a seamless part of your corporate web presence; flexible headers and footers to provide a trail back into their corporate site; single sign on; integrations with third party software products; and SSL.

Our platform, EngagementHQ is configured specifically to meet the needs of the government sector

EngagementHQ is used by organizations ranging in size from national governments and capital cities through to small regional communities. The Rural Municipality of St Clements in Manitoba Canada has a population of just over 10,000 people. St Clements started using EngagementHQ in October 2016 for their ‘Let’s Talk Trash’ Project. DJ Sigmundson, CAO at Rural Municipality of St Clements explained that they chose EngagementHQ because, “We wanted to talk to as many people as possible by engaging through multiple channels.”

St Clements started with a survey and information about the municipality’s trash project and an appeal for the community to register to share views on future municipal projects. In less than a month this small rural community achieved 1,271 visitors, gained feedback from 486 participants on the ‘Let’s Talk Trash’ project and have built a database of 550 community members who are registered to get involved in future projects.

“Comments from participants have indicated that they appreciate being asked what they thought. We are only getting started and will continue to engage using the other tools on EngagementHQ,” said Sigmundson. “It’s really about the next steps and building on the online community. We see a lot of synergy in using the tool for other projects in the city. Our community is very spread out so using EngagementHQ makes a lot of sense.”

Forging ahead, Bang the Table is all set to double down on development expenditure and to continue investing in promulgating best practices “EngagementHQ will keep getting better. Our team is growing and we always look out for opportunities to delight,” commented Crozier.