In any city or council, it is imperative that government listens to the concerns and comments of their communities. You need a place where your community can stay informed and have their say about what's happening in their areas. To meet this need, we have developed the Community Engagement module. This premium module can be installed on main sites, Intranets, and subsites.
See it in action: check out the community engagement module on your demo site.
There are a few different parts to this module that will help you and your community get the most out of it. The module includes:
- Consultation pages: share a summary of initiatives, projects, or plans in the area
- Discussion pages: open up a topic for your community to comment on
- Blog posts: communicate your decisions, progress, and updates
- Timelines: add discussion pages (and additional items) to a chronological timeline to offer a high-level view of everything that's happened, plus what's coming up
- Page Comments widget: add to your consultation pages to allow your community to add or respond to comments
How It Works
We will install the Community Engagement module for you and set up a listing page titled "Have Your Say." This will be the listing page for your current consultations and include a content list to pull all your OC Consultation pages into a listing. We will also install a page for past consultations, which will be linked out from the "Have Your Say" page.
The content list will be embedded into the WYSIWYG Editor of the current and past consultation listing pages and should not be removed. However, you can still edit the pages to add introductory content, page images, summary, and supporting information.
The main pages for this module are the listing pages and OC Consultation pages. For each consultation page created, three folders will be created as child pages of that consultation page: "Discussions," "Latest Updates," and "Timelines." Any pages you make in these folders will be displayed and linked to from your consultation page in either accordions or side panels.
Consultation Homepage Listing
There is also the possibility of having a homepage listing for consultation pages. You can set it up in either tabs or a featured content row, and it will display the three most recent consultation items. The title, summary, closing date, and image will appear for each item. There will also be a link to take visitors to the main consultation listing page.
If you'd like to make a particular consultation stay on the homepage listing regardless of how many are published, you can pin it to the homepage listing. This is particularly helpful for ongoing consultations or for consultations you want to highlight. Past consultations will be removed from the homepage listing and current consultation listing.
We recommend displaying three consultations in the homepage listing for a better viewing experience on tablet and mobile devices. More than three items will create too long of a scroll for users with smaller devices and excessive content for screen readers.