EngagementHQ August Update

As usual our Development team have been working their fingers to the bone to make sure EngagementHQTM provides the most complete suite of tools possible to engage your community online from the one place.

We’ve added Forms (in Beta)

First up, we’ve added something brand new to our suite of feedback tools; forms!

It may seem like a simple change, but the opportunities are endless. We have already created online forms for an internal suggestions box, support requests and new site requests.

Simple forms ensure you get all of the information you need from your stakeholders the first time, saving everyone – you and your stakeholders – lots of time in the long run.

Improved Sign In and Registration Screens

We’ve radically improved the Sign In and Registration processes to drive up participation rates.

We’re now allowing participants to Sign In with their email address as well as their Screen Name.

We’ve also built a nifty new automatic search feature that reads the email address of a participant registering for your site to let them know if they already have an account.

You’ll also notice a new registration schematic at the top of the registration page to help new participants navigate through the process. Finally, you may notice that we have changed the language across the site to simplify things to avoid any confusion between signing up and logging in!

Sign in with Facebook (and maybe Twitter)

Another big change to the Sign In and Registration process is the addition of the ability for a participant to register using their Facebook or Twitter accounts. This should also lower the bar for people thinking about registering to participate in the discussions who may previously have been put off by having to remember another password.

We’ve added pagination to the newsfeed

Our friends at the University of Western Australia asked us to introduce newsfeed pagination to restrict the number of news items to each page. We thought it was such a good idea that we are rolling it out across the entire platform.

Change your project URL whenever you want

Another frequently requested change is the ability for you to change the permalink (or URL) of your project or site. So if you accidently post 10,000 postcards with the wrong URL… to sweat!

We’ve made it easier to navigate from BudgetAllocator back to EngagementHQ

This was a great idea from our friends over the ditch in NZ. We’ve added the ability for you to add custom text and links in the budget submission steps of BudgetAllocator so that it is much easier for your stakeholders to navigate back to your EngagementHQTM site.

I feel need, I feel need for speed!

You may have already noticed that the download speed for the quantitative reports has been radically improved. The guys have worked overtime to dramatically reduce the speed for the really data heavy reports across lots of projects.

Email Database Access

In a major policy shift that reflects that changing nature of our business we are now offering our clients access to the full database of your participant details – including the email addresses.  This represents a major change our Privacy Policy and will be the default for new clients, but if you have been with us for a while it is your choice whether and when we change your arrangements. If you decide that you would like access to the full database going forward, we will email your participants on your behalf and ask them for permission to hand over their details. Feel free to give us a bell to talk this one through.

Social Media Links can be turned off

You can now turn off all the social media links when you are running private or internal consultations. They are unnecessary clutter on the screen.

Anonymous Survey Participation

Your participants can now fill in your surveys without having to register on the site. This should lower the bar for participation in your online surveys.

Email address validation in Surveys

We’ve added a new question type to the surveys. It ensures that any email address provided by your participant is “real” by using a bounce-back validation process – the same method we use for validating new participants registering on your site.

Privacy Policy Updated

Finally, we’ve radically overhauled our Privacy Policy to make it much easier to read and more locally relevant to Australian, New Zealand and Canadian jurisdictions.