Community Priorities Platform

What is Community Priorities?

Community Priorities is a platform that enables groups to collect and prioritize ideas in a transparent, democratic and bottom-up way - a great flexible service providing on demand, or over time, information concerning your community.

You can use Community Priorities to create a website, widget, and mobile website where visitors can vote on ideas and upload new ones. The point is to inspire participation - meaningful participation - by a simple interface with practically no barriers to entry. The intuitive and fun voting process yields powerful results.

Typical applications

Community Priorities is best suited to discern people's priorities - the ideas, services they agree with or value more highly than others, examples include:

Interactive Q&A sessions for events, conferences and townhalls
Budget consultations
Policy consultations
Redevelopment consultations
Membership consultations
Organizational change
Internal team/departmental brainstorming
Conference and events audience engagement
Editorial-focused reader surveys

How does it work?

You set up a question and "seed" it with an initial list of ideas/items.

When a participant arrives at the site, they are presented with two ideas and invited to choose the one they prefer.

They can also select I can't decide which then asks them for more information (I like both ideas, I don't like either, I think they are the same, etc.), or they can add their own idea to the mix.

After they have selected an idea, they are presented with the next pair of ideas to rate, and so on.

View results will show the participant all the ideas and their score out of a 100.

Ensuring balanced results

Community Priorities avoids pitfalls that have plagued some online systems. For instance, to address the issue of people gaming the system by voting on their favorite entry multiple times, the system randomly selects the two voting choices presented to respondents, making it more difficult for someone to repeatedly find and vote for a specific entry.

Site visitors also make their choices blindly, without having seen the rankings of the various ideas, which prevents them from being biased by other people's opinions. The system accounts for some ideas being in the system longer than others, preventing older entries from dominating the rankings because they've been voted on more times.

How to use

Collecting Ideas and Proposals

Community Priorities allows participants to submit ideas in response to a specific question, and they immediately get put on an equal footing with other ideas.

The flow from viewing ideas to adding your own is very easy - previous uses have seen high levels of user-submitted ideas.

You will get a good initial sense of the relative popularity of different ideas to take forward to a next stage. The final analysis is a weighting not based on number of votes but on popularity compared to other ideas.

Community Priorities uses equal-weighting and random comparisons to keep the idea data free from some of the bias whereby an idea?s initial popularity keeps it at the top as more people can see it. This means that it can give a relatively accurate picture of people?s preferences.

Public Consultation Process

In a public consultation process, Community Priorities often fits into a wider process. Community Priorities provides great feedback, insight new ideas depending on how and when it is used. For example, Community Priorities can be effectively used to extract priorities related to:

What should our core principle be in this process?
What should our priorities be for the next year?
What is most important to you about the place that you live?

Surveys

Traditional surveys can be a blunt instrument - their general inability to quantify narrative feedback often forces survey-writers to rely on pre-determined questions. You only get out what you put in - and often you don?t know what you don't know! No matter how hard you try, there are always ideas out there you don't know about - but other people do! Community Priorities helps overcome that limitation by allowing visitors to upload ideas.

Surveyors can tailor Community Priorities to the particular survey they want to run, seeding it with initial ideas and deciding whether the survey run will be entirely algorithmic or human-moderated. For the latter option, each surveyor designates a moderator, charged with approving user-generated ideas before they become part of a question options available for visitors to vote on; for both options, users themselves can flag ideas as inappropriate.

Organizational Change

Community Priorities can be used to support organizational change. This will be particularly useful at larger organizations, where the lower-level staff might have the most meaningful ideas about organizational priorities and opportunities - but where those workers' voices might also have the least chance of being heard.

Key Features

Easy, intuitive interface
Universally accessible - website, web widget, Facebook App, mobile interfaces
Transparency - real-time results
Restrict voting by geographic region (e.g. Country, State/Province)
Allow users to flag ideas as inappropriate
Integrated social sharing (Twitter, Facebook, eMail, social bookmarking services)
Rotating branding/info graphics for header and/or footer
RSS feed for top 10 ideas
Configurable colors
Custom logo branding
First use user welcome and information pop-up
QR-codes auto-generation/support
Short-code URL auto-generation/support
Google analytics support
Extensive usage analytics and visualization (e.g. unique visitors, location, number of votes per day, word cloud of ideas)
Downloadable submission data files
Optional password access control for participants
Moderation control (activate/deactivate/delete/edit) for user submitted ideas
Hosted on our server
Technical email and phone support available