Get Started with a User-Friendly Virtual Public Consultation
Engaging effectively with your local community and stakeholders during the preliminary stages of any planning process holds significant importance in a planning application’s success. If the community struggles to understand your project and feels excluded from the process, they may feel more inclined to oppose your projects during the consultation stage.
Hosting your public consultation online not only simplifies the planning process in many ways, but you can engage more effectively with a wider audience, analyse and report in real-time, and have all your planning materials in one centralised location for your audience to digest at their own pace.
However, the thought of setting up a Virtual Public Consultation (VPC) may seem daunting. Whether you have used a platform before or not, setting up your first consultation can be done in as little as 7 minutes.
Why not try for free here.
At EyeSiteView, we prioritise providing the best platforms whilst also ensuring that they are the most simple to navigate and easy to use.
Why Take Your Public Consultations Online?
A Virtual Public Consultation (VPC) is an online platform where you can host your consultations in a fully customisable 360 environment which is available 24/7 from any device. You can upload all your planning materials and get feedback from your visitors.
VPC’s eliminate accessibility barriers, allowing you to reach a wider audience that provides a more accurate reflection of community opinion. Virtual Public Consultations collect live data from all users interacting with your consultation in real-time. This provides accurate, extractable data from a convenient, centralised location.
Moving online allows you to collect and analyse larger quantities of data more efficiently.
Read more about the benefits of a VPC in our previous blog post.
How Do I get started with a Virtual Public Consultation?
1 – Online Consultation Plans
To get started with a Virtual Public Consultation, you first need to select the plan that is best suited to your needs. This will be influenced by a number of things, such as the scale of your project and your timeline. If, however, you feel that none of the plans are quite right for you, get in touch to discuss options tailored to you. Alternatively, sign up for FREE to get a feel for how the online consultation works.
2 – Customise Your Stands
From here you can customise each of your stands – of which you can have up to 10 – by adding your planning materials to them. Make them clear and inviting with engaging thumbnails and hover labels, and test out how they look live. You can add websites, videos, image galleries, pdf’s, text, feedback forms, or surveys to your consultation.
3 – Engaging 360 Environments
Enjoy total control over your 360 environment thanks to our selection of engaging environment styles and stand types. You can customise your environment to match your brand, and you can even upload your logo and write a personalised message for your visitors to see when they join the consultation.
4 – Invite your team
There is often a whole team behind each consultation, so you can invite team members to help you set up and maintain your consultation. Sometimes, you need to change or update your planning materials mid-consultation. Now any team member can do this with ease.
5- Schedule Your Consultation
The next step is to schedule your consultation. You can run your consultation for up to 22 weeks to get maximum exposure and feedback. This feedback will provide invaluable insights into public opinion and ultimately drive planning success.
And that is how simple it is to set up your own Virtual Public Consultation! The layout of the set-up pages will also help you as the navigation bar will guide you through these steps in this order.
Watch our latest video
Watch someone going through this process from start to finish to see just how easy it really is!
