Analysing engagement data (Blue Mountains City Council 2022)

Analysing engagement data (Blue Mountains City Council 2022)

Engage2 are supporting Blue Mountains City Council with engagement about the potential future uses of the former Katoomba Golf Course site. The Council have proposed that the site be used to create a Planetary Health Centre.

During early engagement Council invited the community to share their vision for the site, vision for Planetary Health and what they would like to Council to focus on in the planning process. Participants could share an idea on Council’s engagement portal, respond to a survey, or email, post, or hand-deliver a via written submission.

596 responses were received across all methods, including 413 survey responses, 20 submissions and 105 ideas and 81 comments on ideas. The submissions, ideas and comments were provided as open unstructured data, and the survey responses included both qualitative unstructured and quantitative structured data. These varied forms of data were collated for analysis and reporting, so that this input could be considered by Council.

Engage2 supported Blue Mountains City Council to analyse submissions and data collected through engagement using Converlens.

With the support of Engage2, Blue Mountains City Council piloted the use of Converlens, an innovative technology designed to analyse unstructured qualitative data collected through engagement. Converlens, has been used by the Australian Government for the management of submissions for some time, but this was the first-time data was imported from MetroQuest plus Have Your Say and submissions.

Prior to uploading the data into Converlen’s, Engage2 ran a workshop with Council staff to determine how the data might be used in Council meetings, public reports, when planning for the precinct, Katoomba, and the Blue Mountains more broadly. During the workshop we also examined the various ways engagement data was being collected, used, and shared across Council and what might work well in future.

When the data was uploaded to Converlens, we were able to categorise responses and tag content within the body of unstructured responses so that the issues, concerns, and opportunities could be reported per response, and across them.

Based on this analysis Blue Mountains City Council created a public Engagement Report, a register of submissions and issues raised in each submission and now have a repository of engagement data that they can reference in Council meetings, when planning, and when engaging the community about related issues.

Technology used

Converlens with data from MetroQuest and EngagementHQ

Lessons learned

• When tagging engagement data, it is important to determine whether you will be tagging and reporting on the entire responses, parent level themes, or issues raised within the content of responses. In many cases, it will be best to tag issues first, then allocate parent tags as ‘themes’ with multiple sub-tags, rather than the other way around. E.g., Cycling, as an issue or sub-tag; then allocate all responses or content tagged as cycling under the theme Transport if more useful.
• Issue tags should be determined based on the terminology used by the community, as well as the terminology used by government. E.g., Parks, and green space
• If you want to tag feedback about an issue as negative, positive, neutral or offer more specific information about the respondent’s position on an issue a new tag will need to be created. E.g., Dogs off leash positive, dogs off leash negative.
• Classifying content within the body of the submission meant that:
  • Sentences, or quotes, could be tagged as related to an issue. Coding issues in this way made it easy to search for, reference, and generate reports based on only the content related to that issue.
  • Multiple issues could be identified within the body of a submission, with related content tagged or separated out when generating records of submissions.
  • Unstructured feedback gathered in submissions could be compared to the questions asked in other data collection tools.
• If an engagement technology does not ask compulsory identifying or demographic questions, it is not possible to identify unique respondents or how representative the engagement is.
• In some cases, it may be better to ask fewer, or no, questions during an engagement rather than many questions in a survey.