Local government & agencies
Consultation your residents can actually take part in
You do not need an enterprise engagement suite to ask one neighbourhood about one plan. You need a page residents can open on the bus, a map they can put a point on, an accessible route for the residents who cannot use a map canvas, and a clean dataset at the end that stands up in a committee report.
- Under the threshold that triggers a tender in most departments
- Accessible address entry alongside every map, always on
- CSV, GeoJSON and a public results page to close the loop
What gets in the way
Three things that stop this work, and what we do about them
“A six-figure platform will never clear procurement for one plan.”
A published price on a card, cancellable any month.
$99 a month on Pro covers custom domain, public results and invites. That is an expense claim in most departments rather than a tender, and because there is no per-project fee, the second and third consultations this year cost nothing extra.
“If it is not accessible, we cannot use it — and most maps are not.”
Address entry sits beside every map, on every plan, by default.
A drag-a-pin canvas excludes keyboard and screen-reader users. Every map we render also offers a labelled text field: a resident types an address or postal code, we geocode it, and their point carries exactly the same weight. The whole public surface is built against WCAG 2.2 AA — semantic landmarks, visible focus, real labels, 4.5:1 contrast — and we publish an accessibility statement you can link from your consultation notice.
“Officers need defensible evidence, not a screenshot of a chart.”
Every response is exportable, timestamped and traceable.
CSV for the tabular answers, GeoJSON for the pins so your GIS team can load them into the existing basemap, and chart exports for the report appendix. Moderation is manual and logged: hidden comments stay in the export with their status, so nothing quietly disappears between the consultation and the committee.
Example campaign
A corridor safety study
A transport team is consulting on changes to a two-mile arterial. Eight weeks, one officer running it alongside everything else.
- Set up
Draw the area, name the categories
Centre the map on the corridor, set a boundary so points land inside the study area, and define three categories: Safety concern, Works well, Suggestion. Add a nine-question survey covering travel mode, frequency, time of day and preferred intervention.
- Notice
Publish on your own domain
Point consult.yourcity.gov at the campaign so the link in the statutory notice looks like the council, not like a vendor. Our branding comes off entirely; residents see your logo and your colour.
- Reach
Meet people where the corridor is
QR codes on bus shelter posters and at the two libraries, the link in the residents' newsletter, and a printed address-entry option at the front desk for anyone who prefers paper. Every route lands in the same dataset.
- During
Ten minutes of moderation a week
The queue collects keyword matches and reports. Hide what breaks your code of conduct, restore what was flagged in error, and block the one IP that will not stop. Everything stays in the record either way.
- After
Publish the results back to residents
Switch on the public results view so people can see what their neighbours said. Closing the loop is the part consultations usually skip, and it is the part that decides whether anybody answers the next one.
One officer, one afternoon of setup, and a dataset the committee can interrogate line by line.
Run the next consultation without a procurement cycle
Start free to build it, move to Pro when you need your own domain and the public results page. Cancel from the billing portal whenever the study closes.
Free plan, no card. 200 responses a month, forever.