Publishing Consultations:

• Consultation Manager logs in to his own web interface and describes and defines a proposed consultation.
• Before the Open date, all details needed related to publishing the consultation are configured and the user view of the consultation details are previewed.
• A survey form or questionnaire is then designed to collect response from participants, this selected from existing survey templates or creating as a new form.

Targeting and encouraging consultee participation:

• A manager can search through the consultee database of registered participants based on demographics, geographic and/or subject interest. He can short list consultees who might have an interest in an upcoming consultation, and communicate with them either by email or personalised letter to announce this forthcoming consultation and thus encourage greater participation.
• The consultation manager can also see the list of users who have already registered their interest for a particular consultation, or users who have registered for a particular category of interest, and announce that a consultation is live.

Alerts to users at the right time:

• Users who have registered interests or who were targeted by the consultation manager will receive email or SMS or personalised letters.

Analysing and Publishing Survey responses and communicating results:

• Participants’ responses are collected online and data is immediately collected in response analysis engine.
• Various graphical and data reports can be produced with powerful search options to derive meaningful results from all responses
• Responses can be linked with demographic and geographic profile fields of consultees, which can give more focused answers to response analysis
• Results can be shared online with other colleagues and published in an appropriate format after finalisation of reports
• Users who have responded to the consultation are sent email alerts to invite them to view published results

Monitoring and Reporting participation activities:

• Various reports driven by comprehensive search parameters to study activity at site level and consultation level

Finding and Responding to consultations:

• Any participants – registered or not - can search for consultation by various geographic areas including postcode, interest, title, status, date and other parameters and access search results with details of each consultation.
• They can bookmark consultation of interest for quick look-up later.
• They can register their interest for a particular future consultation or for consultations falling under specific category/interest area.
• They can view details of consultation and depending on status of consultation they will be able to either respond to consultation (Open consultations) or view results of a consultation (Completed Consultations).
• If they are responding using a survey form, they do not need to complete personal details or login details again as the system has already recorded them.
• Participants receive email acknowledgement and thank you message on successfully submitting their responses.