You’ve engaged your community online, but can you stand behind your data?

When online community engagement was still in its nascent stages the question governments asked was “will citizens participate in online engagement activities?” A decade on and the answer is clearly an enthusiastic “yes!” Now, the question must be, “are the results we’re getting reliable and representative?” In other words, “does our data have integrity?”

When participating in online consultation activities, the community expects governments to act with integrity when making decisions based on those activities. This means adhering to the principles of data and research integrity – that is, asking “did we do the right thing, did we do it the right way, and are the results accurately documented?”

Integrity in decision-making is crucial to good governance and to building and sustaining public trust, and this relies on integrity in research and data gathering.

What constitutes data integrity

Integrity in online community engagement processes can be divided into three areas:

• Integrity of participants - ensuring the people who have participated are who they say they are, that the engagement has not been unjustly influenced, manipulated or gamed.
• Integrity of representation - ensuring the results represent a diverse spectrum of the community or at least identify where the gaps are and who the data does and doesn’t represent.
• Transparency and integrity of process - ensuring there is an explicit action taken by the decision-maker as a direct result of the outcome of the participation.

Why data integrity is important

Ensuring data integrity is vital as it can help identify biases in results based on socio/spatial/demographic segments. It can provide decision-makers with a reliable evidence base to make decisions and demonstrate due process, building trust within the community. Remember, communities will more readily accept policy changes they disagree with if they are visibly forged through robust processes.

Data integrity is expected in offline processes, so it should apply equally to online processes.

There is a case to be made for community engagement professionals to qualify their engagement data using statistical methods to measure community representation. That means defining, measuring and tracking sample sizes for various audience segments. It also means guiding decision-makers with a better understanding of the data collected and who it represents.

All of this embodies a more data-driven approach to community engagement, particularly one that is holistic across organisations. Governments should develop tools to measure and analyse community representation and promote a quality vs quantity approach to data collection.

Quality vs quantity

One key safeguard that any project should take into consideration is user registration. This usually includes providing some personal information and creating an account that can be revisited and reused for multiple interactions over time. This provides a mechanism for qualifying the data provided and deterring hastily-provided submissions without any qualification.

There is a persistent concern around ‘removing barriers to participation’ that dogs engagement managers, who often feel they either can’t take the step of enforcing user registration, or don’t feel they can make the case for it to others. This is partly due to research from the world of marketing, where the ‘reciprocity principle’ says you should always give users something before asking anything of them.

Otherwise, the wisdom goes, people will switch off, click away and not bother with your offering. Managers may also become ‘addicted’ to vanity metrics that show growth in engagement, sometimes at the expense of the quality of contributions.

While it is generally true that enforcing member registration can be a barrier, it is important to remember that you are offering something to your visitors in return: the chance to participate in the process of government. If participants are likely to be put off by a quick registration form or, worse, do not want to be accountable for their contribution, it is unlikely you are going to get a quality contribution in the first place.

Governments have a responsibility to ensure they aren’t just collecting random thoughts and opinions from the internet and collating them into a report. The usefulness of collecting ‘mountains’ of unqualified data should be scrutinised.

It can also raise more questions than it answers, and it is hard for decision-makers to view the collected data as a legitimate body of evidence. If your engagement is well-planned and your content is interesting, back yourself: people will want to engage, and they will register to do it.

Registration is an expectation

Above all, remember that the web is a fluid, ever-changing environment, and principles that once held true may change. Increasingly, web applications of all kinds - from government through to retail - require user registration or some kind of signup, and this is becoming accepted and indeed expected behaviour for web users.

Put yourself in your citizens’ shoes: wouldn’t you be reassured that by registering members and diligently collecting appropriate data on who is participating, the process has integrity? Registering participants both insures your data integrity and demonstrates your commitment to credible community research and data gathering.

Research shows that a key driver in influencing people to do this is brand awareness. If you have built a credible brand around your engagement activities, people will trust that brand and feel comfortable signing up and providing personal information.

A final thought

You owe it to your citizens to ensure that your community engagement activities are not just accessible to everyone - but that the results reflect the diverse views of the community.

Too often we hear community engagement managers talking about the repeat-offenders and loud minorities who dominate the discourse over community projects and decision-making. Employing digital tools can help you broaden the range of voices being heard in your community engagement, or at the very least understand who has participated, and more importantly who has not.

Ensuring that your engagements uphold principles of data integrity ensures you can be confident your results are representative and robust, and allows you to demonstrate transparency and diligence in your engagement activities. Even if you don't enforce user registration, collecting some additional information and understanding who your audience is is a key step towards building data integrity into your project design.