For municipalities, business improvement areas and conservation authorities
A shoreline consultation and a budget consultation should not look the same or reach the same people.
You have a consultation to run and nobody whose job it is. We set the whole thing up around the decision you are actually asking about, reach the residents an online consultation normally misses, answer their questions, and hand you a written record of what was said.
You never operate anything.
The call is free. Bring the consultation you have coming. If we are the wrong fit we will say so on the call.
Who this is for
If you already have an engagement team in house, you do not need us. This is for the organizations that have the obligation without the people.
The problem
A funding agreement, a council motion or a provincial process says you have to consult. The date is set and the report is due.
Most organizations your size have no single approach to this. Departments each have their own, they engage their community regularly, and the results are mixed. A dedicated coordinator is a permanent salary line you cannot justify for two or three consultations a year, so the work keeps landing on whoever has the least full week.
Then there is who answers. An online consultation hears from the residents already inclined to answer one, so the people who respond are not a cross-section of the people the decision affects. The gap shows up plainly the moment anyone puts the two side by side.
The consultants who run these studies often pair the online survey with a phone survey to a few hundred households. That is sensible and we would not talk anyone out of it. A phone survey gives you a representative read. What it does not do is bring the residents you did not reach into the consultation itself, or tell you anything new about them.
Nobody is doing anything wrong here. Running a public consultation properly is a job on its own, and it is not the job any of you were hired to do.
The difference
If you have used one of the big engagement platforms, you know the shape. You get a project page inside their template and you set it up yourself. We start from the decision you are asking about and set the consultation up around that instead.
The two below are examples we made up to show what that changes. Neither is a client project.
The four rows are the same in both. Every answer in them is different. A template can carry your logo and your wording. It cannot change what you are asking, how a resident answers, who ever sees it, or what you end up holding at the end.
One caution on the third row. Putting the consultation in front of more of the town changes who is in the pool. It does not make the result representative, and it is not a substitute for statistical sampling.
What we run
You are hiring a service for one consultation. Nobody on your team logs in and nobody administers anything, so there is no seat to hand out and nobody to train.
Your logo, your colours, your wording, on your own web address if you want it there. What sits on those pages follows the decision you are consulting on. Residents see your organization. Our name is not on it.
A resident shares a photo or a short story and it lands on a map at the spot they picked. The map shows where the community actually is, past the small group who turns up to any one event.
Whatever you have to collect. A written comment, a photo, a pin on a map, an uploaded file. We have shipped all of those.
When a contest fits the consultation, we run the judging and put the winners up on the site for everyone to see. It is a reason for residents to take part and a record you can point to afterward.
Youth, young families, renters, newcomers. We run targeted advertising to put the consultation directly in front of the groups your platform does not reach on its own, so their input is in the record rather than inferred from a sample afterwards. This is a different instrument from a phone survey and not a substitute for statistical sampling. It sits inside this contract, so it is not a separate media budget your communications team has to find and manage.
Every resident who signs up opts in at that moment. The list is yours to keep and to use again for the next round. You own it, we do not.
Put your open house or information session on the same site, right next to the map, so the people you reach online can also show up in the room.
The risk in asking is raising expectations you then have to walk back. We write the framing with you so residents can see what the decision actually is and what it is not, we hold that line in the moderation, and we answer the resident who gets stuck halfway through. Your inbox is not the help desk for this.
A privacy notice written to be read, a consent step that means something, and an interface that works without a mouse. The version of the notice they agreed to is recorded with the submission. A resident can ask for their submission to be removed, and we remove it. What we tested ourselves is set out plainly in the proof below.
What residents said, grouped into themes, with the raw submissions attached underneath. Something you can hand to council or attach to a report, and we hand it over in full at the end.
Proof
One project, described precisely. Everything below is checkable.
We set up and run a public engagement platform for a community organization in Toronto. Residents place a pin on a map, add a photo and a description, and pass a consent step before anything is published. It is live today and the group still uses it.
The advertising that reached residents for that project was set up and run by us. It went out from our ad account with creative we made. The group approved that creative and we turned it on. Plenty of engagement vendors will write your content or produce your notices. We have not found another vendor that sells both the platform and the advertising alongside it.
The submission flow can be completed with a keyboard alone, including placing the map pin, and there is a skip link past the navigation. The resident-facing controls and photos carry screen-reader labels. The focus outline computes to 7.2 to 1 against the white page background, well past the 3 to 1 a focus indicator needs.
A real privacy notice, written to be read. A consent step that blocks submission until it is ticked. Published map pins are rounded before they leave the server, so a public pin sits somewhere inside a block of about 110 by 80 metres rather than on the exact spot a resident was standing.
What we have not done
Only one of those two examples is work we have done. We have shipped a map-and-photo consultation like the first one. We have not shipped a trade-off exercise like the second one. Read both of them as what we would set up for you rather than as a portfolio.
No accessibility audit has been run on that platform. No third party has tested it and we are not claiming conformance with any WCAG level. What we can tell you is precisely what we tested and measured ourselves, which is set out in the proof above. If your procurement needs a conformance statement, an audit is something we can arrange and quote separately.
We have not run one of these for a municipality yet. The organization we ran it for is a volunteer community group in Toronto. Everything this page offers as proof comes from that work. You would be the first public body, and you should price that in.
We are not going to quote you a sign-up count. We have the numbers from that campaign and we could put them on this page. One ward in a large city, run by volunteers, on one topic, tells you nothing useful about a town of 20,000 consulting on a stormwater plan. You would be right to push back on it, so we would rather work out what to expect for your consultation on a call, with your population and your topic in front of us. If you want to see them anyway, ask, and we will open the ad account and the database in front of you and go through what each one does and does not show.
From the group we run it for
Jason built the technology behind our group, and it just works, even for someone as tech-challenged as I am. Thanks to the system he created, we've been able to connect with and engage many new people in our cause.
I am seeing a lot of 'likes' in my feed for the Facebook contest postings. Thank you Jason!
Both quotes are used with written permission from the person quoted.
Next step
Thirty minutes with Jason, who runs the company and does the work. Tell him the process you are under, the date it has to be done by, and what you have to spend. You will get a straight answer on whether we can help and roughly what it would cost.
If you would rather send the details in writing, use the form below or write to jason@metabus.ca and we will reply within one business day.