Effective citizen engagement needs the best toolkit, now more than ever

23rd February 2021

Civica Engagement Solutions will reach its 15th birthday later this year. We started out with a single product to help NHS Trusts manage their new memberships – a concept launched in 2004 whereby NHS Foundations needed to integrate a tripartite staff, patient and public involvement structure into its governance – in return for greater financial freedom.

At the start of 2021, in the midst of a global pandemic and shifting social and economic tectonic plates, the model is especially prescient.  As we are increasingly seeing, our way through and out of this pandemic requires a significant coming together of communities, volunteers, and neighbours. An invisible wartime effort.  As the vaccination programme moves up a gear, this is the underpinning mentality. Communicating and engaging effectively with communities and stakeholders, mobilising them and empowering them has never been more pressing.

Mobilising citizens with digital tools

What we have now, which we didn’t have in 1939 of course, is an array of digital tools to support us. Back in April 2020, 750,000 NHS Volunteer Responders signed up in just 4 days, three times the original target. Online platforms like Nextdoor, Facebook, individual council and local health citizen panels have been able to tap into and mobilise communities in ways and at a pace that would not have been possible even 10-15 years ago, let alone pre-internet. Alongside the incredible scientific leaps made in timeframes, the frontline public sector and charity efforts made every single day, and countless other inspiring individual stories, the digital tools available to us today are proving to be invaluable in mobilising the citizen army for this new kind of war.

Integrating engagement into decision-making

Engagement Solutions has been at the forefront of the engagement discussion in the health sector over the years. We champion involvement and participation as drivers of meaningful change and decision-making based on actual insight. Since 2006, we have broadened our range of digital tools to make it as intuitive as possible for organisations to integrate engagement and insights into their decision-making. 

Now with six core products we offer an end to end service, guaranteeing you have the best tool available for your particular engagement activity:

Civica Engage – our original digital community engagement platform, re-imagined and rebuilt in 2020 for the next decade – used by over 170 hospital trusts, CCGs and other organisations for their membership engagement management

Civica Experience – our patient experience real-time feedback platform with integrated text analytic tools to ensure insight can be captured quickly across multiple channels and turned into action and improvement

Civica Empower – enables your organisation to capture anonymised staff insight from the ground in real time for better employee collaboration and tangible actions for systemic and workplace experience improvement

Civica Declare – the leading and most cost-effective digital tool for NHS Trusts to meet statutory requirements for stronger and more visible governance and conflicts of interest

Civica Involve – at the start of 2021 we are proud to integrate our newest product into our offering. Our community and stakeholder engagement platform allows your organisation to easily create your own community engagement website, capture feedback and visualise data, and drive participation

Research and Community – our five digital tools are further supported by our sixth area - our research team is able to handle any survey, feedback or insights project you may have

In 2021, when it comes to effective community engagement and participatory work, it has never been more important to find tools that are easy to use, accessible, quick to set up, secure and cost effective.  We hope we can help you.