Online Consultation & Survey Publishing, Management and Analysis Tools

Brief Description

This tool is developed for an online Consultation, Survey, Market Research and Community Solutions provider in the UK. It is an online consultation publishing, management and analysis system for creating and managing online consultation process. The Online Consultation Publishing Solution facilitates users to create and manage complete consultation process with comprehensive analysis and reports, providing complete eConsultation experience to consulters, consultees and other stakeholders.

This Internet Community Solution is easy for consultation coordinators to use and to engage participants. Moreover, no technical knowledge is needed to create and manage consultations. Because of this very effective consultation process, better results can be obtained more easily, enabling deeper insight into stakeholders’ opinion, experience, preferences and needs. Its flexibility and clarity of process encourages a wider spectrum of stakeholders to participate. Online Consultation Management and Analysis Tool can also be deployed for internal, in-house consultations. In addition, it supports ‘spatial’ functionality so that users can link to specific areas with tailored maps and data layers and also feedback comments about specific locations.

Tools and Platforms

Migrated from Internet Information Server 5.0 to 6.0, SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005, Active Server Pages to .Net (ASP.NET 2.0)

Key aspects of the online consultation Solution

Bite-sized consultation texts or chapters

With this application, detailed consultation document can be segmented into bite-sized chapters. Key questions are asked within that context, while making it easy for participants to respond. Topics can be printed or emailed to colleagues. Complete consultation documents may still be downloaded for reference.

Meaningful navigation within the consultation itself

Participants can make contextual responses to all sections of the consultation texts or to particular parts as appropriate. Using the consultation guidance table as a reference point, respondents know where they are (and where they have been). They know they can return, view a specific response, edit if required and continue in another session.

Providing clarity of purpose, process and outcome

Participation and relationship opportunities are maximised. For example, registration is acknowledged (immediately by email) by describing outcomes and by making aims, objectives, timetables and intentions clear. In addition, using the tools of online community interaction - for example discussion forums, newsletters – can help maintain on-going stakeholder dialogue and community interaction and leverage the consultation process.

Providing reporting and analysis

This tool provides powerful cross tab and graphical representation for the following:

• Participants profile analysis for who is responding and who is not responding.
• Response statistics regarding what is the response level and what is the suitable date and time for response.
• Survey results analysis, both cross tab and graphical, with dynamic cross tabulations, and Question vs. Question matrix type analysis.
• Tagging or Marking on Responses for better categorisation and higher level analysis, especially for deriving quantitative analysis from textual responses.
• Formatted response reports for presentation and publishing.
• Enabling guest access to the sample courses with limited functionality

Publishing results

For an effective consultation process, it is imperative to ensure participants that their voice and opinions are heard and actioned upon. This democratic and stakeholder-centric product provides features to easily publish results to all stakeholders, internal contacts and participants. In addition, it keeps them updated on the progress further made on the policies or the steps related to consultations. Yet another feature of this Online Consultation Management and Analysis Tool is that it allows conducting a series of consultations where responses and feedbacks from a stage are fed as input for consultation paper on the next stage.

This comprehensive and unified online consultation, research and discussion management system enables total control over the whole consultation cycle, from planning and response analysis to the final presentation. This tool involves various processes: creating consultation paper, floating consultation paper with questionnaire, inviting stakeholders to participate in consultation, collecting all responses from them on the consultation paper, analysing the responses, and finally publishing the results of the consultation as well as the steps to be taken. This makes it a very powerful, democratic and stakeholder-centric tool.