Extremely hard to see everyone's comments

Chat to the Engagement team about alternative tools to use - example Hot Spot with a quick poll or turn on clustering.

• Marker Clustering - enables pins in the same location to be aggregated into a single marker with a number indicating the number of pins in this location. This removes visual clutter and allows you to take a broader view of your map. Marker clustering doesn’t affect the data, its just a way of visually consolidating the markers in one place. This option can be easily enabled/disabled from the block settings any time.

By ticking next to any of the attributes will result in what is seen on the screen (It will appear below the comment box and above the submit box). We recommend limiting to under 3.

If you select email address, please note that this will autofill for members

In activity description of the tool - please enter this text (to ensure our members will know their user name will be displayed: -

Please note: your username and response(s) will be displayed publicly.

A risk we don’t often think about is the risk of too much participation. A city in California began using EngagementHQ and was excited to utilise the interactive map within the Places tool. They invited citizens to drop pins on the map, indicating what size buildings they felt were appropriate for different areas of the city.

What the city staff didn’t anticipate was one overzealous resident dropping over 2,000 pins on the map within three days! This not only skewed the data but also influenced others using the map, who didn’t know that so many of the pins were from one person.

The same resident began posting inaccuracies on the platform which other participants were reading. In response, the city decided to open a Forum on the site and encouraged the resident to post their thoughts there and have a conversation with other community members.

Rather than blocking him from the platform they instead honored his passion and the time he wanted to spend on the issue. The lesson is that you can change your strategy along the way.

And that map with all the extra pins? It wasn’t a problem in EngagementHQ. City staff were able to create a second map, restate the guidelines for using it, and then export the data from both maps into a GIS file. They were even able to include or exclude the extra pins from the enthusiastic resident. This provided rich data analysis.

When things go off the rails remember you can re-state the ground rules/guidelines for input, or pivot to a new tool. You can use any data you get, even if it’s overwhelming at first.