NEIGHBOURHOOD
DEVELOPMENT
PLANNING
This is how we can help councils and their planning groups, and their planning consultants where engaged, to work with their community to deliver a Neighbourhood Development Plan for their town or parish.
In the beginning
GoCollaborate was originally formed to help neighbourhood development planning groups reach and connect to their communities. This reflected the immense difficulties of consulting and engaging communities given the logistical challenges associated with paper and low-cost electronic surveys, which often resulted in uninformed feedback, unclear outcomes and very significant time delays.
We set out therefore to make an affordable, pain-free consultation platform that can sit alongside or replace paper based surveys. That platform has now transformed into an affordable and pain-free consultation and engagement service. In doing this, we were intent on our platform being accessible, informative, and interactive so it would stimulate more contributions from the community, engage with younger generations and produce higher quality, better-informed feedback.
How can we help you?
Through our retained NDP consultants, we now offer set-up advice and thematic health-check reviews to town and parish councils and their Neighbourhood Planning Groups, to increase their chances of successfully completing their NDP journeys.
That support introduces the GoCollaborate consultation platform. Enabling groups to explain the role and value of Neighbourhood Development Plans and to get started on understanding what their communities aspire to in making their places better, more prosperous and more sustainable.
Delivering informed feedback
Unlike other electronic surveying tools, our platform allows for issues and opportunities to be explored interactively, alongside survey questions. They can be configured to encourage the exchange of ideas from respondents. It also enables the better-informed comments that result to be offered up for all in the community to consider.
Completing the feed-back loop
The platform takes all the pain out of monitoring, managing, and analysing the incoming responses and removes GDPR risk. Critically through this, at each stage, the results of the consultations can be fed back very quickly and easily, to inform the community on what is being said and how the Neighbourhood Planning Group is responding. This enables the community to be kept informed and motivated, to continue to be engaged and encourages support throughout, including the all-important Referendum Stage.
Neighbourhood plans are led and developed by the community. Effective community engagement is key to developing a good plan and a successful outcome at referendum. Finding out what people think and using their local knowledge will also help with developing robust evidence to support the plan.
- Locality, FAQs by Neighbourhood Planners, 2021