Back at the start of December, we were excited to host our first user group in Liverpool. The grand city and its surrounding area is home to several Citizen Space customers – including Liverpool City Council, the Liverpool City Combined Regional Authority, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE)’s head office, and nearby Sefton Council – plus we were delighted that other organisations from further afield were willing to make the journey and join us for a fantastic day of connecting and sharing knowledge.
Good morning good morning
Delib’s Chief Customer Officer (EMEA), Jessie Ashmore, kicked off proceedings by providing a top level snapshot (bird’s eye view?) of what Delib has been up to and what other exciting changes will be winging their way to our customers soon.
(This section of the blog could also feasibly have been titled “Blackbird” since Jessie’s presentation slides were adorned by a variety of different feathered friends! The below slide refers to Delib’s newly introduced referral scheme, which offers a subscription discount for any customer who introduces Citizen Space to a new team or other organisation.)
(Jayne &) Michelle
Next up on the agenda was a fantastic and insightful presentation by Jayne Vincent and Michelle Anglesea from Sefton Council about the custom landing page on their Citizen Space site dedicated to the council’s co-production activities. They commented that they’ve been “really pleased to get the support from Delib to develop this extra page”, which represents a commitment to increasing this way of working now that the council is 7 years into its co-production journey. They explained that having all of these related activities displayed on one page has made a big difference and made it much easier for the council to communicate about this piece of work.
Their presentation prompted the reflection from one attendee that local government organisations are sometimes better than central government at making things more accessible to a diverse audience. Certainly, learning more about the approach that Sefton Council take and seeing their leadership in this field gave us all a lot of food for thought.
Paperback writer
Throughout the day we also took the opportunity to hold several group discussions for attendees to talk and share with other organisations at their table. The first topic was offline responses – i.e. responses received outside of a Citizen Space survey, whether that might be via email or letter or captured following in person contact or by phone – and how to process those. We wanted to hear how many offline responses our customers tend to receive, whether there are particular topics that seem to attract more, what our customers do with them and what the main challenges around those current processes are.
We had a great conversation and it was particularly interesting to hear one customer reflect on the challenge from both sides of the fence, both as a Citizen Space admin who has recently had to process lots of offline responses to a Local Plan consultation, but also as someone who often responds to other organisations’ consultations on behalf of the council she works for and has been known to submit an offline response herself due to time constraints.
Here comes the sun
Elissa Watson, Delib’s in-house UX Designer, looked back on the recent changes introduced by Citizen Space 8 last summer and then gave a more detailed preview of some of the new functionality that Citizen Space users can look forward to next. If you’re curious to know what’s coming up on Delib’s roadmap for product development, we recommend user groups as the best place to hear those sorts of updates.
When I’m sixty-four
Following on seamlessly from both Sefton Council’s and Eli’s presentations, we had another group discussion on the topic of Easy Read. Everyone in the room was at different stages in their journey with Easy Read, from people who hadn’t come across it before the user group to Sefton Council at the other end of the spectrum who have adopted it as their default format. However it’s fair to say that most attendees were either excited or intrigued to hear that better support for creating Easy Read content is very much on Delib’s roadmap for Citizen Space in 2026.
“Accessibility: essential for some, useful for all”
We can work it out
With Eli having talked about the new library of activity templates introduced via Citizen Space 8, plus more still in development, we also took the opportunity to hold another group discussion and pick attendees’ brains about what other activity types they’d be keen to see added to the software in the future. What processes did they see their organisation running on a regular basis in a repeatable way, where a template within the tool could potentially save their teams valuable time? Or were there particular types of activity where they’d already created their own internal template for users to work from and might appreciate us building it into the software in a more easily accessible way? We’re keen to identify templates that will deliver efficiencies across our customer base, but we’re also working closely with individual customers to explore and understand the intricacies of their specific processes and where they may benefit from a custom template tailored just for their organisation’s own purposes.
Lucy Lauren in the sky cloud with diamonds a gem of a product update
Our final update from Delib was delivered by Lauren La Rocca, our fabulous Product Manager, via a recorded video since she is now based in the US. She gave a brief overview of the Citizen Space API (Applied Programming Interface), which can sound like scary technical language to the uninitiated, but is essentially a way to get information in and out of Citizen Space and in practical terms means you can integrate your site with other tools. For example, you might want to smoothly and securely transfer your response data OUT of Citizen Space and into a data visualisation tool, such as Microsoft PowerBI – this is now possible, and we can supply two default PowerBI templates to get you started. Alternatively, you might want to use a third party A.I.-supported tool to help analyse your response data and then insert the results back INTO Citizen Space so that the information is visible in the analysis dashboard – again, that’s now possible too. In fact, the world is your oyster when it comes to integrating your Citizen Space site and its data!
Ticket to ride
After hearing from Lauren it was almost time to head home, but we were delighted that some attendees were so keen to continue the valuable conversations begun at the event that, as per user group tradition, they agreed to our suggestion that we decamp to a nearby drinking hole – in this case Doctor Duncan’s, a historic pub named after William Henry Duncan who was the UK’s first Medical Health Officer (appointed in 1847). We were more than happy to toast Dr Duncan’s public health legacy as well as the success of the user group in these beautiful ceramic tiled surroundings, before our little group of digital engagement buffs dispersed and each headed back to our respective homes, energised by new connections made and ideas exchanged.
With a little help from my friends
Thank you to Jayne and Michelle from Sefton Council for presenting and sharing their expert knowledge throughout the event, the Brain Charity for their kind and attentive hosting, and everyone who took time out of their schedule to come to the event. We look forward to hopefully seeing some of you at another Delib event soon – watch this space.