Your Voice Champions Event: Using the Ideas Tool

Today's Your Voice Champions Event: Agenda (23.10.25)

2:00 Welcome and housekeeping

2:10 Widget review/ Using custom widgets creatively

2:30 ‘Building the Council's Research Capacity' with Tahmida Khanom – Learn more about free training opportunities

2:55 Quick 5 min break

3:00 Introducing the new Tool Builder and how to use it with the ideas tool

3:20 AOB/Audience questions

3:30 Close

Last Your Voice Champions Training Event

What can the ideas tool be used for?

The ideas tool can be used as a "stand alone" tool to encourage participants to:

• engage with one another in debate,
• source new ideas and solutions,
• facilitate creative thinking,
• share potential options,
• facilitate participatory budgeting or prioritisation
• help facilitate early engagement in co-design
• share customer feedback
• support multi-stage projects (e.g. seek service options development, gather survey feedback, use the Places tool to understand the geographical variation in need for services).

Participants can add posts, choose accessible colours, add images (which can be cropped, rotated, zoomed or flipped).

They can also comment on posts (where this is enabled) and vote on (or unvote) using a thumbs up icon for published posts.

Posts can also be shared with others using the share icon.

Other functions

• The ideas board has a search function to filter new newest, oldest, most voted and by the posts with the most comments.
• Posts can also be searched by title where this is known.
• Participants can report posts considered inappropriate posts for moderation but cannot edit or delete another's post.
• Posts cannot be edited or deleted by participants once the tool has been closed their posts whilst the tool is closed published and open

Advantages for people who are registered users

• Participants who are registered with the Your Voice Engagement Hub can edit or delete their posts whilst the tool is published and open

Examples of how the "ideas tool" as been used by others

For an example of the different ways in which the "ideas tool" has been used, you might like to visit the following studies, some of which we will be exploring during out session:

• #WestSussBus Ideazone (opens in new window) which seeks ideas to improve the experience of public bus travel.
• Lancaster's Keep Connected Climate (opens in new window) Change ideas to see how ideas are sought to promote climate change.
• The City of Point Russell consultation (opens in new window) to see how the Ideas tool is used to ask the public to suggest a name for thier new Transit Centre.
• The City of Point Russell's transport options page (opens in new window) which seeks to debate the pros and cons of potential traffic option designs.
• The West Sussex Birth, Deaths, and Ceremonies Sub Hub page (opens in new window) where the ideas tool is used to share customer feedback on the services they have received.
• The City of Russell Council Meetings page (opens in new window)where this tool was used to suggest and vote on resident-led Agenda items to be included at Council meetings.

Reporting on the "ideas tool"

Data can be analysed whilst your project is open, but the final dataset will not be available until the tool is closed and archived.

You then have three data analysis options:

• A detailed excel report: Select Reporting tools > Project reports > choose relevant project name and date range > select the update button, then click on blue download report button in top right hand corner of screen
• The "Ideas tool" report: Select Reporting > Tool Reports > Ideas
• Text analysis: Use the Text analysis function alongside tags to organise ideas, demographics, filter, and carry out sentiment analysis which can be downloaded in an excel spreadsheet.