Story by Mark Skelsey, Principal at StoryPower

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March 2024

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While most community engagement practitioners would say they love their job, many would also be happy to tell you there are aspects of their work that currently lack credibility, along with being time-consuming and tedious.

 

Take the age-old concept of setting a letter notification area.

 

It’s often a concept of guessing a target area (on the basis of no or little evidence) and then handing across a scanned Google Map with a texta line, which defines that area, to the letter notification company.

 

The letter that then goes out is generic, irrespective of the potentially different characteristics of residents in the target area.

 

Another area is the creation of engagement outcomes reports. More often than not, the analysis of free text comments is highly subjective and takes many hours, if not days.

 

It’s not easy to draw conclusions and stats from a wild mis-mash of words and phrases.

 

It’s exciting that, in 2024, two new Australian companies have developed products which seek to wildly improve the above two scenarios, and potentially much, much more.

 

Scopomap

 

Launched in late January 2024, Scopomap combines the power of Australia Post and Australian Bureau of Statistics data to allow community engagement and other professionals to undertake fine-grain community stakeholder mapping.

 

Scopomap’s co-founder is Oliver Young (pictured below) who spent 13 years as a practice lead at community engagement consulting firm Elton (now WSP).

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“It became really clear to me that a lot of engagement was really broad-brush…it involved setting up an amorphous but defendable catchment area, run a letter and then largely always get the same result, which is feedback from people who were impacted or were the usual suspects,” Young said.

 

“I wanted to find a better way to reach people that wouldn’t ordinarily engage.”

 

For the past two years, he’s been examining how to build on the address data used in his existing letter distribution business, to combine address with demographic data.

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The result is Sydney-based Scopomap (the scopo is short for “scoping”). Scopomap is an interactive mapping tool, which allows professionals to define a bespoke area and then determine the number of residential and business properties and key demographic information in this area (including at the individual block or street level).

 

The current demographic filters include age, employment and income, dwelling type and tenure, languages, nationality and travel to work, but over time these fields are expected to be expanded to include most of the demographics in the ABS dataset).

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This may allow a community engagement professional to know that, when seeking to notify a specific area, there is a need for letters to be available in a certain language.

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“We had one client who was making assumptions about the ethnicity of people in a certain block in a suburb, only to find when he used our tool that it was an entirely different ethnic group,” Young said. “They were surprised and we were surprised, but the stats don’t lie.”

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                                          Graphic showing how Scopomap provides in-depth analysis of small areas

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Scopomap also has uses outside of community engagement, including to create social impact or marketing reports or to simply inform outreach tactics with pinpoint accuracy.

 

To this end, Scopomap allows users to download a social analysis report for a set area.

 

These reports use artificial intelligence-generated writing to call out significant demographic findings.

 

Scopomap’s website is here - https://scopomap.com.au/

 

Communiti Labs

 

Communiti Labs is a new community engagement analysis platform, which is powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

 

The company co-founders are Melbourne-based Steven Germain and Dan Ferguson, who last year met in an accelerator program.

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                                            Dan Ferguson (left) and Steven German (right) from Communiti Labs

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Germain was previously operating a brewery in Melbourne, but was looking for a career change. 

 

After interacting with two community engagement processes (for skate parks) he came to realise that technology had the potential to make community engagement more responsive and seamless.

 

“I am personally super passionate about this space…from a community perspective,” Germain said.

 

“I started talking to community engagement practitioners , and learned about the tools they were using. I could then see a clear path of how we could improve their practice. It became quite infectious.” 

 

Soon after, he met Ferguson, who complements Germain’s marketing and operational skills with the technical and technology know-how. 

 

The Communiti Labs product was launched earlier this year and uses AI to solve one of community engagement’s biggest headaches - the time-confusing and manual process involved in analysing large amounts of data made by traditional online engagement platforms and in-person engagements.

 

“The primary use case for the product is that, if you have a current engagement, you may have 1,000 people writing a novel in open text, to respond to what they want in their new aquatic centre, it might take a person a week to analyse all those comments. Our platform improves that timeframe by 300%.”

Currently, the relevant insights need to be uploaded into the Communiti Labs platform, but over time the tool may be integrated within the portalsand other sources of feedback, meaning the analysis could be across dozens if not hundreds of engagements. 

Part of Communiti Labs’ product roadmap would also see the creation of bespoke and complete community engagement outcomes reports, co-written by AI.

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Communiti Labs website is here - www.communitilabs.com/