EngagingPlans offered a wide variety of tools to use in our comprehensive plan update process. We are particularly excited that we can engage a broad spectrum of citizens more efficiently and cost effectively than ever before. The customer service and tech support we have received from Urban Interactive Studio has been prompt and very helpful.
Jim May, AICP, Director at Centre Regional Planning Agency
No, EngagingPlans is provided as Software-as-a-Service, hosted on our servers. This allows us to set up new Websites automatically.
Yes, we do. We will host your sites on our Canadian servers if you’re based out of Canada.
Yes, the staff at Urban Interactive Studio, the makers of EngagingPlans, have extensive experience in providing custom Web applications to government agencies and engineering firms. Please contact us and we'll be happy to discuss how we can help you.
This question is hard to answer, since participation numbers depend on your outreach strategies. Just like diverse outreach is necessary to fill a public workshop, effective online engagement requires a good communications strategy. Talk to us if you need some inspiration.
There’s technically no difference between a Web survey and a mobile survey; you simply create your form fields and publish the survey. EngagingPlans will detect whether the survey is accessed from a computer or mobile phone, and in the latter case display a form that is optimized for small mobile screens. As a site administrator you will see a QR code for each survey that you can copy and put on your marketing materials, such as posters or signs, in order to drive participation.
EngagingPlans stores sign-ups in the database and you can download them to CSV in order to use them with your existing email marketing provider. If you would like to integrate the sign-up form directly with ConstantContact.com or Mailchimp.com (where you get 2000subscribers / 12000emails per month for free), you can sign up for our small Getting Started package and we will set that up for you.
This depends on what you mean by "maintain." Maintaining content is your job, but we'll maintain the technical end (security updates, bug fixes if necessary, etc).
What we typically see is that it's hard to have a very project-specific setup within the limitations of a city Website - that’s why companies like GE, IBM and Kraft have microsites for each of their brands. Microsites have a life-cycle: Eventually, a while after project completion you will probably take the EngagingPlans website offline and move the final document and outcomes within your city's website structure for documentation. So typically we recommend that you prominently feature the EngagingPlans microsite on the city website and link to it until project completion and then fold in the outcomes.
We provide access to the Google Analytics reports for your EngagingPlans site. You'll provide us with a Google Account email on sign up and you can download the reports yourself.
