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Deeper insights.
Balanced outcomes.
Better places.

Participatr creates bespoke, intuitive, accessible and unintimidating digital platforms for public participation in built environment projects.

We then combine them with intelligent, inclusive engagement activities to gather ideas, opinions and local insight from people of all life circumstances. This, in turn, creates balanced and robust evidence for change and places that meet the aspirations of ordinary people.

We have years of experience in the built environment space, so we understand its unique challenges. But we’re not here to digitise traditional forms of participation. We start from first principles to open up opportunities, create new possibilities and transform outcomes.

What we do



Digital participation platform creation

We create standalone, bespoke digital platforms for each project, integrating the right digital tools for the job and carefully crafting the look and content of the website to tell the right story, integrate with your established brand and capture the right community insight.

Community engagement

Building on our extensive engagement experience, we offer a range of services to complement your digital platform and encourage people to visit it. This includes stakeholder mapping, publicity design and distribution, social media promotion and outcomes reporting.

Deep-dive community analysis, powered by AI

The Participatr dashboard provides deep, real time analysis of opinions, sentiment and feedback by location (including postcode, ward, council, LSOA, MSOA, parish and constituency), organisation, role, demographics and keywords. AI-enabled text analysis summarises unlimited open text responses.

Stakeholder management tools

Our purpose-built CRM logs, sends, edits and tracks stakeholder communications, and our webmail interface sends and receives emails from your project email address. The system automatically captures incoming and outgoing mail, making correspondence management quick and easy.

What makes Participatr different?



We understand engagement

We’re experienced engagement practitioners with digital know-how, rather than techies or sales people, having stood in village halls and been ‘at the coalface’ of community engagement for over 13 years. Since Participatr's inception back in 2016, our product has been designed to address the ‘democratic deficit’ in built environment decision-making that we’ve observed first-hand.

Our product is truly flexible

We're a sustainable micro business and we don't have investors looking for a quick return, meaning that we can focus on listening to our customers and shaping our product to meet their needs, rather than scaling up. In practice, this means you'll get a finessed, carefully crafted, interactive digital hub for your project, rather than something which looks and feels like a ‘cookie-cutter’ survey tool.

Our toolkit is constantly evolving

We evolve our digital tools continuously based on what works (and what doesn’t), what's useful (and what isn't) and the real-life requirements of our projects and the communities that they affect. We're not interested in ‘next big thing’ or what our competitors are doing, only what works and what doesn't. Everything we do is tried, tested and effective.

Our projects

Click here to open this map in a new window

Our tools

Issues and ideas map

Issues and ideas map

Participants can highlight a suggestion for a street, building or public space by dropping a pin on a map (using GPS if they're on location) and uploading a photo. Pins are colour-coded to reveal community feelings about a place. Clickable map boundaries signpost to project information and other opportunities to participate.

Masterplan feedback map

Masterplan feedback map

A masterplan can be overlaid on an interactive map for participants to drop a pin and comment on specific design elements. The map legend colour-codes land uses and design features, allowing participants to zoom in and comment on proposals. Users can toggle between layers showing different plan options or parameters.

Interactive proposals map

Interactive proposals map

Interactive maps can be used to add a spatial dimension to project plans and initiatives. Participants can select an area from the map legend or click a map focus area to zoom in, find out more about what is proposed and have their say by completing a pop-up survey or live poll relating to that location.

Interactive surveys and polls

Interactive surveys and polls

Visual polls, surveys and questionnaires help participants influence design principles and project outcomes from an early stage, revealing outcomes in real-time. As plans are formulated, plans and CGIs are presented alongside questions to comment on in-turn.

Rich content pages

Rich content pages

Project information and proposals are outlined in a bespoke, lay person-friendly, thematic, smartphone-compatible and visually-appealing format. Images open in a lightbox when clicked, for participants to appreciate every detail of your carefully crafted CGIs and plans on any device.

Virtual exhibition gallery

Virtual exhibition gallery

Participants can view, pan and zoom presentation slides, document pages or display panels on any device. The slide gallery creates a familiar environment for visitors to take in information about your project where the aim is to present in a more traditional format.

News, events and content feed

News, events and content feed

Our dashboard-based content manager makes it easy for project teams to independently keep participants and stakeholders up to date on project progress with regular news updates, as well as provide details of future events, such as drop-in sessions, virtual meetings or opportunities to get involved.

Live project timeline

Live project timeline

The timeline sets out key milestones, such as the programme of events, the planning submission or practical completion dates, and sets the engagement process within its wider context. It updates automatically, highlighting the current phase of activity or opportunity to get involved.

AI-enabled real time analytics hub

AI-enabled real time analytics hub

The engagement management dashboard reports feedback, sentiments and insight in real-time. It uses a range of metrics, including council, ward, postcode area, LSOA, MSOA, parish, constituency and demographics, to provide deep insights into participant sentiments, location and opinions. Automated summaries of open text responses are generated by AI for designated dashboard users.

Social and web visitor monitor

Social and web visitor monitor

The dashboard reports when, where, how and how often people visit the front-end of your digital platform. Hits are reported by location, time, device type and referral website, helping you monitor chat about your project elsewhere on the web, including social media platforms, blogs, campaign websites and search engines.

Email integration

Email integration

Send and receive messages from your project email (e.g. hello@projectname.com) using the dashboard and dedicated webmail feature. Incoming/outgoing emails are automatically logged in the dashboard, and you can generate emails to stakeholders by location, sentiment, organisation, role or opinion.

Purpose-built stakeholder CRM

Purpose-built stakeholder CRM

The powerful, purpose-built CRM logs, tracks and captures stakeholder correspondence, reporting running metrics by type, category, sentiment, discipline, tags and response status. Forward correspondence to your project email address to automatically log it in the system.

What they're saying



"Participatr is particularly good at capturing sentiment, using maps to which consultees can pin comments. These can be instantly seen by everyone – 'real-time' feedback that lends its strength."



"Participatr creates interactive online tools for town planners working on development frameworks and sustainable transport plans to gather ideas, issues and feedback from the public"



"Participatr creates interactive online tools for town planners, architects, developers, local government, others to gather ideas, aspirations and feedback on built environment projects, designed to overcome the real-life barriers that ordinary people face"



"Now companies such as Participatr have developed online consultation tools that allow for participation at any time from any location, allowing engagement of a wider range of audiences."



How we comply



Data security

The data that we collect from participants is stored on a private, secure server, located in the United Kingdom, owned and operated solely by Participatr Limited.

Each Participatr platform establishes a secure, encrypted connection between the user's web browser and the private server, to ensure that information provided is transmitted securely. Find out more about our data security measures.

Privacy

We only store participants' names, information about location and email addresses where absolutely necessary. We will never disclose these details to anyone outside of the project team and only keep them for as long as necessary.

Our privacy and cookie policy can be found here, setting out in detail how we handle personal data.

Cookies

Our platforms do not install or use any cookies other than 'PHPSESSID', which is required for the website to function correctly and deemed to be 'technical' and 'strictly necessary'.

Accessibility

All platforms created on behalf of public sector organisations include an accessibility statement, setting out how they meet W3C WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards.

Get started

We have answered some of the most common questions that we get asked about Participatr's services below. Please take a read through and, if you're happy with what you see, complete the form below to request a live demo or a quotation.

The digital platform is priced on specification and offered on a fixed-term basis, where the platform is offered at a fixed price for a specific period of time (the subscription period).

AI-enabled analysis for dashboard users gives your project team access to on-demand and automated analysis of open text responses from stakeholders and the community. It means that they can analyse and summarise potentially thousands of responses in just a few seconds, compared to an incredibly laborious, time-consuming and expensive process of reading each response in turn and summarising manually.

With this powerful service, designated dashboard users have unlimited, on-demand access to AI-generated summaries of text interactions (such as feedback form responses or map-based comments) received through your digital platform (including responses captured verbally or on paper and manually input by the project team).

The AI-generated summaries pull out the key feedback issues and themes, whilst clearly setting out the balance of stakeholder sentiment on issues raised. As with the standard analysis tools, AI-enabled open text analysis can be filtered by a range of metrics, so you can generate instant summaries according to keyword, age group, ethnicity, geographical location or date range.

AI-enabled text analysis for dashboard users is priced at £200 + VAT per month, per user login, in one month multiples (the minimum commitment is one month). AI-enabled text analysis can be activated, transferred or split between dashboard users at any time during the subscription period in one month blocks.

We offer a range of additional services to complement your digital platform and get more people to visit it. This includes:

Stakeholder mapping

We'll use our vast experience of community and stakeholder engagement to dive deep into your community and identify the people and organisations that have a stake in your project and can help promote it to the wider community. Once we've identified these stakeholders, we'll upload their details to the Participatr platform so you can see where they are, who they are, what their stake is and start communicating with them.

Publicity design and distribution

We can design, print and distribute a postcard or enveloped flyer for households and businesses (by 2nd class post) to find out more about your project and find out how to get involved. This might contain an image, information about your project, a link to your digital platform and/or alternative ways to get involved for those without internet access/capability.

Social media promotion

We'll create a social media promotion campaign that places links to your digital platform in the Facebook, Instagram, Threads and X (Twitter) feed of people that you're keen to hear from, based on geographical location, age or life status. These links include an image and text that piques interest in your project, encouraging them to click through and get involved. Social media promotion typically results in approximately 250 additional digital platform visits per day.

Outcomes reporting

Whilst all Participatr platforms provide access to real-time digital reporting through the dashboard, we know that some projects and organisations require a static report detailing the outcomes of the public participation process. We'll create a custom-branded report after the participation process (or participation stage) has finished, summarising feedback captured by the digital platform.

No, we don’t offer self-service/SaaS software for creating consultation pages or surveys. We create digital consultation pages and surveys on your behalf, as part of a fully managed service.

The benefit of this approach is that we can design a digital participation platform that is custom-built to the specific needs of your project, rather than relying on a cookie-cutter, ‘one-size-fits-all’ system that never quite fits your requirements.

However, our platforms do provide some content management features for you to manage web content independently, such as news articles, events, timeline entries and HTML information pages (we will need to set up all forms, surveys and questionnaires on your behalf).

Once you’ve signed and returned your service agreement, we’ll get to work straight away. We’ll ask you to confirm a domain name (i.e. yourprojectname.com or .co.uk) to use as the website address for your digital platform, and any brand requirements that you have. We’ll then register your domain name(s) and start getting everything set up, ready for you to supply us with web content, surveys, maps and other media that you would like to include on the digital platform.

We work with a range of document, image, video and GIS file formats, and we’ll work with you to get the information that we need in a format that we can use. We’re also happy to advise on best practice and help curate your written content, images, maps and survey questions to make them as user-friendly as possible for members of the community.

You can read our full terms and conditions of service by clicking here:

Terms and conditions of service

Get in touch

Please get in touch if you would like any further information, or if you would like to request a demo or a quotation.

What would you like to request?



Please tell us about your project and its geographical area of reference

The geographical area of reference might be a neighbourhood, ward, parish, district, county or combined authority area

How many months do you need the digital platform to be live for in total?

The length of time from the public launch to the end of the project
12

Which of our digital engagement tools would you like to use?













Do you require any additional services?





At times where your project isn't active, we can switch your digital platform into 'hosting only' mode so the website stays live and publicly visible but isn't gathering feedback or being actively updated. Do you anticipate using the 'hosting only' mode and for how long in total?



If yes, for how long (in months)?

Have you already registered a domain name (e.g. yourprojectname.com) that you would like to use to link to your digital platform?



If not, what is your preferred domain name?

This is typically a .com or .co.uk web address

Do you require any additional domain names to link to your platform?

Please list them here

Do you require AI-enabled text analysis for dashboard users? If so, please state how many months this service is required for.

AI-enabled text analysis can be activated, transferred or split between dashboard users at any time during the subscription period in one month multiples

Is there anything else that we should know?

About you

Your personal information is captured, held and processed by Participatr Limited, who make decisions about how personal information is captured, held, processed and analysed, meaning that they are data controller for the purposes of the General Data Protection Regulation.

Your name and email address is used to identify you as a single respondent. All of your personal information is held in a secure database on a server located in the United Kingdom. For more information about how we use your personal information, please visit our privacy policy.