Consensus Communications Ltd

Design, development and ongoing running of an Umbraco based community engagement campaign system.

Services used

Collective members involved

The Brief

Community engagement for property development has always been very traditional, making use of printed mailers and exhibitions or public meetings. Consensus wanted to break this trend because the only people to respond and turn up to the public events are retired and very negative people. Consensus wanted to capture the younger more positive audiences using websites and social media.

Example of an A5 mailer used to drive traffic to the Kings Square website

The Process

The first iteration of the Consensus campaign websites was static, testing the water and learning how to better gain positive feedback from younger generations. After a series of these it was quite apparent we could save time and do a better job if we had an easily repeatable system in place and we set about the second iteration, the Umbraco website campaign system.

Examples of the Kings Square project website

Using a set of templates to define every website, each site can be customised to match the brand guidelines of each end client (the property developer) from within Umbraco. Site navigation, feedback forms and ongoing updates are all dynamically built depending on the content added to each campaign website. Privacy Notices and small print is populated from a central resource. And finally, each site retains the flexibility required to fulfil the unique requirements of each campaign by using nested content to build the site out of a series of content blocks.

Print and public events

We can't always get away with avoiding public events, sometimes the project calls for it. In those cases, Paul is on hand to draw up an exhibition pop up stand for the event and design any accompanying print collateral.

Example of a pop up exhbition wall for a public event

The Outcome

We applied this system to a wide variety of developments, from large scale town centre redevelopments to smaller housing plots. We had an insane 12 months after moving to the second iteration of the campaign system, so it's just as well we automated and templated as much as we could. Not only that, but when compared to the previously run traditional campaigns, we'd swapped from 100% negative feedback to around 90% positive and 10% negative on average. We'd hit the target audiences we'd aimed at and received a much better wider variety of responses. Wins all around.