The following article is an overview of your CivicBell dashboard — if you would like to understand how to use engagements to post, please see here.
Unpublished
- When your engagement is first created, it will be visible in the “unpublished” section of your dashboard.
- You may edit unpublished engagements at any time.
- Your engagement is now ready to be published, where it will be publicly viewable.
(Step 1) Open:
- After publishing an engagement, it is considered “open” and appears on the CivicFeed.
- While an engagement is open, it can be viewed by residents and interacted with.
- When you are ready for the engagement to be completed, you may close it at any time.
- While open, you can no longer edit your engagement. If you want to change its content you need to delete it and start fresh.
Please note that even after you delete an engagement that went public (i.e. it moved from “unpublished” to “open”, to uphold public record requirements, CivicBell will retain a copy of your deleted post.
(Step 2) Closed:
- Once an engagement is closed, the public can no longer comment on it or (if applicable) engage on the survey.
- Use this time to understand the results and the public sentiments before taking action on the engagement’s results.
- If there are meetings or hearings where decision will be made on the issue, update your constituency to bring engaged residents into the loop.
(Step 3) Outcome:
- Once made into an “outcome” engagement, you may deliver the outcome to residents.
- Consider a brief update to thank residents for their feedback, outline the future steps you plan to take, or announce the resulting decision made on the issue.
- While you do not need to share the engagement’s results, informing residents of their impact upon your decision will incentivize them to interact with your future engagements.
- There are no more steps to take on this engagement, but it will remain visible in its final state.
Managing engagement timeframes:
- We suggest leaving your engagement open for at least two weeks, but no longer than two months. This way, you allow various users to interact with your engagement and thoroughly deliberate. However, if you leave your engagement open too long, it may be forgotten as new issues arise.
- After closing your engagement, take your time to thoroughly analyze the results and act on the issue before publishing an outcome.
- Ideally, try to use the outcome status once a decision has been reached, or when there is a timeframe for the next steps to be taken. This completes the feedback loop for residents.