EHQ Staff Pick: WorkSafe Victoria, Australia

Part of the fun working with EngagementHQ is to see the variety of projects and sites published every week. In the last two weeks alone we have witnessed Australia Post launch another round of consultations, VicRoads re-imagine their look and feel by moving to our Torquay template and then there was Bathurst, another iconic Australian council getting started with EHQ (we are way past 100 councils by now!).

The diversity of projects across all our site is quite amazing and this week's staff pick proves that point. WorkSafe Victoria launched their Occupational Health and Safety Regulation Reform consultation and while most of us know little about OHS regulations - although we hopefully all appreciate its importance - we should take a closer look at this project page because it ticks a lot of boxes that make a project great and therefore appear on our staff pick radar.

Client: WorkSafe Victoria

Template: Torquay, bypassing the hompage.

Project: OHS Regulation Reform

Publish Date: 18 July 2016

Topic: Victoria’s Occupational Health and Safety Regulations from 2007 will expire in June 2017. WorkSafe Victoria is now seeking feedback on the existing rules to draft new regulations.

Tools: News Feed, Survey

Widgets: Document Library, 2x Custom Widget, FAQ, Life Cycle

We love:

1. Thoroughness: Overall, there is nothing missing in this consultation and the page ticks ticks all the boxes that need to be ticked for a consultation around this type of topic.
   
   
2. Document Library: The term 'library' is actually fitting in this case. It appears that all key documents have been uploaded to the site and are available in accessible format (PDF) and a reasonable size. If you are consulting around documents or draft documents, make sure that they can be found easily and are small enough to be downloaded quickly. Just like WorkSafe Victoria have done here.
   
   
3. Custom widget: WorkSafe are holding a range of information sessions for which tickets can be ordered via Eventbrite. The custom widget in this project lists all information sessions with links to Eventbrite. It's a simple and effective use of the custom widget.
   
   
4. Project description and News Feed: The project description is kept short and precise, which is important in any project. The team then opted to use News Feed to outline the details of how to make a submission and help participants navigate around the page. Usually, we find this kind of detail in the project description, the downside of that is that it can make the description unnecessarily long and move the tool tab too far down the page. Using a news article instead is a clever way to keep the description short.
   
   
5. Closing the loop: Not in action yet, but notice the 'Submissions Received' link in the header. This is linking to a static page on which the team will post submissions. This 'closing of the loop' approach is excellent practice and something we encourage everyone to do. Doing it via a static page is a good idea.
   
   
6. Promotion: The overall promotion to drive traffic to this site has been great and the team has seen up to 200 visits per day. A great start to a hopefully fruitful consultation.

For further consideration:

1. Contact us form / Q&A tool: The second custom widget, which you can see at the bottom of the right hand column, outlines contact information. We usually recommend to ensure that all communication and engagement happens on the site. This could have been achieved by using a contact us form through the survey tool, or by enabling the Q&A tool. In both cases the visitor could have engaged with the team without having to move away form the page and sending an email.

2. Forum: Although the nature of the consultation requires submission to be made via a form, having a forum published could have allowed visitors to discuss their experience with the current regulations in an open space, therefore adding another layer of engagement to the project.
   
   

OVERALL: When we look for staff picks we look for projects that are set up fittingly to the topic of consultation. If the topic, like the one at hand, is fairly technical, and dare we say 'dry', then there is nothing wrong with keeping the project page in a similar tone. WorkSafe Victoria have done just that and in the process created a comprehensive and almost flawless project page. We are looking forward to more consultations from the team.

NOTE: The article above is based on a visit to the site on 27 July 2016. Changes made to the project after that date may have altered the appearance of the project.