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EngagementHQ: New features and product updates

The latest product updates and new features. EngagementHQ publishes a monthly change log to keep partners informed about the latest product developments. This page provides a high-level overview of those changes.

Email Surveys (Beta)

New Engagement Embeds offer a seamless way for community members to provide valuable feedback across various digital channels. This new features gives your community access to embed a quick poll or survey from EngagementHQ into web content or emails.
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New Home Dashboard

The new home dashboard is designed to save users time in understanding community impact across their engagement site in one central location. New functionality includes new filter options, chart types, an interactive map and tag/theme grouping.
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Redesign

EngagementHQ has unveiled a fresh admin interface and product logo that affectionately identifies us as part of the Granicus family. This marks a step in a series of enhancements outlined in our recently published product vision.
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Participant Profile

Participant profiles provide a central location for community members to manage their personal information including past engagement activity, project subscriptions and recommendations. It’s now easier than ever for community members to securely log in and update their details on local engagement sites.
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OpenCities x EngagementHQ connector

The OpenCities x EngagementHQ connector lets you surface EngagementHQ projects on OpenCities websites, so that community members can discover and engage with projects in-context and change makers can save precious time on cross-promotion efforts.
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Project Duplicate

Get set up and ready to engage in seconds. Project duplication is a quick and painless way to reuse previous engagement projects within your team’s natural workflow. With all tool settings and content now included when you clone a project, it’s easier than ever to adopt standardised project formats, repeat annual surveys and update group and visibility settings.
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Background Report Download

We believe in participation without limits; that’s why we never cap response numbers. For those dealing with BIG reports, life just got a whole lot easier – large file downloads are now generated in the background and admins will receive an email notification once the report is ready.
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Tag Manager

The new Tag Manager lets site administrators create and maintain project tags in one dedicated and intuitive interface. Sort tags by name, number of projects and creation date. Keep tags organised and tidy with tag naming conventions and streamline sorting, organising and finding projects for participants and admins.
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Engagement Embeds

Don’t make participants do their own detective work just to provide input on topics that matter. Engagement Embeds are powerful web elements that let you generate a code snippet or stand-alone link to place surveys and quick polls in various web environments, increasing project discoverability and participation.

Fast Project Links

Quickly find, copy and share your project URL with our new quick link feature. Simply click the ‘Copy page URL’ button at the top of your project page and get sharing now.

YouTube add-on

Want more ways to integrate your social channels with community engagement? You can now add the YouTube icon to the footer of your EngagementHQ site, driving your community to more content. Find the youtube link configuration in Appearance – Homepage Editor – Footer.

Shared Konveio Usernames

Participants logged into EngagementHQ will now be able to add a comment to Konveio documents using their existing EngagementHQ credentials – allowing you to match contributions in Konveio against registered users in EngagementHQ.

Private PDF Reports

We have more ways to protect participant privacy. Now, you can exclude participant details from Survey Detailed PDF Reports in one click, save time and collaborate without concern with private PDFs.
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Quick Link Documents

We’ve made hyperlinking to documents easier to do. You can now use the link icon in the document widget to quickly copy and paste document links without leaving the project editing interface.

Enhanced Emojis

Choose from 3,342 emoji and simplify and enhance communications. With a seamless font integration, you can mix and match, elevate your brand voice and apply different moods to tools and projects.

Images by Unsplash

You now have access to over 2 million high-resolution free-to-use Unsplash photos. Stop wasting time trawling through images across random sites, instead stay inside the Appearance Editor and find the project image for you.

Expanded Social Sharing

Whether you’re looking for Facebook shares, LinkedIn posts, or to go #viral on Twitter. We’ve got you covered with expanded social sharing for contributing participants.
Edit this setting from your dashboard: Project > Settings > Advanced > Social Sharing > On/Off.

Outbound SMS Partnership

New MessageMedia packages available in the Marketplace help you integrate outbound SMS into your engagement lifecycle. Promote upcoming consultations, send updates on progress or close the loop.

Project Page Themes

Quickly and easily change your community engagement projects’ colour and theme with our range of customisations and preprepared templates. With three templates to choose from, you can give your engagement project a fresh new look without burdening the IT team.
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Submissions Manager

Receiving a high quantity of submissions on your community project can be both exciting and overwhelming – that’s where Submissions Manager comes in—introducing your new streamlined workflow. Submission Manager lets you quickly and easily collaborate with colleagues and share your insights back to the community.

Easy Participant Registration

Registration should never be a barrier to participation; that’s why we’ve simplified our participation flow, so you get all the information you need without overwhelming community members. While registering, Participants remain in-context, keep prompts top-of-mind and set themselves for easy re-engagement in future.
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Project Showcase

Project Showcase makes it easy for site visitors to locate relevant projects while delivering admins with an automated way to keep their homepage up to date with the latest projects. Each newly published project will be added to a compact section of your homepage where visitors may search and filter through your full catalogue of engagement projects.

Leverage Project Tags During Tool and Project Reporting

Using project tags provides a new, convenient way to filter and group project reports. When running a project report, select the project dropdown menu and you’ll see a new option to select projects based on your tags. You may also apply and/or logic to your filters, making it easier to run targeted reports for a specific group of projects.
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Google Translate for Appearance Editor

Providing site visitors with quick access to Google Translate can be a great way to acknowledge the diversity in your community. If you’re using EngagementHQ’s new Appearance Editor, you now have a convenient way to add Google Translate on your website. Visit the marketplace to enable and manage Google Translate with the click of a button.

Create a branded companion app through SitePodium

A companion app for mobile devices delivers a familiar way for your community to stay in sync with your efforts on EngagementHQ through push notifications and a branded mobile application to display project information.
We are looking for innovative, early adopter organizations that want to explore the companion app in close collaboration with SitePodium and Bang the Table. To learn more, visit the SitePodium listing on the EngagementHQ Marketplace or reach out to your Engagement Manager.

Appearance Editor: New website design interface

Appearance Editor makes it simple to showcase your brand and engagement efforts. Additional content sections guide visitors toward projects of interest. Enhanced design flexibility inspires creativity, while additional templates make it easy to launch a compelling website. Shareable website draft preview links make it quick to obtain feedback and approval. Contact customer support to enable the new Appearance Editor on your EngagementHQ site.
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Security and Privacy Management

Additional controls to manage privacy and security compliance were added to your EngagementHQ platform. Visit your site settings to view the updated privacy and security controls which include cookie consent, Google and Facebook sign-up forms, and more.
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Advanced Search for Text Analysis

Advanced search makes it easy to identify comments that may be grouped together for bulk tagging, saving time and clicks. You may now perform multi-keyword searches, select between three matching options, and exclude certain words from search results.
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Customised Survey Reporting

Customised survey reporting places admins in control of the appearance and information included in a survey report. Additionally, all PDF reports across EngagementHQ have been visually refreshed.
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Bluehaven: EngagementHQ’s new interface

Efficiency for administrators is at the heart of Bang the Table’s new backend interface. Adding, organising, and editing tools and widgets is now more centralized, visual, and intuitive.

Sentiment Analysis strengthens reporting through AI

Think of Sentiment Analysis as an assistant, guiding you through vast amounts of open-ended survey responses and enabling you to gain deep insight more efficiently than ever.
This advanced functionality provides value to existing text based survey data. It also presents new opportunities to optimize insight collection when creating new survey questions in the future. Enable Sentiment Analysis for free by visiting the EngagementHQ Marketplace.

Transparent Surveys to engage participants

Transparent Surveys allow participants to view aggregated survey responses after submitting their own insights. This is particularly useful for consultations where stakeholders will benefit from understanding how their results align (or don’t align) with the rest of the community.
You have the power to choose when to apply Transparent Surveys across your projects. Bluehaven users will find a switch to display survey responses to participants from within their survey tool’s settings.

Demographic Filtering for Text Analysis

Applying registration questions as filters within Text Analysis helps you understand how your diverse community members feel about a particular topic. You’re now able to view and sort through demographics, search comments based on one or multiple demographic filters, and cross reference Sentiment Analysis with demographic data.

Konveio turns PDF’s into social documents

Now available in our Marketplace, Konveio software makes interactive publishing, reviewing, and commenting on city documents more social, allowing local governments to elicit feedback, expand on ideas with contextual insights, or add rich media overlays right within the PDF. Combined with the EngagementHQ suite of feedback tools, organizations can now easily incorporate these draft or official documents into their community engagement outreach.

Survey Tool with Conditional and Skip Logic

The new Survey tool includes a totally redesigned look from both the administrators and participants’ perspective, and is powered by skip and conditional logic. Within the new Survey builder you’ll find many improvements to the question design and user workflows, helping you create unique survey experiences with ease for your community.

Scheduled Publishing and Archiving of Surveys

A small update focused on making life easier for our Project Administrators. You can now schedule draft surveys to publish at your desired time, and live projects can be scheduled to archive when the consultation closes.

Draft Project Sharing Gets Easier

To further simplify your workflow and the project approval process, we’re rolling out a new way to share draft projects. Whether you need feedback or approval from those inside or outside of your organization, you now have an easy and secure way to simply generate and share draft project links within EngagementHQ.

Introducing Project Finder

Create a visual display of your engagement projects directly on your council or corporate website. The new Project Finder integration displays your projects on any website and ensures the information you display is always up-to-date for participants.

Add Project Banners to ALL Pages

Customize any page of your EngagementHQ site with a banner. This update allows you to add a unique banner to your sites or project and works with any of our themes.

Likert Chart Improvements

We’ve made the answers to Likert Survey questions easier to visualize, providing one easy-to-understand summary chart for each statement. Look for these new charts in your Survey reporting.

Emoji Questions

A fun way to bring sentiment into your engagement, Emoji Questions can now be customised for your project and added to any survey. Responses show up on Survey Analysis and can be used to filter and compare within cross-tab analysis.
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Budget Engagement: A New Partnership with Balancing Act

We’re excited to pair the best in budget engagement software with our EngagementHQ platform. See how this integration is a natural fit for more comprehensive community engagement initiatives.

Survey Response Counter

This survey feature expands support for online petitions when using the number of respondents to determine the level of support for any given initiative. Easily see the number of survey responses collected within your project and weigh priorities.
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Multiple Layers and Boundaries in Places

The Places tool gets a major overhaul with the ability to add multiple layers and boundaries to your map, improved look and feel for both the administrators and participants, as well as reporting improvements. Highlights in this update include:

Upload multiple layered maps, control their styling & order.
Draw and customize your own layers in full-screen map view.
Improved search function, activity feed & mobile experience.
ESRI Shapefile support expanding upon existing support for map layers: includes KML files, WMS & custom-drawn layers.

GDPR Compliant by Design

The GDPR protects the fundamental right to privacy and protection of personal data. It introduced robust requirements that have raised standards for data protection and security. GDPR came into effect May 2018 with non-compliance resulting in massive fines. EngagementHQ offers all the features you need to comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Workforce Single Sign-On (SSO)

Connect your existing staff database to your EngagementHQ platform for a quick and easy staff sign-on process. This feature helps gain organizationaladoption by making it easy for everyone to get involved.

Brand Integration

Bring the look and feel of your organization’s brand to your EngagementHQ platform. With Brand Integration, easily incorporate your unique website header, footer and style sheets into your engagement site.

Enhanced Survey Analytics with Better Filtering and Cross-Tabulation

Explore your survey data in a new way and draw out valuable insights. This new analytics feature improves filtering options, allows you to compare variables side by side and enables cross tabular filters and comparison in a single query.

Clone Widget Content Across Projects

Easily clone widget content between projects. Widget cloning helps simplify set-up to get new projects launched faster.

Email Marketing Integrations

Our advanced API now makes it easier than ever to send emails to your EngagementHQ site participants through your current email marketing service. We currently integrate with Campaign Monitor, Mailchimp and Constant Contact. Talk to us if your preferred email marketing software is not on this list.

Text Analysis with Tagging Across ALL Tools

Tags are powerful for conducting qualitative analysis and further segmenting results and your engagement data. Now, you can tag participant contributions across all tools for deeper analysis.

Our Best Practice Information Security Management Awarded ISO 27001 Certification

Having confidence that your community’s personal data and information is safe and secure has never been more important for online community engagement software. At Bang the Table, we take the protection of your information and the information of your community extremely seriously, which is why we are committed to comply with relevant standards in all of the jurisdictions in which we do business and have been awarded the ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certificate from BSI.

Branded Email Notifications

With built-in templates that align with your colors and brand, EngagementHQ automates important notifications for both internal stakeholders as well as participants. This feature simplifies workflow for password reset, moderation emails, contribution notifications, project recommendations and more.

Photos, Likes and Comments for the Ideas Tool

Ideas is a fun and interactive way for participants to share simple ideas. This upgrade lets them also upload photos to support and better communicate their ideas. We’ve also added the ability for participants to comment on and like other ideas, making this tool more social and increasing engagement rates for projects with the Ideas tool enabled.

Participant Relationship Management with Enhanced Filters, Tagging and Groups

With a new look and feel, we have upgraded our Participant Relationship Management (PRM) with more robust filtering options, ability to edit groups, and bulk tagging of participants for increased efficiency.

SSL Certificate by Default

The safety and security of your EngagementHQ site and its data is something we take very seriously. Free SSL certificates are applied to all EngagementHQ sites to ensure that data-in-transit is safe from malicious intervention.

Chat Support Baked in Right Where You Need It Most

We are excited to introduce in-app chat support to EngagementHQ. Now you can get in touch with us instantly, while you are working on your consultations and projects. Ask for technical help, best practice advice and other examples of great EngagementHQ sites.

Improved Survey Accessibility

EngagementHQ’s most used tool, surveys, now has improved accessibility across devices. This change ensures customers are equipped to collect feedback from a variety of respondents, including people living with a disability, with components that meet evolving accessibility guidelines.
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