The Project Website

 
The Project Website is perfect for projects that need interactivity with a group, a population, a target audience, or a constituency.

The Project Website is simple and straightforward. It allows you to stay in touch with your public on a real-time basis, and it allows members of the community to comment whenever they want. They don’t have to come to a public meeting or participate in a formal survey to be part of the process. At the end of a project, the entire site can be archived as an XML file and can be accessed at any time.

The client has the opportunity to approve comments before they are posted to the site.

Client agencies or firms can post information and ask for responses, which visitors can make directly on the site, or individual categories can be set up to collect comment on specific issues. Comments are made in Leave a Comment boxes such as the one below) and must be approved by the client agency or firm before they will be posted to the site. Once posted, they can be responded to by the client and/or by interested parties. People can also comment privately through emails. You screen all comments, edit them, and decide what to publish. You can also monitor who’s making the comments and contact individual contributors who are active on the site.

One of the smartest uses of this aspect of The Project Website is for the client agency or firm to summarize emails, letters, and phone comments, as well as comments made in public forums and meetings, to post directly to the site for others to see. This helps maintain transparency of the process and fosters a robust discussion of the issues at hand.

It’s easy to set up polls, surveys, feedback via email, and ongoing comments and responses that can be seen by the public on the website itself. A Project Website also offers the capacity to post PDFs, background documents, media (including video), draft reports, and final plans, up to 150MB.