Effective public sector consultation: Best practices & tools for authentic engagement.
- Peter Carswell
- Sep 22
- 9 min read
Effective public sector consultation means going beyond compliance with legislation to truly hear and reflect community voices. By law, consultation must be broad-based, inclusive, continuous, accessible, not burdensome, and transparent. Meeting these principles in practice requires more than a single method; it involves combining traditional approaches (like town halls and written submissions), digital tools (such as surveys and consultation portals), and voice-first platforms (like Talkscape) that capture lived realities in people’s own words. When designed well, this mix delivers consultation that is compliant, trusted, authentic, and representative.
The aim of this blog is to explore how governments and public sector organisations can design consultation processes that meet both the letter of the law and the spirit of authentic engagement. You’ll learn about the benefits of prioritising authentic voice, the challenges and how to overcome them, best practice design principles, and the tools (traditional, digital, and voice-based) that can be combined into a roadmap for more effective, inclusive, and trustworthy consultation.
What is authentic public sector consultation (and how does it build on a traditional approach)?
Authentic engagement builds on the consultation methods already used, e.g. town halls, surveys, written submissions, and workshops. They all have their place, but authentic engagement builds on this by creating conditions where a much larger number of people are able to share their lived realities in their own words. This is important, as it means the community can genuinely see they have a voice and it is heard.
The difference is subtle but important:
Traditional consultation is often structured and formal, with a focus on representation and data collection.
Authentic engagement values people’s lived experience, stories, and context, alongside data.
Together, they create a fuller picture. By combining the structure of traditional methods with the breath and inclusivity of authentic voice.
Why authentic voice matters
Too often, public consultations end up dominated by polished submissions or the “usual voices,” leaving out the lived experiences that most need to be heard. There are many reasons for this. One of the major ones is that people do not have the time or resources to engage in the consultation process. This risks the results of the consultation being heavily biased.
Moving to a process that prioritises authentic voice shifts the focus from token participation to genuine contribution. This is one where many more people speak in their own words, about their own realities. When governments listen to authentic voices, the consultation process is more likely to be seen as a pathway to trust, inclusivity, and better decisions.
The benefits of this approach include:
Building public trust and legitimacy: When communities hear their actual words reflected in outcomes, their confidence in the government processes grow.
Captures lived realities: The authentic voice highlights the real challenges and needs people experience, not just abstract opinions.
Strengthens inclusivity: Systems that make it easy for people to engage will elevate the perspectives of groups that are often underrepresented or unheard in traditional consultation.
Supports accountability: Making easy access to the community's actual voices (rather than aggregated summaries) allows communities to see how their input was used.
The challenges in capturing authentic voice - and how to overcome them
Capturing authentic voices at scale has always been difficult. Traditional approaches like workshops, surveys, and interviews provide valuable insights, but they face some common challenges:
Challenge | How to overcome it |
High cost of scale: Collecting a large number of voices through face-to-face or manual processes is expensive and time-consuming | |
Limited visibility of outcomes – Results often end up buried in lengthy reports or shared only with a narrow group, leaving communities unsure how their input was used. | Provide transparent platforms where people can easily explore consultation outcomes. These can include things like a journey map to show the experiences or emotions. This can be enhanced further by including hearing the actual voices. This helps to build trust and show that their contributions matter. |
Barriers to participation (language, literacy, accessibility) – Written surveys or formal submissions can exclude people with literacy challenges, language barriers, or accessibility needs. | There are now tools (e.g. Talkscape) that use voice-first approaches and multilingual tools. This means people can contribute naturally, in ways that are accessible and inclusive. You can even use conversational AI to build solutions that use human-sounding voices to probe deeper into responses |
Over-representation of the “usual suspects” – Consultations often attract the same groups, leading to skewed outcomes. | Using approaches that are easy for people to partake in will increase response numbers and quality. For example, using community forums on social media to send links to conversational AI surveys will get better engagement - particularly if this is combined with the community getting access to 'live' feedback. |
Consultation fatigue and power imbalances – Communities can tire of being asked for input without seeing change, and some voices may feel undervalued. | Create strong feedback loops that show how contributions influenced decisions, and let participants hear outcomes reflected back in their own words. This can be enhanced by showing how feedback impacted decisions, then showing community feedback after they have experienced the result of a decision. |
Best practices for ensuring authentic voice in consultation
Given the benefits of authentic voice (and the challenges to overcome), what are the best practices that should be considered in any community consultation process? While there are plenty of resources that outline best practices for community engagement and consultation (e.g. A UK local government guide, Australian Government's Best Practice Consultation Guidance Note ), these are typically focused on the more traditional approaches.
The use of technology to support and scale authentic engagement needs to be considered within a number of best practice principles.
Accessibility: Ensure platforms work across devices (mobile, desktop), support multiple languages, allow voice input, and meet disability accessibility standards (WCAG).
Scalability without loss of nuance – Use AI/NLP to analyse thousands of inputs quickly, but retain the ability to access and share the authentic voice (audio/text) behind the themes.
Data security and privacy – Apply strong encryption, role-based access, and compliance with public sector data standards. Explicitly avoid using people’s voices to train external LLMs without consent.
Transparency and feedback loops – Provide dashboards or reports that make results visible to both decision-makers and participants, showing how voices are shaping outcomes.
Ethical data governance – Embed principles of consent, ownership, and control — ensuring communities retain confidence in how their data is stored and used.
Cost-effectiveness and efficiency – Deliver solutions that reduce the traditional costs of consultation (time, manual analysis, facilitation) while expanding reach. For example, use Talkscape's ROI calculator for community feedback to look at the cost savings versus a traditional approach.
Tools to capture authentic feedback from different tools and methods
Authentic consultation depends on drawing out not just opinions, but lived realities, experiences, and emotions. Different approaches (traditional, digital, and voice- or experience-focused) each play a role. Used thoughtfully, they complement one another to give both breadth and depth.
Traditional approaches
Traditional methods have long been the foundation of public consultation. They create visible forums for participation and give communities a sense of formality and accountability. While they sometimes privilege confident voices, they still have the potential to capture authentic feedback. This is particularly when facilitators create safe spaces for diverse participation and provide multiple ways for people to contribute.
Town hall meetings: Skilled facilitation and breakout groups can help quieter participants share their lived realities in a safe, structured way.
Strengths | Weaknesses |
Provide open debate, visible accountability, and direct interaction with decision-makers. | Can be dominated by confident speakers; timing/location may exclude some groups. |
Written submissions: When guided with clear, open-ended prompts, submissions can capture in-depth, personal experiences.
Strengths | Weaknesses |
Allow detailed, structured contributions; create a formal record. | Favour those with strong literacy/advocacy skills; time-consuming to analyse. |
Focus groups / community panels: With diverse recruitment and culturally appropriate facilitation, panels can uncover nuanced, authentic voices.
Strengths | Weaknesses |
Enable deeper discussion in smaller settings. | Limited scalability; risk of over-representing the engaged. |
Digital approaches
Digital tools have widened the reach of public consultation, making it easier and cheaper to collect input at scale. While they can feel transactional, they also offer opportunities for authentic feedback if designed with open-ended options, clear accessibility features, and space for people to share personal stories in their own words.
Online surveys: Including open-text or audio upload fields allows participants to share lived experiences alongside structured data.
Strengths | Weaknesses |
Scalable, cost-effective, simple to complete; capture demographic trends. | Limited space for nuance; risk of reducing voice to categories. |
Consultation portals / interactive websites: Portals can showcase community stories, enable multimedia contributions, and share back results transparently.
Strengths | Weaknesses |
Centralised, accessible, can include mapping tools and comment threads. | Require digital literacy and internet access; participation may skew to engaged groups. |
Social media polls and discussions: Social listening can reveal genuine concerns and lived experiences expressed in everyday language, especially from younger demographics.
Strengths | Weaknesses |
Reach large audiences quickly; conversational feedback. | Can amplify polarised voices; not always representative. |
Voice-based and experience-focused approaches
Voice and experience-focused methods are designed to capture lived realities more directly. They allow people to speak in their own words and tone, lowering barriers of literacy or formality. These approaches are especially powerful for capturing authentic voices but still require thoughtful design and facilitation to ensure inclusivity and trust.
Voice-first feedback platform (e.g. Talkscape): participants contribute naturally in their own words, with tone and emotion retained.
Strengths | Weaknesses |
Removes literacy barriers; scalable via AI analysis; preserves authenticity by letting decision-makers hear real voices. | Needs thoughtful question design; relies on digital access. |
Citizen assemblies: when diverse participants are brought together, their lived experiences shape nuanced recommendations.
Strengths | Weaknesses |
Allow deliberation and co-creation; legitimacy through representative sampling. | Resource-intensive; not easily scalable. |
Storytelling workshops: designed specifically to elicit stories and lived realities.
Strengths | Weaknesses |
Capture cultural and emotional depth; promote empathy; valuable for indigenous/minority voices. | Small-scale; require skilled facilitation. |
A roadmap for capturing authentic feedback in the public sector.
Recent observations, at a senior level (e.g. the OECD), on the importance of deepening democratic participation mean it is imperative that effort occurs to support a more authentic citizen voice. It is also important to remember that this is a legislative requirement. We need to ensure engagement and consultation with the public is broad-based, inclusive, continuous, accessible, not burdensome, and transparent.
So....how can we combine the various tools and approaches (both traditional and emerging) to more effectively give 'voice' to our communities and citizens? Below is one way that we might consider how to do this.
At the heart are good design principles of exploration, going from 'small to large', feedback, and accountability.
Awareness raising and engagement,
With new issues to explore it is often best to start small, e.g. town halls or focus groups. This is important as it creates space for dialogue, raises awareness, and can surface early perspectives. Importantly, they bring visibility to the process. They allow people a way that they feel they can hold decision-makers to account. While generally not representative, they set the tone for an authentic approach and start to build legitimacy.
The importance of this stage is that it starts to build an understanding of the issues that matter. These issues can then be used as the basis of methods that are designed to capture breadth, depth, and target hard-to-reach communities.
Going from Small to Large
This is where digital approaches can be applied. These include online surveys, consultation portals, and voice-based experience tools like Talkscape. They all allow thousands of citizens to participate in the consultation process in a cost-effective way. You can use Talkscape's return on investment calculator to see the cost-effectiveness of this approach, versus things like a town hall meeting or a series of focus groups.
These tools broaden participation, ensuring that voices go beyond those who can attend a meeting. Importantly, they make it easier to engage with those communities that are traditionally 'hard to reach', e.g. those that live rurally, have English as a second language, or are just busy with the management of their lives.
The other strength of these approaches is that they can provide a deeper exploration of the issues. Voice-based feedback tools give space for the emotion, context, and nuance to be captured. The data provides the depth needed to understand not only what citizens see as important, but why. This integration makes it harder for decision-makers to dismiss the feedback as shallow or unrepresentative. Rather, because the data is both broad, deep, and authentic, it means there is a strong accountability line back to the community. This leads to the final principle of authentic community engagement.
These methods provide the context and richness of what the community sees as important. It is this material that is the bedrock of authentic engagement. The final part is then to 'close the loop'.
Feedback and accountability
If the public is to feel the engagement is authentic, the results should not be locked away in long reports. In fact, the best practice guidance from the OECD highlights transparency as a key component of effective engagement. There is technology now to create feedback platforms easily. This includes the use of video, infographics on websites, and (through platforms like Talkscape) the opportunity to actually hear the voices of the community speak - with all their original emotion and intent.
Conclusion
Authentic consultation is essential for meeting the legislative principles that require public engagement to be broad-based, inclusive, continuous, accessible, not burdensome, and transparent. Traditional methods build visibility, digital tools bring scale, and voice-based platforms preserve the depth and emotion of lived experience. Together, they create a cycle of consultation that is both compliant and trusted, delivering insights that lead to better decisions and stronger public confidence.
The question for public sector leaders is not whether to act, but how quickly. Communities increasingly expect to see their voices reflected back in outcomes, and legislation demands it. Now is the time to pilot authentic voice approaches. Start small, scale up, and build accountability at every step. Platforms like Talkscape make this both practical and cost-effective.
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