Planning

Planning

1. What technical knowledge/expertise should be available in-house?
2. How much time is required to implementation of the technology?
3. What support, documentation, help are available to implement the technology?
4. How much maintenance, training is needed for using technology?
5. Is required to customise/change technology to meet envisage use of technology?
6. Will it be accessible to participants and consulter?
7. What are the stages in organising an e-consultation.
8. What are the design difference between online & traditional techniques i.e. surveys.
9. Would it be possible for me to know where exactly in the policy-making process my involvement will take place? Is it at the agenda setting, formulation, or implementation stage?

Strategies

1. What are the most important issues to consider in formulating a strategy?
   1. For consultation, and
   2. E-consultation?

Promotion (Online Marketing and Offline Marketing)

The objectives of promotion, using both online and offline marketing strategies, is to drive traffic and build public branding to the e-consultation project.

Online-Marketing

• Search engine optimization (SEO): submission of e-consultation websites to Top Search Engine and directories.

• Electronic Joint venture (JV): Initiate joint venture with other public (i.e., government), private (i.e., sponsors) and NGOs websites to make your e-consultation weblink available on their site.

• Blogs: e-consultation advocators should start to blog and make their presence in the electronic world (e-world). Example Steven Clift at http://dowire.org/notes/

• E-forum & e-community: the e-consultation group can use the already establish e-forum or e-consultation to tap into their existing customers and solicit for ideas and input to questions posed in e-consultation.

• Use Meta-tags in web-building to get to the top ranking in Search engines. For example, <Meta name = “descriptions” content= “e-consultation study group research project”> <Meta name = “keywords” content = “e-consultation, e-consult, econsult, econsultation, e-participation, e-participation, e-democracy, edemocracy”>

• Use data-mining technology or Webstats to monitor the traffic to the e-consultation website. Refine the keywords and also understand the behavior of the user of e-consultation site to better understand their movement in the e-consultation webpage.

• E-mail strategy: E-mail marketing is the most cost effective way to market on the Internet today. E-mail marketing tactics can be used to build relationship with existing database customers and prospects.

• E-newsletter: Send newsletters to users in the e-consultation website to inform them about the latest happening in the e-consultation projects.

• Security and Privacy: Ensure the data protection act (1998) which includes security and privacy information, clearly stated on the e-consultation website.

Offline-Marketing

• Press conference: A joint press conference by all e-consultation stakeholders to promote the e-consultation benefits (tangible and intangible benefits) to all parties and relate the e-consultation progress.

• Publications: Paper publications in Journal will raised the awareness of such project in the academic world.

• Exhibitions and workshops: To exhibit the e-consultation project and seek for feedback from target audiences.

• Surveys will help to gauge the citizen perceptions and to increase their awareness in e-consultation.

• Joint venture: Partnership with big corporations, for example International Business Machine (IBM), Fujitsu-Siemens, CISCO and etc companies to borrow their expertise and outsource some of the work to them. [This initiative will help to raise profile of e-consultation and increase broad range of expertise]

• Networking: Network and raise the profile of the project in international arena by working with government from different countries.

• World first E-Consultation conference to be held at QUB: The group can organize the world first e-consultation conference. [publicity]

• Get politicians involve in spearheading and advocating the e-consultation projects.