Harnessing the power of technology in public engagement

6 July 2010

The Coalition Government has spoken about the need to build a “Big Society”, promising “a deep and serious reform agenda to take power away from politicians and give it to people”¹ Clearly, a key part of this agenda will involve actively engaging the public during the policy making process. ORC International has developed advanced tools, including web-scraping and text analysis, which enable organisations to tackle consultation head on.

We are already seeing evidence of public interaction with a national debate on tackling the UK deficit.The Your Freedom website has been established to gather the public’s suggestions regarding laws and regulations that should be repealed, promising "raucous, unscripted debates", which will "throw up the best ideas".²

Clearly technology has a key role to play here; not only in delivering future public services but also in terms of the manner in which people are consulted and how feedback is reviewed and analysed. Consultation can be a long-winded and costly process; increasingly, the challenge will be to deliver to the promises of “Big Society”, whilst doing so in a cost-saving manner.

ORC International has always been at the forefront of developing new research approaches.  Our strength of expertise in the field of IT, combined with detailed public sector knowledge, enables us to provide innovative approaches to our clients’ research requirements. We help organisations gain further insight from unstructured feedback and consultation about their organisation’s reputation or policy activity.

Our web-scraping and text mining tools can analyse an almost limitless amount of data, providing organisations with a detailed, and cost-effective, approach to gathering and analysing feedback on services and quality. 

We can offer:

• Web-scraping tools to gather data, commentary and feedback from a large number of websites, blogs and social media sites to feed into any subsequent analysis. 

• Automated text analysis software using the latest Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to help categorise comments into broader subject areas, including assessing sentiment and depth of feeling, so that the range and weight of particular comments can be determined.

• Analysis techniques that explore patterns and relationships within comments. We can draw on the expertise of our in-house statistics team to provide additional insight, delivering maximum value to any research exercise.

If you are a researcher who wants to evaluate what people are saying about your organisation, or a policy-maker who needs a detailed view of your users, these tools will provide you with the platform to gather this information.