Involving users in policy making, the story of Talk London

Talk London made an impression during the UserCentriCities summit in Brussels in 2023. The digital engagement platform was listed in the top 3 of most user-centric services in Europe. The praise Talk London gets, isn’t without reason, as we learn in a conversation with Greater London Authority’s Kate Lindemans and Selina Holliday. They tell us more about the platform and its development over the years.

Kate, Senior Online Community Engagement Officer and Selina, Head of Digital Engagement have been working on Talk London together, for many years. “Talk London has always been a place to involve Londoners with policy makers in City Hall”, says Kate. This is still the scope of the platform. But a lot has changed since its launch in July 2012. Not only has the team grown to 6 colleagues, Talk London has been rebuilt in 2021 through user-centred design principles and with the specific aim of reaching a more diverse and representative membership.

Talk London in a nutshell

This redesign further stimulates Talk London’s mission. The platform exists to engage with Londoners and bring their voices into City Hall to help policy teams make better policies and programmes. The external facing mission and vision is to empower Londoners to shape a better London, now and for future generations. With a tag line of ‘Your city, your say! Let’s make London better together!’

Londoners can register to become members on Talk London and take part in engagement activities. The platform asks for demographic details upon registration, such as age, sex, borough, month and year of birth, housing tenure, ethnicity, and work status. This helps to understand who is taking part and how different citizen groups are represented on the platform. Read more about Talk London on the old UserCentriCities website.

(Re)designing Talk London

The original Talk London platform wasn’t as engaging as it is today. “Internal stakeholders had a strong desire for a more dynamic platform. Their ambitions to engage Londoners in policy development far exceeded what the platform at the time could facilitate. This helped us get buy in to redesign the site and make it much more user-centric”, says Selina.

The green light for the redesign happened after a series of interviews and workshops to better understand City Hall’s appetite for citizen engagement. Selina: “We conducted interviews with 25 colleagues from City Hall, all of whom had different roles and were from different departments. We also organized several workshops with these stakeholders, partly to understand and get consensus on the level of ambition and partly to demonstrate what Londoners want and need from the Greater London Authority. We had some videos of interviews with Londoners from underrepresented groups and we played some of these in the workshops, in order to get their voices into the room. What we understood from that process, was there was a clear consensus that we needed to redesign and develop the platform to meet our goals and expectations”, to which Kate adds: “The old platform had served its time.”

How Londoners get involved through Talk London

So how do Londoners get involved in policy making? As stated on the old UserCentriCities site: “Engagement happens through engagement campaigns on the site. These vary from statutory consultations on specific strategies, to idea generation activities to improve the high street, for example.

The Talk London team creates a bespoke engagement approach, including background content and context, to allow members to get involved in an informed way. These can include a combination of surveys, discussions and idea generation activities.

The membership can also be used to recruit participants for user testing opportunities.

Making an impact

As part of making sure that there is a demonstrable reason for Londoners to take part on Talk London, the team have one condition for policy teams. “There has to be a clear impact of taking part,” says Kate. “We work together with commissioning teams to explore this, to ensure that engagement on Talk London leads to a tangible outcome. As Talk London is an open and large community of Londoners, any engagement campaigns we run also need to be relevant for all Londoners.”

An important part of the engagement process is to inform citizens on updates and what their contributions have led to. “This closes the feedback loop and shows that City Hall is listening,” Selina says. “We aim to build trust between Londoners and our organisations and provide a long-term platform for engagement. Showing impact also makes it much more likely for Londoners to take part again.”

A personal approach

To make taking part on Talk London more engaging for Londoners, the team uses a personal approach. “All of our emails are sent from our community manager Mia”, says Kate.

With regards to personalization, the platform is also tailored to individual users. “For example, the platform shows what you specifically have contributed to. It also shows statistics and highlights from projects you’re involved in. We make sure we communicate the impact of members’ participation back to them.”

Continuous improvement

Part of Talk London’s strategy and success is to always be on the lookout for improvements. The team uses a number of channels, including unsolicited feedback, member surveys, user interviews, behavioural analytics and monitoring our north star and important metrics. “We make sure any feedback we receive from citizens and stakeholders on their experience of engaging through Talk London, helps us to identify where we can improve our content, our communications or our platform”, Selina shares.

She continues: “For example, not everybody knows exactly what the mayor does. So we’ve added a section on the platform explaining what the mayor can and can’t do. We also have a role in educating citizens if we want to help them engage with the work of City Hall.”

To continuously improve, the Talk London team also evaluates every project once it’s over. “There’s no best practice we can give you to be successful. What we can say, however, is that we continuously evaluate our efforts to see where we can improve. And that this has helped us tremendously to consistently improve”, says Selina. Kate adds: “It’s all about collaboration. We’re just a small team, but together with all our stakeholders, we’re able to constantly improve the platform and what we do.”

Moving forward

An improvement for the near future, for example, is reaching underrepresented groups. “That’s one of the challenges we currently face. There’s no silver bullet to reach all different groups of citizens. For us, recruiting 16 to 24 year olds to engage with City Hall is a big challenge, as they don’t organically show up and register on the Talk London site. We have to proactively use different channels to reach them and then they are always getting older, so it’s a constant challenge”, Selina shares openly.

Kate adds: “We also want to keep our platform an encouraging space for members to contribute. We’ve been lucky so far that conversations on our platform have for the most part been civil, even if members have opposing views. It’s our job as moderators to keep it that way.”

The team will continue to champion citizen engagement within City Hall. The team is currently working on new campaigns and more improvements to the user experience on site. And with Kate and Selina leading the team, it seems Talk London is in good hands. “I love that our work actually makes a difference. That motivates me every day”, says Selina. Kate closes: “For me, launching a new campaign and seeing the survey results and comments from Londoners come through is still the most exciting part of what we do. It’s what Talk London is all about.”