Public sector
Public consultations
The hard part of a public consultation is not writing it, it is getting answers from the people who do not usually answer. Those who respond unprompted tend to be the ones already involved in municipal life, so the result describes the engaged rather than the neighbourhood. Publish it through several channels at once, keep it under five minutes, ask for district and age so you can see who is missing, and say up front what you will do with the answers: doubt about whether it changes anything is the first reason people do not take part.
The templates
Who answers and who does not
An open consultation self-selects: the people who answer are the ones who were already listening. That is why all these templates ask for district and age band, not out of demographic curiosity but so you can compare who answered against the population register and see which groups are missing. If a district or an age band comes in far below its real weight, that does not invalidate the consultation, but it does oblige you to say so when you publish, and to push distribution there before closing it.
Screen for residency first
A municipal consultation published behind an open link can be answered by anyone, including people from outside the municipality. These templates open with a residency question that screens out non-residents, so the sample is what you say it is. It is not bureaucratic friction: it is what lets you defend the result if anyone challenges it, and it takes a single screen.
Publish what comes out
Turnout in the next consultation depends on what happened after the last one. If residents never see the result, they learn that answering achieves nothing, and the next response rate will be worse. Publish the full figures, including the uncomfortable ones, say how many people answered and from where, and explain which decisions were taken on that data and which were not, and why. It is the cheapest part of the process and the one that most determines the next round.