It’s a new year!  Not only that, but we’ve almost made it through January – the monthly equivalent of a long, hungover bus ride home.  As 2014 stretches out before us with all the promise of a brand new notebook, we reflect upon how we spent the months of 2013.

It’s easy to be engrossed in the day-to-day and not realise the big achievements made when you look at things as a whole.  The same goes for public engagement; all of those individual consultations, public events and budget discussions have collectively reached a huge number of people whose responses are vital in shaping public services.

Here at Delib, we work to 10 regular development milestones per year and try to fit as many useful features, updates and fixes as we can into each – we’re a very small team, but a busy one!  Now seems a very good time to run through all the significant developments we made to Citizen Space in 2013:

New features added:

Survey cloning

Editable ‘call to action’ link text

Consultation preview link for anonymous users

Ability to remove duplicate or test responses

Help links throughout Citizen Space (wherever you see the [?] icon)

Key feature improvements:

Total responses at a glance

Editing and improving the way a consultation URL is presented

PDF summary report improvements

Email list management – improved working with MailChimp and other mail services

Citizen Space makeover (many small, but cumulative style improvements)

Consultation finder results listed by close date

Easily turn-off-and-on-able social media widgets

Key pioneer features created:

Event pages and calendar

Response moderation and publishing

Not only that, but our development team carried out 109 bug fixes and behind the scenes improvements in 2013 too.

We’ve previously written about the iterative and Agile* way we work; this allows us to be flexible and responsive (and also help keep the Post-It note industry alive!).

A photo of kanban boards

Just some of our kanban boards with their many colourful post-its

Your feedback is vital in helping us to know how important a potential feature or enhancement is to you – the majority of the above improvements were down to suggestions and support queries generated by our users.

You might not also know that you can collaborate with us if you have an idea for a feature which isn’t on our roadmap, but is something you really want.

“What’s planned for 2014?” you might ask.  Well for starters, and it’s a big one, there’s Skip Logic (otherwise known as survey routing), something many of you have asked for.  This will be winging its way to your Citizen Space instance in the next week or so with some helpful supporting articles on our Knowledge Base.

Another 2014 aim is to help as many customers as we can to become centres of excellence for consulting, through training and support and sharing best practice.

We’re keen as mustard to know what your plans are for 2014, so tweet us @delibthinks, email info@delib.net, send a carrier pigeon, come and see us at any of our lovely offices or just give us a call for a chat – we would love it!

0845 638 1848 (UK)

1800 034 129 (Australia)

+44 1173 812 989 (Anywhere else)

*For extra reading on Agile, the UK Government Digital Service have a great blog post on working in an Agile way. https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2012/12/19/the-agile-wall/