Case study: The Shire of Denmark integrates an online platform to increase community engagement

WA-based town Shire of Denmark needed an online community platform to better engage with its residents and communicate with them during emergencies.

Courtney Walsh, communications and engagement officer at the Shire of Denmark spoke to Digital Nation about the journey they took to implement a digital communication platform.

Walsh said the Shire of Denmark has a very engaged community and turns to the local government for information and support.

“We realised that as the world is going more online, and people are becoming more tech-savvy, we realised we needed to fill a gap in that online engagement space,” she explained.  

Prior to using the engagement platform, Walsh explained the community would contact the local government in person and via the phone. However, she said they decided to move these interactions to be mostly online-based.

“There was a sense that we needed to move with the times, get online and make the most of some of the cool technologies that are out there, and EngagementHQ has that,” Walsh said.

The Shire has close to 7000 residents and is in an area prone to bushfires, and Walsh explained how they leveraged this platform during a bushfire in February last year.  

“[The page] was important for us because I was one of the residents that was evacuated from my home, but I'm the only communications person at the Shire. Having something like EngagementHQ, that's so easy to use that I can operate remotely was super valuable,” she said.

“I could have my laptop with me and I could build a page with key information for the community, and also for our customer service officers.”

Once the bushfire had subsided, Walsh explained how the community jumped on the platform to understand the next steps.

“Once the craziness of the fire had passed in the first two days, people all of a sudden wanted questions answered. I could create a page quickly with all the resources we needed,” she said.

“I could say to the community, here's the page, but if you want to speak to a person call us and our customer service people had the page open in front of them. That is the vital role that our EngagementHQ page played in the bushfire and in the recovery afterwards.

“We’re very grateful for that,” she added.

Walsh said one of the reasons they implemented this platform was to bring all the information into one centralised location.

“We are trying to make our community feel like they can self-serve their engagement a little bit more. Instead of tying up loads of time with the customer service officer, who sits at the front desk and might not know the ins and outs of a project or an engagement we're doing,” she said.

“By building the community's awareness of our online platform, folks are getting more and more confident to go straight online to find an information hub that's got all of the answers that they would be looking for.”