Questions & Answers
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions from municipal leaders, communications teams, planners, and IT administrators about Civic Citizen Engagement — from platform capabilities to deployment and compliance.
Civic Citizen Engagement supports the full spectrum of municipal consultation: surveys with conditional logic, interactive map engagement with GIS overlays, idea boards with community voting, participatory budgeting with trade-off visualization, virtual town halls, document review with inline commenting, discussion forums, and story sharing. Projects can combine multiple tools within a single engagement and support multi-phase consultation workflows aligned to the IAP2 Public Participation Spectrum.
Unlike proprietary SaaS platforms, Civic provides full source code ownership with a perpetual licence — no escalating annual fees, no per-project charges, and no vendor lock-in. Your municipality controls the platform, the data, and the deployment infrastructure. Civic also provides native integration with the Civic suite (CRM, council agenda, asset management, budget), ensuring engagement results connect to municipal decisions rather than sitting in a standalone tool.
Yes. Civic supports hybrid engagement projects that combine online participation (surveys, map feedback, idea boards) with in-person events (virtual town halls, open houses). In-person event feedback can be entered by staff through mobile-optimized data entry forms. All participation — online and in-person — is captured in the same project analytics, ensuring comprehensive 'What We Heard' reporting regardless of participation channel.
Yes. Civic supports English and French as core languages with the ability to add additional languages. Survey questions, engagement descriptions, and notifications can be published in multiple languages simultaneously. Participants select their preferred language and receive all content in that language. Machine translation integration (Google Translate API, DeepL) with staff review workflow accelerates multilingual content creation.
The IAP2 (International Association for Public Participation) Spectrum defines five levels of public participation: Inform, Consult, Involve, Collaborate, and Empower. Each engagement project in Civic is aligned to a spectrum level, and the IAP2 Compliance Reporter (spec 4.5) tracks whether the municipality delivered the promised level of engagement — documenting the gap between commitment and delivery for accountability and continuous improvement.
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