Get involved is a free online consultation toolkit for Queensland Government agencies to use. You can use Get involved to create online consultation pages and surveys that support your offline consultation and community engagement activities.
Frequently asked questions
About Get involved
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Smart Service Queensland (Department of Communities, Housing and Digital Economy) is responsible for managing the Get involved website and toolkit.
The Get involved team is available from 8.30am to 4.30pm, Monday to Friday.
Setting up consultations and accounts
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Email the Get involved team with the following details:
- consultation title
- opening and closing dates and times
- agency contact details for public enquiries (this is not mandatory)
- names and email addresses of users requiring access to build your consultation and run reports
- a brief description of your consultation (e.g. topic, expected volumes, media activities).
The Get involved team will:
- set up user accounts
- prepare the 'shell' of your consultation
- give you access to build your consultation.
If you are building a survey, we recommend allowing 1–2 days to complete your survey.
Please allow 2 business days for the review and approval process.
Logins are required to:
- build a consultation using the Get involved toolkit
- submit test survey responses before a consultation opens
- submit postal survey responses after a consultation closes
- access reports.
Respondents do not need a login to complete a survey. They can access the survey by clicking on the survey link, completing the survey and clicking Submit—this will record their submission.
Managing consultations
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The entire process of seeking feedback from stakeholders or the community on the Get involved website is often referred to as a consultation—this can include using a survey or other forms of submissions such as email, post or fax.
If you are seeking feedback online, you can create a survey in the Get involved toolkit—this will be linked from your consultation page. Submissions will be recorded in the database and are available via online and downloadable reports.
If your agency is not seeking feedback through an online survey, a listing page can be created. This includes a brief summary of your consultation, reference links and information about how respondents can make a submission.
Responses to an IAS are often from businesses and industries that may prefer to submit a document rather than complete a structured survey. You should provide an email address for this in the consultation contact information.
You can also create a basic survey for individuals to complete as part of the broader consultation process.
Consultation plans for regulatory proposals should be developed in line with the best practice stakeholder consultation principles set out in the Queensland Government Better Regulation Policy (PDF, 449KB).
The Get involved team can provide technical feedback about your survey questions (e.g. functionality).
Here are some tools to help you when developing your questions:
You can include a link to another survey tool (e.g. SurveyMonkey, SurveyGizmo) on a Get involved listing page with certain privacy provisions. Please read the Guidelines from the Office of the Information Commissioner before using another platform.
You can add a third party survey link to Get involved under 'Reference material'.
Email the Client Relationship team to arrange phone support for your consultation through the 13 QGOV (13 74 68) contact centre.
Consultations can be featured on the Get involved home page but space is limited. We reserve the right to choose the most appropriate consultations to promote on the home page.
You can also request a feature to promote your consultation on the www.qld.gov.au home page.
Building a consultation
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There is no functionality to copy survey questions across to a new survey. We suggest keeping a copy of your survey questions in a Word document for reuse.
Once a survey has been closed it cannot be re-opened in the toolkit.
The number of survey questions can vary depending on the type of data you want to collect (e.g. quantitative or qualitative) and the outcomes from your consultation process.
Questions should be easy to understand. Avoid 'double-barrelled' questions—e.g. 'How old are you and where did you hear about the consultation?'.
There is no average number of responses for surveys. Shorter surveys generally result in higher participation.
There is no minimum or maximum number of people who should receive a survey. Each agency is responsible for promoting their survey or consultation process to increase community participation.
Popular ways to promote participation include:
- ministerial media statements
- social media
- intra-departmental communications
- features on the Get involved home page.
Opening periods can vary depending on a number of factors (e.g. type of consultation, audience base, deadlines).
Get involved uses the Queensland Government single website experience template and cannot be customised.
There are a range of question types available in the toolkit:
- choice questions (e.g. tick boxes, radio buttons, drop down lists)
- ranking and rating questions
- text questions (with character limits)
Progressive disclosure or question branching is available in the toolkit when setting up your questions.
Tables are not available in Get involved.
Hyperlinks should only be added to a consultation under the ‘Reference material’ section. This ensures the document or page is opened in a new window and the user can easily return back to the consultation.
Agencies must host documents (e.g. PDFs, Word documents) on their own infrastructure. This is to ensure Get involved is referencing accurate and up-to-date material with a single point of reference.
You can link to documentation from the ‘Reference material’ section in the left navigation menu.
When you create your consultation, the toolkit will assign a unique URL.
Contact the Get involved team if you would like to create a URL for promotional purposes (e.g. qld.gov.au/consultation-name).
Get involved has a general privacy statement, and this can be customised to suit your needs.
If you are collecting personal information, you will need a collection notice. Refer to the privacy principles for more information.
Surveys can be configured to separate personal data from individual responses to protect individual privacy. Alternatively, personal information can be collected together, but care should be taken if you are publishing responses.
Information in Get involved is held in a secure database hosted in Australia.
Approval and publishing
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Before your consultation can be published, the Get involved team will review your content according to the Queensland Government web writing and style guide.
Our review and QA process usually takes 2 business days. Please discuss your requirements with the Get involved team during the build phase to help us to ensure your consultation is reviewed and published within required timeframes.
Closing a survey
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The survey will close automatically at the scheduled date and time. If you need to reduce or extend the consultation period, contact the Get involved team before the scheduled closing date and we will update the details for you.
Note: A consultation cannot be reopened once it has closed.
We can assign permissions to your login to enable survey entries after the survey has closed (e.g. hard copy responses).
Please contact us for more information.
Reporting
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Reports are available either in an online format or as a CSV file.
We do not analyse survey results. You can download your response data in a CSV file for analysis in a third party tool (e.g. Excel, SPSS).