Real-time Consultation Analytics
Live dashboards with automated sentiment analysis give you a clear, continuously updating picture of community opinion. Understand what residents think and feel about planning proposals as responses arrive, not weeks after your consultation closes. From response tracking to demographic breakdowns, every metric you need is available at a glance in your consultation dashboard.
Live Dashboards
Watch responses in real time with interactive charts that update automatically as participation grows. Track response rates hour by hour, identify peak engagement periods and monitor progress against your participation targets without refreshing or running manual queries. Your consultation dashboard is always current.
Automated Sentiment Analysis
The platform automatically analyses the tone and meaning of free-text responses, scoring sentiment and extracting recurring themes. Understand whether community feedback is positive, negative, or neutral at scale, without reading thousands of individual comments. Ideal for producing balanced summaries for planning consultation reporting.
Exportable Committee Reports
Generate publication-ready PDF and CSV reports with a single click. Reports include charts, statistical summaries, sentiment breakdowns and full data tables, formatted and ready for planning committee papers, stakeholder briefings and consultation documents. No more spending days compiling data into presentable formats.
The Problem with Traditional Approaches
Why real-time matters for public consultations
Traditional consultation analysis is painfully slow. Once a consultation period closes, planning teams face weeks of manual work: reading through hundreds or thousands of free-text responses, categorising feedback into themes, tallying demographics and compiling everything into reports that officers and committee members can digest. For large-scale consultations on Local Plans or major infrastructure projects, this process can stretch to months, delaying critical planning decisions and frustrating communities who want to know their voices have been heard.
The cost of this delay is significant. Days can be spent on data entry and spreadsheet manipulation instead of professional analysis and recommendations. External consultancies charge tens of thousands of pounds for community feedback analysis that still takes weeks to deliver. Meanwhile, councillors heading into committee meetings often rely on incomplete summaries because the full analysis simply was not ready in time. Decisions get made on partial or inaccurate information, or get postponed entirely.
Real-time consultation analytics change this fundamentally. With ConsultOnline, public engagement data flows into your dashboard as residents respond. Sentiment is scored automatically. Themes are identified and grouped. Demographic and geographic patterns become visible within hours, not weeks. By the time your consultation closes, your analysis is essentially complete, leaving the development team to focus on interpretation and strategy.
How It Works
From data to decisions in three steps
Automatic Data Capture
Every page view, survey response, map interaction, and document download is captured automatically from the moment your consultation goes live. There is no manual setup, no tracking codes to install, and no third-party analytics tools to configure. Response tracking begins immediately, and all data is stored securely within the platform, fully compliant with UK data protection requirements.
Intelligent Analysis
As responses arrive, the platform processes free-text answers with automated sentiment analysis and theme extraction, surfacing the key issues and concerns. Quantitative responses are aggregated into statistical summaries. Geographic data is mapped to postcodes and wards. Demographic breakdowns are calculated automatically, giving you the complete picture of who is participating in your consultation.
Publication-Ready Reports
Download polished reports with charts, executive summaries and detailed data tables at any point during or after your consultation. Reports are formatted for planning committee papers, consultation reports documents and stakeholder briefings. Export raw data as CSV for further analysis in your own tools or share live dashboard links with colleagues and councillors who need to stay informed.
Purpose-Built
Analytics built for planning professionals
Generic analytics tools were not designed for the specific requirements of planning consultations. ConsultOnline provides the metrics and reports that developers, consultants and local authorities actually need.
Track Consultation Participation Rates
Monitor how many residents are engaging with your consultation in real time. Set participation targets based on population data and track progress against them. Identify whether engagement is growing, plateauing, or declining so you can adjust your promotion strategy mid-consultation rather than discovering low turnout after it is too late.
Consultation Report Evidence
Demographic analysis tools help you demonstrate that your consultation has reached a representative cross-section of the community. Monitor response demographics against local census data to identify underrepresented groups early, giving you time to run targeted outreach before the consultation period ends. Generate the demographic evidence needed for your consultation report.
Geographic Clusters of Feedback
Visualise where responses are coming from with postcode-level geographic analysis. Identify clusters of support or opposition, spot areas with low engagement that may need additional outreach, and understand how proximity to a proposed development affects sentiment. Geographic data is presented on interactive maps and can be broken down by ward or parish.
Compare Engagement Across Phases
For multi-stage consultations such as Local Plan reviews or phased development proposals, compare engagement metrics across different consultation phases. Understand how participation, sentiment, and key concerns evolve from early engagement through to formal consultation. Track whether issues raised in earlier phases have been addressed in community perception.
Benchmark Against Previous Consultations
Compare current consultation performance against your historical data. See whether your engagement rates are improving over time, whether new outreach strategies are working, and how sentiment on recurring planning themes has shifted. Benchmarking data helps you demonstrate continuous improvement in your consultation practice to inspectors and auditors.
Real-time Alerts and Notifications
Set up alerts for key milestones such as reaching participation targets, sudden spikes in negative sentiment, or when responses from a particular area exceed a threshold. Stay informed without constantly checking the dashboard, and respond quickly to emerging trends that might require adjustments to your consultation approach or communications.
See your consultation data come to life
Book a demo and we will walk you through the analytics dashboard using real consultation data. See exactly how response tracking, sentiment analysis and reporting work in practice.
Capabilities
Comprehensive consultation analytics at your fingertips
Every tool you need to understand public engagement data, analyse community feedback, and produce planning committee reports, all in one consultation dashboard.
Sentiment Analysis
Understanding sentiment at scale
Free-text responses are the most valuable part of any public consultation, but they are also the hardest to analyse. A single planning consultation can generate hundreds or thousands of written comments, each expressing nuanced views about transport, heritage, environmental impact, housing density, and dozens of other material planning considerations. Reading and categorising every comment manually is time-consuming and subjective, with different officers often reaching different conclusions about the overall balance of opinion.
ConsultOnline’s automated sentiment analysis processes every free-text response as it arrives, scoring each comment on a spectrum from strongly negative to strongly positive and identifying the specific planning themes it relates to. The platform groups similar concerns together, quantifies how frequently each theme appears, and presents the results in clear, easy-to-understand charts and summaries. This community feedback analysis happens continuously, so your sentiment picture is always current.
The practical benefits for planning professionals are substantial. Consultation reports that once took weeks to compile can now be drafted in hours, with accurate sentiment data and theme breakdowns already prepared. Planning committee reports can include precise figures on the balance of support and opposition, broken down by topic, rather than vague characterisations. And because the analysis is consistent and systematic, it provides a defensible evidence base if consultation outcomes are challenged at appeal or examination.
Metrics That Matter
Data you can act on
Every metric in your consultation dashboard is designed to help produce more robust reports and better decisions.
Response Rate Tracking
Monitor the total number of responses, completion rates for each survey section, and drop-off points where respondents abandon the process. Set participation targets and track progress in real time so you can boost promotion efforts if engagement falls below expectations.
Geographic Analysis
Map responses by postcode, ward, or parish to understand the geographic distribution of feedback. Identify areas of concentrated support or opposition and spot gaps in engagement that may need targeted outreach. Essential for demonstrating geographic reach in your consultation report.
Demographic Breakdowns
Understand who is responding to your consultation with breakdowns by age, gender, ethnicity, disability status and other characteristics. Compare your respondent profile against local census data to assess how representative your consultation has been and identify groups that may need additional engagement.
Sentiment Scoring
Every free-text response is automatically scored on a sentiment scale, with results aggregated into overall sentiment charts and breakdowns by theme. See at a glance whether the community is broadly supportive or opposed and drill into specific topics such as traffic, design, or environmental concerns to understand the nuances of public opinion.
Device & Accessibility Metrics
Track which devices, browsers, and screen sizes your respondents are using. Understand whether your consultation is accessible to people using assistive technologies, mobile devices, or older browsers. Use this data to ensure your digital consultation is genuinely inclusive and to report on digital accessibility compliance.
Response Timeline Analysis
Visualise when responses are submitted with hourly, daily, and weekly trend charts. Identify the impact of promotional activities, press coverage, or social media posts on response volumes. Understand peak engagement times so you can schedule communications and social media posts for maximum impact on future consultations.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Ready for smarter consultation insights?
Stop guessing what local residents think. Let automated analytics reveal the patterns, sentiment and demographic insights in your public engagement data. Join developers, planning consultants and planning authorities across the UK who are already saving weeks on consultation reporting.
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