Three boxes of responses
The council is consulting residents on the future of the recreation ground, or a draft neighbourhood plan, or whether to install a new skate park. There is a questionnaire in the village magazine with a tear-off slip, the same questions as an online survey, an email address for comments, and two drop-in sessions in the hall with sticky notes on boards and a comments box.
When the consultation closes, the clerk has a pile of paper forms, a survey export, thirty-odd emails and photos of sticky notes. A working group of councillors volunteers to type the paper forms into a spreadsheet, each in their own way. The written comments, which are the most useful part, are read by one person and summarised from memory. When a resident asks at the meeting whether their comment was taken into account, nobody can quickly show it.
Why collating responses is so slow
Every channel produces a differently shaped result. The survey tool gives a neat export; paper forms give handwriting; emails give free text with no questions answered; drop-in boards give fragments. Combining them is manual, and the free-text comments, where residents say what they actually think, are the hardest to count fairly.
| Channel | What arrives | The difficulty |
|---|---|---|
| Online survey | An export of answers | Different layout from the paper version |
| Paper forms | Handwritten answers | Typed in by several people differently |
| Emails | Free text | Does not map to the questions |
| Drop-in events | Sticky notes and comment slips | Photographed, rarely counted |
| Letters from organisations | Formal responses | Need to be reported separately |
What a messy collation costs
Councillors lose weeks of volunteer time to typing. Results are delayed, so the momentum from the consultation fades. Duplicate responses, such as someone completing both paper and online, are hard to spot. Most seriously, if the summary is not seen as fair, residents lose trust in the process, and for formal consultations such as a neighbourhood plan the council needs to show how comments were considered.
What a consultation must include and how it is reported are matters for your council and, for statutory processes, its advisers. We build the collation.
One log for every response
- The questionnaire is set up once as an online form. Residents use it directly, and paper responses are typed into the same form by volunteers, so every response has the same shape.
- Each response records its channel, date and, if collected, a postcode or area, which helps show spread across the parish.
- Emails and letters are added as free-text responses and tagged to the relevant questions by the person entering them.
- Drop-in comments are typed in as short responses, marked as event comments.
- Possible duplicates are flagged, such as the same name and address on paper and online, for a person to decide on.
- Written comments are grouped into themes. An AI model such as Anthropic Claude can suggest themes and assign comments, and a councillor or the clerk reviews and corrects every grouping.
- The report shows counts for each question, themes with representative quotes, and the full list of comments as an appendix, so any resident can find their own.
- Paper and online results are comparable.
- Every comment is kept and traceable to its theme.
- Organisation responses are listed separately.
How the working group spends its time instead
Volunteers type paper forms into the same online form, which is quicker and consistent. When the consultation closes, the counts are already there. The working group spends its meetings reviewing themes and reading comments rather than building a spreadsheet. The report goes to full council with the appendix, and when a resident asks whether their comment was considered, the clerk can point to where it sits.
The same setup can be reused for the next consultation, whether it is on the precept, a new play area or a community building.
Is this how your consultations end?
- Paper and online responses are combined by hand.
- Councillors spend evenings typing forms.
- Written comments are summarised from memory.
- Duplicate responses are hard to spot.
- Residents cannot see how their comments were used.