4,600+ registered residents: how Goeree-Overflakkee built one central participation platform

From strong policy to real practice

In 2022, the Goeree-Overflakkee city council adopted its "community participation" policy paper. The document was well-researched, but hard to translate into practice. "It was put together well, but it was also a difficult, almost academic piece of writing," says program manager Willeke Moerkerk. 

That's why the organization received a clear mandate in that year's coalition agreement: make sure the participation policy actually gets implemented. In 2023, Willeke took charge of that mandate. After drafting a clear program plan, she quickly concluded that the existing way of working fell short:

• Participation mostly happened through classic methods: resident evenings, standalone surveys, and general research. 
• The online platform in use at the time was only used for sustainability topics, not across the organization.
• Different teams worked with different tools and outside agencies, so the results were scattered.

"Colleagues often just did whatever seemed logical at the time. Sometimes a team ran a survey, sometimes an outside agency was hired to set up a process. There was hardly any structural overview or shared approach."

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One central place for participation

The program plan included a clear next step: the local government would select and roll out one centralized digital participation platform. The platform needed to serve several goals at once:

• Create one recognizable place where residents can share their opinion.
• Make participation easier to organize within the organization itself.
• Support project leads in setting up participation processes.

During the selection process, the local government looked at several options. Ease of use was critical. "It mattered to us that our project leads could work with it easily. The platform needed to be intuitive, to lower the barrier to getting started. After talking to some reference governments and a thorough evaluation, we chose Go Vocal."

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Participation: a new way of working

Rolling out the platform also changed the way the organization works internally, says communications officer Janine Roos. "Project leads and policy advisors who want to involve Goeree-Overflakkee residents in a project now check in with the platform administrator first. Together, we look at how to organize participation and how to approach the digital side. We discuss things like what phases a project needs, what questions to ask residents, and how to close the loop on feedback."

Those conversations help colleagues approach participation more deliberately and consistently. At the same time, the platform lowers the barrier for colleagues to use participation at all. "It used to seem complicated. Now we just say: stop by, and we'll figure out together how to set up the project. Before you know it, it's live."

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From big policy questions to small neighborhood projects

In many local governments, digital participation mostly gets used for big policy projects. That's true in Goeree-Overflakkee too, but the platform is also deliberately used for smaller, hyper-local topics. One example: asking residents of specific streets for input on a new parking permit rule.

"In cases like that, only the directly affected residents get access to the participation project." They receive a letter explaining the situation and can then respond online. "So we test our decisions first with the people directly affected by them."

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A growing base of engaged residents

Goeree-Overflakkee deliberately runs most participation through the platform with registration. That helps build a lasting base of engaged residents. The platform now counts more than 4,600 registered users across roughly 20,000 households in the region, meaning someone is registered in about one in five households.

That's a big shift from before. "For new projects, we can now email our residents directly. That direct approach gets a noticeably higher response and gives us a strong base we can reactivate with almost no effort. We no longer have to start from zero every time, we can keep involving the users we already have."

That said, to keep participation accessible and inclusive, the local government also offers other ways to take part. It combines digital participation with in-person meetings wherever possible, and residents can fill out surveys on paper too. Those paper responses get added to the platform with no extra effort, so they're included in the analysis as well.

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Faster analysis and deeper insight with AI

Beyond the wider reach, the Go Vocal platform also has a strong impact on staff workload. Participation projects often bring in a lot of open-ended responses, and analyzing them takes time. The platform's AI analysis tools help process those responses faster, something Janine tested herself on a survey about the environmental vision. 

"The survey had about ten to fifteen questions, each with dozens of open answers. I read and analyzed everything myself first. That took three to four hours." For bigger projects with hundreds or even thousands of responses, manual analysis quickly becomes unworkable. "That's where AI is a huge help. It clusters answers and surfaces the key themes." 

"The insights feature especially is incredibly valuable: you can lay different questions side by side and spot connections you might not think of yourself. AI opens up new perspectives. You get a broader view and can quickly pull out interesting cross-sections. I didn't just test whether it was faster, I also checked whether the summaries actually held up and were reliable. And they were!"

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The measurable impact of Go Vocal in Goeree-Overflakkee

Using digital participation in Goeree-Overflakkee hasn't just led to more responses from residents, it's also brought a clear shift in how participation is organized across the organization and the community. That impact shows up in a few different ways.

Rising marks in the national resident survey

A recent round of the Dutch national "Waar staat je gemeente?" ("Where does your local government stand?") resident survey shows one score improved markedly: how much residents feel the local government makes an effort to involve them in policy and decision-making. 

According to Willeke Moerkerk, that improvement is partly thanks to the participation work of the past few years and the use of the Go Vocal platform. "We see this as important confirmation that our participation approach works."

Internal effects within the organization

The impact shows internally too. "Participation is increasingly becoming a natural step when starting a project." Project leads and policy staff think about participation earlier and more often. "Where residents used to mainly be involved in big projects, that now happens on smaller, everyday topics too." 

The platform, along with support from the administrators, makes it easier to organize participation. That's lowered the barrier for colleagues too. "On top of that, positive experiences spread quickly through the organization, and that inspires other teams to involve residents in a similar way."

‍Staying close to residents

Finally, the impact of that shift shows up in the relationship with residents too. Willeke and Janine point to two clear effects: "First, residents feel more involved in local projects and policy. Second, they have a much better overview, they know much more clearly what's actually going on."

Thanks to Go Vocal, residents have to "search" a lot less. "For residents, it's a relief to have one place where they can find information, share their input, and see what happens with it. They get targeted emails and can find everything in one central place. There's no more fragmentation."

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Working and learning with other governments

Throughout the process, the local government works closely with the Go Vocal team. Their dedicated contact doesn't just help with technical questions, they also help think through how to approach participation projects. "That support goes beyond explaining buttons, tools, or features. They genuinely help you think about how to organize participation well."

The local government also actively uses Go Vocal's webinars, "Lunch & Learn" sessions, and Inspiration Hub. There, governments can see each other's projects and pick up ideas, which leads to concrete action. "During one session, we heard how another government got extra sign-ups with a simple letter and a cake giveaway. We copied that idea almost exactly."

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The next step: embedding participation further

Participation is now firmly embedded in the local government's physical domain, but Willeke sees room to grow it in other policy areas too. "In the social domain, participation is often more complex. People there tend to work with fixed partners or networks. Topics like youth care, vulnerable groups, or benefits are also more sensitive and need a different approach."

The ambition to involve residents more in those areas too remains. "It takes time to change existing ways of working, but we're on the right track," says Willeke. "In these kinds of areas, we focus heavily on measuring satisfaction, and with Go Vocal's help we're finding more and more ways to apply participation there as well."

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A clear message to other governments

When other governments ask about their experience, Willeke and Janine are candid: "The platform doesn't just help organize participation digitally, it helps embed it into how we work, structurally and with a low barrier to entry. The platform's ease of use, the AI analysis, and the email feature make it possible to reach a lot of residents even with limited capacity."

For Goeree-Overflakkee, the participation platform is now a solid foundation to build on. "Participation doesn't stop at one project," Willeke concludes. "It's about involving residents structurally in the choices you make. The Go Vocal platform helps us keep building on that, step by step."

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