Making hybrid participation practical: capturing every voice, online and offline

This session will be held in English, with subtitles available in your preferred language.

Community engagement has become increasingly digital, helping local governments reach more people than ever before. Yet some of the most valuable conversations still happen offline: at community meetings, through paper surveys, during workshops, or in conversations with staff in the field.

The challenge is no longer deciding between online and offline participation. It's finding a way to connect them into one coherent participation experience.

Join this live demo to see how Go Vocal helps local governments bring every form of participation together into one complete picture of community input. We'll show how teams can capture feedback wherever it happens, reduce manual work, and analyse online and offline participation side by side.

In addition to the live demo, you'll hear how a local government team is using these tools in practice to capture and analyse community conversations.

What you'll learn

• Capture participation wherever it happens: see how participation teams can collect feedback from paper surveys, handwritten forms, meetings, workshops, interviews, and digital engagement projects.
• Bring everything together: discover how Go Vocal's 360 Input repository creates a single place for managing and analysing participation data across channels.
• Reduce manual work: learn how FormSync digitizes paper participation and how ECHO by Dembrane transforms conversations into searchable transcripts and structured insights.
• Build a more complete understanding of your community: see how online and offline inputs can be analysed together to identify shared priorities, emerging concerns, and recurring themes.

Plus: a real-world perspective

We'll also be joined by a member of the participation team at the City of Ostend, who will share their experience using ECHO to capture and analyse community conversations. Hear how the tool is being used in practice and what they've learned along the way.

Can't make it live? Register and we'll send you the recording so you can watch on your own time.

Your host

Wietse Van Ransbeeck — CEO & Co-Founder, Go Vocal

Wietse has spent over a decade helping local governments build stronger cultures of participation. He is an Obama Leader (2025–2026) and Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe alumni, and leads Go Vocal's mission to make public decision-making more inclusive and participatory.

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