YourSAy

YourSAy enables 100,000+ South Australians to directly influence government decisions.

Since the creation of SA Plan in 2011, DPC and Katalyst Interactive have fostered a relationship that has spanned many years and seen the evolution of the YourSay website. YourSAy is the community engagement platform developed for the South Australian Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPC). Since the release of the current YourSAy platform over 40 individual government agencies have created around 400 engagements as well as over 18 different types of initiatives based on the foundation of YourSAy, including award winning Fund My Neighbourhood and Fund My Community initiatives.

Client: Government of South Australia
Industry: Government
Project Type: Community Engagement

The Challenge

South Australian Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPC) wanted to develop a new online decision platform to enable government agencies to inform and gather feedback from the community. The YourSAy website needed to enable agencies to create their engagements by following a process that would ensure best practice for engaging with the public. The website needed to be scalable so new engagements could be created with the click of a button and without the need for a development team.

The Solution

South Australian Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPC) engaged Katalyst Interactive to custom build the YourSAy website. Working with the team at DPC, Katalyst engineered an extendable solution that catered to multiple government agencies to engage with the community on different initiatives within a single digital platform.

Easily create engagements with best practice workflow

YourSAy provides agencies a workflow to create their engagements which follow best practices learnt through many years of design refinements developed by DPC and Katalyst. Engagements are created through a self-service workflow. Agencies can add content such as text, images, video, links, to their engagement.

A timeline feature allows a timeline of key dates to be created. Each engagement can also add different ways the community can engage such as comments, polls, and events with integration into eventbrite. Links can also be added to follow engagement social pages.

Shared access to all initiatives

A powerful feature of the YourSAy system is the single user base that gives the community access across all of the engagements. This allows for greater engagement across all engagements as the community may discover the YourSAy website through a specific engagement important to them and they can also browse and participate in other YourSAy engagements.

Data analysis

Government agencies can review and export data from their engagements. Demographics such as their age, gender, and what level of engagement from those who are participating. This data can be used for analysis to understand more about the community and who are participating in engagements.

Reduced administration time with Agency Hub

Though the YourSay website has been around for many years, Agency Hub is a feature recently developed to improve the administrative workflow. Agency Hub provides a template and structure to simplify the administration workload required by DPC to review and approve engagements submitted by government agencies.

Custom built initiative sites

As well as engagements, the YourSAy website also housed a number of other initiatives. . These are specialised sub-sites that support the running of an initiative. Programs such as the award-winning Fund My Community have been developed to incorporate complex idea voting systems that allow the community to decide on how to allocate millions of dollars of public funding.

As well as the YourSAy website, Katalyst Interactive worked with DPC to develop initiative sites for these initiatives;

Fund My Idea was a participatory budgeting initiative that ran 11 times between 2014 to 2017. It required a custom built participatory budgeting system and received over 447 ideas with $550k of public funds allocated to winning the projects chosen by the community
Fund My Community was a participatory budgeting initiative ran in 2016 and 2017. Over $2 million dollars of public funds were allocated to projects as voted by the community. Fund my community received international acclaim when it won a United Nations Public Service Award in 2017 for its community engagement achievements.
Fund my Neighbourhood is the largest participatory budgeting initiative ever ran in South Australia. Over 33,000 South Australian’s participated casting 122,000 votes. 1700 projects were submitted with the community voting allocating funding to 204 winning projects. Fund My Neighbourhood won the 2018 Australian Good Design award for Best In Class Digital Website.
Share was a 2014 initiative to engage the community to submit an idea for a business or social initiative that uses sharing economy principles. 190 ideas submitted with 2 winners allocated $100,000 public funding.
Simplify was the government’s red tape reduction initiative. 700 ideas submitted with 20 successful ideas.
Blockchain was a technology challenge where participants submitted ideas that were reviewed by a jury, shortlisted, and then presented on the pitch night. The initiative received 120 ideas, 10 finalists. 2 winners were allocated $100,000 of public funds.
Pirsa was an initiative to select candidates for a recreational fishing committee board. 55 candidates nominated with 5 successful. The initiative received over 1,400 votes. The initiative also leveraged the blockchain voting platform.

The Outcome

Katalyst has played a fundamental role in the strategic planning and implementation of the YourSAy Platform since its inception around 2011. The system has approximately 117,000 registered users, and almost 100 government agency users over 21 government departments.

Since 2011, Katalyst has continued to work with the South Australia Department of Premier and Cabinet to further develop and improve the platform over the last 7 years and the learning of the YourSAy and the many initiatives created have also influenced initiatives run by other states as well as winning awards nationally and internationally.