Search engine - finding consultations and results and outcomes. Built into eConsult is a very powerful search engine. This allows the consultee to easily find and participate in a consultation.

They can search by:

Consultation Status (current, proposed, closed, results published)
Subject
Partner (viewing partners' consultations)
Keyword
Сonsultation dates.

You have total control over the welcome text, images, branding, hyperlink labels and email alerts.

Providing key information at the right time, in the right place. From the detailed consultation page a link will appear - "Background Documents" where the consultee can view all these files which are associated with your consultation.

eConsult Calendars - keeping you literally up to date and very well organised Both consultor and the consultee have consultation calendars. Allowing both to visually see When consultations start and end and plan accordingly.

Powerful and flexible survey creation, real time analysis. Best response comes when you make the interrogation process meaningful. Interrogation? Yes! Too often responding to surveys can feel like torture! Relentless, impersonal, mechanical - leading to indifferent or dubious results. eConsult surveys are powerful but user friendly. They encourage and enable intelligent response. Of course, you have all the functionality you need but you also are in complete control of context.

Powerful and flexible survey creation, real time analysis. Best response comes when you make the interrogation process meaningful. Interrogation? Yes! Too often responding to surveys can feel like torture! Relentless, impersonal, mechanical - leading to indifferent or dubious results. eConsult surveys are powerful but user friendly. They encourage and enable intelligent response. Of course, you have all the functionality you need but you also are in complete control of context.

Populate question and answer libraries to save time when creating your survey. Also a store of best practice.

Each consultation and survey can have their own branding - allowing you to give each consultation its own identify.

A very good feature, allows reflection by users before sending responses. Of course a participant can also print out their responses.

It may be appropriate to do this and it is under admin control. Particularly valuable rersponses can be displayed – just a click away. Of course we very often learn from others, and when appropriate, seeing what others have said is instructive.

If consultees have only completed part of the consultation/survey - this great feature allows you to turn their incomplete response into a completed response, which you can then analyse.

Participants can save their submission half way through and continue at a later date.

Many consultations can be in stages. eConsult allows you to link one consultation to another. This informs the consultee (and consultor!) of previous realted activity.

Enabling large and complex documents to be broken up into sections and accessed at the right time, when answering a specific question.

If a consultee isn't behaving, you can quickly disable their account and stop them from participating.

eConsult has a feature in which you can enter responses you've collected offline - easily integrating online and offline responses.

eConsult allows you to create a survey on its own! If you don't require your audience to register - you can simply generate a URL and email your survey!

Easily create special interest groups. Groups can be experts, or citizens, or stakeholders. The can be consulted by you or speak to each other, sharing ideas, experience and knowledge, You will benefit from such emphasis on dialogue which will inform your subsequent decisions.

eDecide is another very useful tool to offer perspective and look at all the angles in an issue. We all know that many issues (any issue?) may not be black or white. So that explaining the options, the advantages and disadvantages can be very helpful.

eDecide resembles a poll in that it poses a question and respondents can answer yes or no (or don't know). However, rather than just a result diagram/bar chart being displayed, the system presents arguments for or against the issue, based on the user's choice/decision.

We have found that you need a combination of methods of interaction and response gathering to provide a fulfilling experience for participants. Of course we must have surveys, and the more carefully constructed the better, but being able to provide dialogue and flexible ways for people to decribe their experiences, agree or disagree, rate another post - all that is important

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. That is a fancy term for enabling you to automatically get updates when web site content changes. You get fed the new material. But you can use eConsult RSS feeds to place links in other parts of your site or on partners sites or sites whose audience you wish to be involved in your consultation. Its RS (really Simple).

Enabling participants to enter their profile information and for that data to be analysed as part of the consultation process is extremely important. This allows you to contact them in advance of a consultation which is of interest. Total personalisation – the right email, the right information at the right time.

It’s easy to produce powerful reports in eConsult – on both quantitative and qualitative data. Reports that help you learn what people need, want or prioritise.

eConsult allows you to highlight very important consultations at the top of the consultation list, so that there is no chance they will be missed. You can highlight as many consultations as you wish.

From Admin you can create multiple accounts for managers and co-ordinators. Admin can give different access rights to different consultation managers. Very simple to do and very handy to have help from colleagues in relation to adding consultations.

It is very important to be able to alert, prompt and generally communicate with your target audience in the right way and at the right time. Participants enjoying being kept in the loop - before, during and after the consultation is closed ... and of course when results are published. That is how trust in the process is built. eConsult makes it easy to do.

Results, raw data, lists of consultees – any data, any time, any way.

Once archived any consultation can be retrieved and made live. Archive and un-archive at a click!.

In eConsult forums you can rate posts and report on levels of agreement and consensus. You can link posts to participant profiles and book mark important ones for your report . In short, forums become a feed to decision making, not simply a chat room.

eConsult is personalised. Good navigation – participants knowing what, when, how - means better responses and a much more satisfied audience, who, being well treated, will come back for more. Increasing your responses, reducing your costs is the result.

eConsult can be deployed simultaneously in two languages should that be a requirement. Participants have the option of responding in the language of their choice.

Consultors are, more often than not, also consultees. eConsult’s Consultation Responder module makes orchestrating your response to a consultation very efficient, saving time while enabling all viewpoints to be inclusively validated by relevant experts or stakeholders.