Public engagement made clear. Share plans, collect comments, map feedback, surveys, updates, and results in one place.

Community Engagement

Ask a whole community what it wants to become.

Visioning usually fails in the same place: hundreds of good answers, a theme board built by hand, and a promise that the input will shape the plan. Tortoise 40 keeps each answer attached to the question, the place and the person who gave it.

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01The challenge

Three things that go wrong

01
Open questions, uncountable answers
A comment box produces paragraphs that have to be re-read and re-sorted before anyone can say what the community asked for. The counting happens by hand, at the end, under time pressure.
02
The room is not the community
An evening workshop reaches the people with the evening free. The residents the plan is most trying to reach are the ones most likely to miss it.
03
The input does not survive the process
Six months later the vision statement is written by the consultant, and the input sits in a folder nobody opens again. There is no line from what was said to what was decided.

02Where Tortoise helps

Four products, one record.

Each part of the platform does one job in the sequence, and the record stays in the same project throughout.

Tortoise Discover

A public project page that opens from any link with no account, no download and no sign-in, so a QR code on a printed card reaches the same engagement as a link in a newsletter.

Tortoise Shell

The questions themselves: a short survey, a map activity for the places people love or avoid, and a document review when the draft vision comes back for comment.

Tortoise Intelligence

Drafts the themes that the collected comments carry, with the comments behind each one, for a person to review, correct and keep or discard.

Tortoise Studio

When the round needs boards, exhibits or a designed What We Heard document, the Studio team produces it with the project.

03The workflow

One visioning round, end to end

Five stages, and one record that carries all of them.

01
Set four questions, not forty
What to keep, what to change, where, and what would make the biggest difference. Each question has a closing date, and each answer is a form the page can count.
02
Publish the project page
The map and the survey sit on the same page under one address. It is public on purpose: a resident should not need an account to describe their own neighbourhood.
03
Take the same link into the room
At an open house, people answer on their own phone rather than on a worksheet. Nothing is typed up afterwards, because the answer already arrived as data.
04
Read what arrived, in the words it was said
Comments come back grouped by question and by place, with the original wording intact. A reviewer reads the comments rather than a summary of them.
05
Publish what was heard
A short results page with the counts, the themes and the comments that carry them, so the community can see the input it gave and check it against the draft.