Commonplace and Waltham Forest win best stakeholder engagement Award

Digital engagement service, Commonplace and London Borough of Waltham Forest have won the award for best stakeholder engagement in planning at the Planning Magazine awards on 21st June. The award was made for Mini Holland, a visionary programme of integrated neighbourhood improvements to safety and convenience for all road users in the borough.

Mini Holland is made up of integrated neighbourhood schemes across the borough. Central to each neighbourhood was a comprehensive engagement process with Commonplace as its hub, around which pop-up events, community meetings and interviews were held. In total, over 25,000 local people took part, providing strong evidence as part of the planning process. Local people viewed the engagement as beneficial, and asked why they had responded, the most popular response was that it would improve the general environment – demonstrating that Mini Holland is meeting broad community needs.

Describing the reasons for making the award, the judges said that the Commonplace and Waltham Forest entry had won because of 'the impressive number of people involved in shaping their neighbourhood', describing it as 'the future of engagement'.

Commenting on the success, Mike Saunders, CEO and co-founder of Commonplace said: “We’re delighted to be recognised with this award. Our work with Waltham Forest is a great example of an innovative company helping local government to deliver excellent results. We’re seeing an increasing trend in customers wanting to capitalise on planning benefits of digital engagement as part of their strategy. Commonplace allows them to easily deliver high quality engagement that creates mutual benefit for the scheme and community.”

Vala Valavan, Director of Highways and Traffic Management at Waltham Forest said: “We’re particularly delighted to have been recognised by the Planning awards. Use of Commonplace has been central to the success of Waltham Forest in engaging local people effectively about our mini Holland project, and you see the benefit of that all way through the programme. As the judges indicated, I believe use of tools like Commonplace to improve engagement is the way forward.”

Launched in 2014, Commonplace is the leading online service for comprehensive engagement with communities about the places they live. It facilitates better planning decisions and enables cities and developers to reach the unheard majority in local communities.