Digital public engagement is a web-based approach to traditional public engagement that incorporates social media, email and content marketing, and often an electronic means for receiving and managing input from clients, citizens or other stakeholders.
Like its traditional counterpart, the goal of digital public engagement is to foster an environment of genuine interaction and understanding between a company, government agency or other organization, and those affected by the decisions they make or the policies they pursue. This is achieved by creating efficient channels to involve outside parties in the decision-making process for the purpose of developing more effective solutions than might otherwise be reached independently.
Many different forms of digital public engagement are commonly combined to ensure the deepest penetration possible in an organization’s stakeholder base. For example, a client survey might be posted on an agency’s website, but also announced via links sent in a series of Tweets, a Facebook post and an email newsletter. On the back-end, that same agency might further enrich the process by employing software to analyze the results of the survey and even to provide a forum for the agency to respond to those who answered the survey.