Photo: brimbank.vic.gov.au

Brimbank Mayor Cr Lucinda Congreve said that Council was extremely pleased to win a PIA award in the Public Engagement & Community Planning category.

“Council’s ‘Plan Brimbank’ engagement process, conducted earlier this year, demonstrates how a closely integrated campaign of both online and face- to-face engagement practices can complement each other and be used to strengthen the consultation approach.

“In a first in Brimbank’s consultation history, Plan Brimbank engaged with the community using a gamified online platform, resulting in record engagement numbers.

“The engagement was undertaken as a part of Council’s review of the Brimbank Planning Scheme, to help identify our community’s land use issues and development priorities.

“Brimbank partnered with Harvest Digital to create ‘Plan Brimbank’, a fun interactive game that asked for feedback across a number of broad land use and planning themes.

“The gamified approach made the consultation fun, quick and easy to understand, and the interactive game was also available in six languages to encourage widespread response from our diverse community,” Cr Congreve said.

The ‘Plan Brimbank’ game explored priorities under the themes of Housing and Neighbourhoods, Council Services, Shopping, Employment and Business, Getting around Brimbank, and Environment and Conservation.

The ‘player’ could choose their most important issue through the use of simple comparisons between a range of priorities, resulting in a final ranked list of their planning priorities. Each of the themes related to policy areas within the Municipal Strategic Statement.

Feedback was received from over 1900 participants, coming from over 100 different cultural backgrounds, with ages ranging from 15 years to over 80-years old. Data also showed that the most responses were from young people aged 15-25 years, which is a traditionally hard to engage group. Over 2800 games were played, and this data has provided Council with vital knowledge about our community in terms of the priorities for particular socio spatial groups. 

The online and face to face Plan Brimbank engagement collected a wide range of data to inform Council’s review of the Brimbank planning scheme, as well as other information that would be valuable to Council departments.

Council’s Plan Brimbank engagement will be considered for the PIA National Awards, to be announced on the Gold Coast on 15 May 2019.