Getting your Budget Simulator up and running

Transcription

1 Getting your Budget Simulator up and running A quick start guide v2.0 August 2016

2 Introduction So you need to get your budget consultation up and running but you ve never used Budget Simulator before. Don t worry! This quick start guide will walk you through the basic steps of building your Budget Simulator. NB: this guide is not an exhaustive manual. It doesn t go into every detail or demonstrate every possibility. It s designed to be used in conjunction with the Budget Simulator knowledge base, which gives more detail on particular processes, is frequently updated and is fully searchable. Access the knowledge base at Look out for the yellow boxes! Each one contains links to more detailed instructions and information on a given topic in the knowledge base. Contents Some initial prep 2 Setup with your account manager 2 Get the financial information you need 2 Adding your content 3 Access the admin system 3 General settings 3 Policy Pages 4 Intro Page 5 Budget settings 7 Service groups 10 Consequences page 13 Demographics page 14 Thanks page 15 Are you ready to go live? 16 Preview 16 Testing phase 16 Go live! 17 Troubleshooting 18! 1 of 18!

3 Some initial prep Setup with your account manager Before getting going with your budget consultation, there are a few initial things to set up with your account manager. You ll need to provide them with: Your chosen URL for your Budget Simulator Your organisation s logo Your organisation s brand colours or the colours you want to use A banner image for the site Up to 10 demographics questions that you want your respondents to answer (e.g. age, occupation, ethnic background) Links to your social media pages, if appropriate Guidance on the set-up process See Get the financial information you need You ll need to do a little bit of research within your organisation to find the budgetary information you need. We recommend using the templates mentioned in the yellow box below to gather all the necessary facts and figures. You will need info on: The organisation s total target budget for the year or period you are consulting on. Up to seven service groups e.g. waste and recycling, education, parks and public spaces, taxation. These may be areas of income or expenditure. Up to six specific service items within each group e.g. library provision, adult education classes. Current spend or last year s spend on each service item. The spend per item doesn t need to add up to the total budget, since the budget for the consultation year may well be less than last year. Some potential consequences of reducing or increasing the spend on each service item. For instance, if you reduce spending on libraries by 10%, what will happen? Perhaps one library will have to close, or opening hours of all your libraries will be reduced. Useful help and templates Read more about service groups and items and download a useful template to fill in: Read more about consequences and download a template to help you gather the info you need: 2 of 18!

4 Adding your content Access the admin system Once your site s ready to use and you ve got the info you need, log into your Budget Simulator admin area. (The address will probably be something like yourorganisation.budgetsimulator.com/admin) Your account manager will have given you your login details over the phone when they deployed your site. General settings When you re logged in, click on the Settings button. The first page in this section is General Settings. Click through the four sections on the left to enter: The title of your consultation (e.g. Arlen Hill s Budget Challenge). The open and close dates between which the public can respond (you can extend the deadline later on if you want to). Your organisation s contact details these will appear in the right hand sidebar. The Analytics tracking code if you want to use Google Analytics. Make sure you click save changes each time before moving to the next section. Do I want to use Analytics? For guidance and further instructions on using Google Analytics, see 3 of 18!

5 Policy Pages This is the next section on the General Settings page. By law, your site needs to include an Accessibility Policy, Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy and Terms of Use. To make life easier for you, we have already filled out these pages with some standard text. You just need to add a couple of things specific to your organisation: Privacy Policy: It is important that you add your organisation s Privacy Policy to this page so that respondents know how you will use their data and any information they provide. You can either type your Privacy Policy out here or link to where it lives on your website. Terms of Use: We have entered the standard Delib Terms of Use here. We strongly recommend you use your own terms and conditions for this section, as they deal with the relationship between the organisation and the respondent. Again, you could link to the existing Terms of Use on your corporate website. Unsure about your policies? Please ask your account manager! 4 of 18!

6 Intro Page The next thing to fill out is your Intro Page. This introduction page is your homepage the first thing the public sees when they visit your budget simulator site. There are four text boxes on this page. The first one, Page heading is the title that will appear before your introductory text. The next one, Page body text is the short introduction shown on your homepage when your consultation is open. It s best to keep this brief so that visitors aren t put off by a huge amount of text. If you like, you can add links or embed a video to introduce your consultation. You probably have more to say about the budget consultation than you ll want to put on the homepage. You can explain things in more detail using the more info popup. Fill out the next text box and this extra information will appear if and when people want to click on it. Here s what a nice brief intro page looks like in action. Note the more info link.! 5 of 18!

7 The last box on this page is for the intro text that will show on your homepage after the consultation is closed. Keep this brief - you can update it to keep the public informed about what s going on now and what will happen next. Here s an example: Don t forget to click Save Changes when you ve filled out this page. Then preview what this page will look like to the public by clicking on the public URL listed at the top of the page. How do I embed a video? Find out how to embed a video or images on your Intro Page: 6 of 18!

8 Budget settings Click the Budget tab. Here s where you enter all your figures. First off is the Overview page. When you ve added all the figures for your service items (we ll come to that shortly), this page does the maths for you to check how far over the target budget you are and therefore what your respondents will have to achieve to balance the books. Enter your target fixed budget in the fixed budget for period box. The budget call to action is the heading that your users will see to remind them of their goal while they are completing the budget simulator. e.g. Your target is to reduce spending by 34m. Make sure this is brief and clear. Finally, you can tick the box to enable extended commenting. This will insert a comments box at the end of each service group section that your users can choose to complete, to add comments about the choices they have made for that particular service group. You will gather more qualitative data if you enable this feature - whether you want to do this or not probably depends on whether you will be able to make good use of it. There is always an opportunity for users to leave final comments at the end of the exercise before they submit their response. Don t forget to save your changes.! 7 of 18!

9 You can preview what your budget section will look like so far to visitors by typing in your URL/budget for instance, nottingham.budgetsimulator.com/budget. It will look something like this: Budget call to action Extended comments box Next, click on the Budget Target section. In the first box, enter the message that you would like to appear when a user has completed the challenge. e.g. You have balanced the budget. You then have the option to tick Enforce budget target. This is an important decision because it changes the nature of your consultation. If this box is ticked, people will only be able to submit their response to you if they manage to complete the challenge and balance the budget. If you don t tick this box, people can submit their response anyway, even if they don t manage to completely balance the budget or only fill out a few sections. You will gather more responses and more data with the box unticked, but the responses might not be quite as useful as they are not complete solutions to the budget challenge.! 8 of 18!

10 Save your changes. Again, you can preview how it s looking so far at your URL/budget The final section in Budget Settings is an option to change the currency, if you need to use euros or dollars instead of pounds.! 9 of 18!

11 Service groups This is where your budget simulator will really start to take shape. Click Add Group in the Service Groups section to see this screen: Add the name of one of your service groups in the Title box. e.g. Leisure. Mark this group as a source of either income or expenditure. The Scale boxes refer to the gradations that respondents will see on the budget simulator sliders: More about the sliders Read more about how the sliders and scales work at budgetsliders Add in numbers corresponding to the percentage changes that you want people to be able to make in this section. The example above ranges from -50% to +50%. The middle value does not have to be zero - if you want to weight your budget simulator towards expenditure cuts, your range could be from -50% to +10%, for example. Click Add Value to add more gradations to the slider. Click Submit to save this service group. Add all your service groups in the same way. (You should have no more than seven.) You can rearrange the order in which they appear on your simulator by clicking Set group order on the left hand side. We recommend putting the service group with the biggest expenditure at the top so that people start the challenge there.! 10 of 18!

12 Next, select one of your service groups: Click on Add Service to add your first service item. You ll see this screen: Add the title of your service item, and a brief description that the public will see. Make sure you use familiar terms that the general public will easily understand when explaining what this service does. In the next box, add your figure for last year s spend (or income) on this item. Fill in the following boxes with the consequences of making the various percentage changes to funding. The Summary text that you enter for each consequence will appear next to the slider.! 11 of 18!

13 If you like, you can enter a more detailed explanation of each consequence in the Full details box. If you add text here, a More link is displayed under your summary, which will display the longer explanation as a popup. When you ve filled everything out, press Submit at the bottom of the page to save. Go back to your service group and keep adding services until you have added all the service items for that group (up to six). Go through all your service groups adding all your services and consequences. NB At this point, make sure that the language used to describe all the consequences is consistent. You might have gathered these consequences from several different departments and staff members have a look through and tidy up the wording before you finalise the information, making sure that there s consistency in the terms used and the severity of the consequences given for the various levels of cuts. Save and keep previewing how it will look to the public at your URL/budget! 12 of 18!

14 Consequences page Once someone decides to finish and submit their response, they will see this screen, known as the Consequences Page: It summarises all the decisions they have made and their consequences, giving them a chance to make any further changes before they submit their final budget. Click on the Consequences Page tab to enter the text that you want to appear as an introduction at the top of this page. You might want to say something like: Take a moment to review the budget choices you have made and their consequences - when you re happy, press Submit Budget. Press Submit to save your changes.! 13 of 18!

15 Demographics page Just before finishing, your respondents will be presented with your demographics questions, and a chance to leave any final comments on how they found the exercise. Your demographics questions have already been added by your account manager. Click on the Demographics tab. Enter a title for this page, and a short introduction to the demographics questions. You should reassure people that this information is anonymous and explain why you would like to collect it. You can preview what this page looks like by clicking on the public URL at the top of the page. Remember to save your changes.! 14 of 18!

16 Thanks page When they ve submitted their budget, your respondents will see the thanks page. Click the Thanks Page tab to enter a heading and some text for this page: It s a good idea to thank people and explain that this was just a simulation. You should also tell people what you will do with their response - how will all the responses you gather help to inform your decisions as you set your new budget? How can they get an update on what happens next? You can preview what this page looks like by clicking on the public URL at the top.! 15 of 18!

17 Are you ready to go live? Preview You can preview most of the pages of your Budget Simulator (see above). To preview the section with the sliders, use yoururl/budget for instance, nottingham.budgetsimulator.com/budget Correct any obvious mistakes and save your changes. Testing phase We recommend that you publish your Budget Simulator (i.e. make it live ) but don t publicise it to anybody immediately. Instead, have a one-week testing phase where you ask some selected people to try it out for you. To publish your Budget Simulator, go to the Dashboard, and click the big green Open Consultation button. You ll be asked to confirm that your Intro Page text is correct. If everything looks good, go ahead and open the consultation. Send your URL to your testers privately. It s best to ask people who don t work with you, and people who don t know your organisation s jargon. Can they understand all of the instructions and the descriptions of your service items? Can they manage to balance the budget with a little time and effort, or is it is actually impossible? Note it is possible to create a Simulator that s impossible to complete, i.e. making the maximum spending cuts still does not reach the target. Do check that you haven t made this mistake before releasing it to the general public. Delete your test responses You'll want to remove the test responses from your data before going live. Here s how: deletetests! 16 of 18!

18 Go live! After a week or so of testing, tweaking and refining your Budget Simulator, you can finally launch it to the public. Enjoy! How to publicise your budget simulator Your budget simulator s success depends on as many people taking part as possible. Just because it s online doesn t mean anybody will find it! Read our Success Guide for advice on publicity and engagement: 17 of 18!

19 Troubleshooting Remember, if you re looking for help that s not covered by this guide, have a look through the Zendesk articles at If you re still stuck, or something seems to be playing up, you can always get in touch with us direct: Australia Canada UK USA New Zealand Worldwide info@delib.net! 18 of 18!