Happy New Year and welcome to 2021! 2020 was a remarkable year, and most of us are happy to put it behind us. But despite its hardships 2020 was also a big year for the Harvest team and an even bigger year for digital engagement as a whole, so we thought we'd take some time to reflect on the previous 12 months and what we've achieved.

No one saw 2020 coming. Australia was battling blazing bushfires and then floods across the country, and we hoped 2020 would provide a reprieve and a chance to recover. Covid-19 happened instead.

Luckily, in late 2019, Harvest implemented remote-first working processes across our company, so we could respond very quickly to CV-19, and assist our customers in using The HiVE to digitally-support and engage their communities in times of crisis.

In the challenging early days of CV-19, we collaborated with the Engage Victoria team to produce guidelines to replicate face-to-face activities online, which provided options for engaging communities online.

Our team responded immediately to the crisis by launching our online Learning Centre to support our customers and quickly developing and releasing a number of new features to fill the void of losing face-to-face capability. These features included a Zoom integration, real-time commenting, private project enhancements, new survey capability and additional options in our moderation system.

We were inspired by the work that organisations like Canada Bay, Canterbury Bankstown Gladstone and the San Diego Food Safety Alliance did in the early days of the crises - connecting and communicating with their communities in new and meaningful ways.

Our customers in Victoria suffered from two lockdowns, the second 100-day stretch pushing everyone to their limit. However, we were inspired by the creativity and innovation that resulted. Banyule City Council’s Recipe for a good life project was a silver lining.

Melbourne Water’s Waterway Blitz project encouraged engagement and participation on an environmental project that captured the hearts and minds of the community. They were also recognised by IAP2 for their work in community engagement work in 2020 - winning Australaisan Organisation of the Year.

In Victoria, the revised Local Government Act 2019 challenged our government clients to reassess their community engagement practices, fueled by the requirements to provide more deliberative forms of engagement. A special shout out to City of Casey and City of Yarra for their innovative digital engagement work in seeking input from their communities at scale.

The HiVE supported engagement on large, infrastructure and planning projects to ensure communities were consulted, and projects moved along. Organisations like Engage Victoria, City of Melbourne, QLD Department of Transport and Main Roads, Tilt Renewables and the City of Pittsburgh set a new standard in what is possible with digital engagement in their respective sectors. Our digital tools supported city planners and designers to conduct meaningful place-based engagements in their communities.

We also released the first version of our AI-driven Assisted Analysis tools which take some of the pain out of analysing qualitative responses. These tools are especially useful when your survey results exceed expectations, or you have large volumes of feedback to summarise.

During the crises, we were invited into our customers' homes via Zoom to continue our work together. We will never forget the meetings shared with bubs in laps, hubbies delivering tea and piano lessons all happening simultaneously. We know how tough it has been, and we are so proud of the meaningful outcomes that were achieved this year despite of the enormous challenges we faced.

With 2020 finally over, we're looking forward to continuing our work with our existing customers, meeting new ones and building on the positive outcomes from last year. We think 2021 will be another big year for the digital engagement industry and we’re already hard at work developing and testing a new batch of exciting features to bring your practice to the next level.

Recommended holiday reading - Deliberative Engagement: How governments can enable citizens to lead decision making