2019 was a big year for both The HiVE as a platform and for our User Community.

Over the course of the year, 681 engagement projects were launched across three countries and over 25,000 pieces of feedback were collected, while our customers grew their memberships by nearly 40,000. We love seeing our User Community making the most of the tools and features available and we were proud to see the outstanding results you achieved throughout the year.

Our upgrades focussed on Usability, Automation and Reporting, further improving your ability to engage your community and create dynamic content and great online experiences.

Major improvements to mapping tools

We made some big changes to the Social Map and Web Map tools, helping you take your spatial engagements and projects beyond what has been possible before.

The overhauled Social Map and Web Map now allow you to draw feature layers such as shapes or lines, or drop feature pins to denote specific areas of interest or important places. You can also now add content pop-ups for a richer experience. This gives you the advantage of being able to inform your community about your project, as well as gathering information from them.

We also overhauled the tools’ User Interface, introducing a bigger, more easily navigable interface that allows you to preview your map changes. This UI makes it quicker and easier to create great-looking maps that invite participation and communicate detail.

We also made some changes to the way maps behave for mobile users to improve the interface and provide a smoother user experience.

The new Web Map features fast-loading, vector-based maps with the ability to personalise your map through 10 new base maps, the ability to upload and draw complex map layers with pop-up information panels and support for 3D maps. This upgrade brings the Web Map into line with previous improvements to the Social Map.

The improvements to your mapping capabilities means you can connect with, inform and engage your community in highly visual, interactive ways. You can illustrate your plans, inform people about changes or big ideas in a spatial way and provide an exceptional user experience that brings your audience along on the journey and inspires them to provide their feedback.

Introducing Mailer

We were thrilled to announce the introduction of new mailer functionality to The HiVE. This represented a big upgrade to the platform, providing email services akin to eDM solutions such as Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor, but seamlessly integrated into the architecture of the platform.

New features include list management, visibility over automated campaigns, the ability to create manual campaigns and campaign reporting so you can track the success of your email communication.

The Mailer makes it easy to manage your communications across the platform, continuously engage your members, and maintain visibility of subscriber lists and campaigns sent from the platform. This is a great way to automate your community building actions and make the most of interest lists and project followers.

Events features

We introduced a new way to promote your face to face events, allowing you to better integrate your traditional and digital activities with Events. The Events feed displays a clear Events card with an associated Events page to promote face to face events.

Events pages display an image, venue information, a map of the location and a prominent call to action button that can be used to link to third party event management services.

The Events Feed tool allows you to display an attractive feed of events, with options to filter events by selected projects, project status or event type.

And best of all, the Events tool is integrated into the ‘Follow’ functionality, allowing you to automatically send a notification of the new event to your followers.

Event pages give you the opportunity to create engaging invitations for your events, set up pre-event participation activities, and ensure your community has all the information it needs to attend one of your face-to-face events.

Hotspot

The new Hotspot tool added a new way to create highly engaging interactive content to your projects. The tool allows you to add interactive annotations on a background image along with explanatory text, images and videos. Your users interact with each hotspot by clicking or touching them, which then opens a popup allowing them to view the content. Where images and videos are added, these can be expanded into a full screen for a more immersive experience.

Hotspots can be customised with a range of colours, sizes and thousands of different icons, and even animated to make clicking on them irresistible.

This tool opens up a whole world of options, including creating interactive plans, annotating illustrations, artists impressions or photographs. Hotspot has already been adopted by many of our premium customers as a favourite tool, as it allows you to take your images and bring them to life, adding additional meaning and information and crafting beautiful and sophisticated online experiences for your community members.

Facts

Sometimes, you want to communicate some striking facts or statements to your audience. The new Facts tool allows you to highlight key facts and display them as fact cards, either by themselves or in a ‘wall’. Key words or phrases can be coloured to make them stand out and a source section allows you to provide references for your facts.

The Facts tool is a great way for you to take the key messages or pieces of information and highlight them in a fun, colourful and visually appealing way. You can start your project with a list of key facts about it, or even a wall of quotes from ‘what we heard from the community’ with sources. This tool invites you to get creative and pull key information points out of blocks of text and bring them to life.

Improvements to Gather reporting

We were excited to release a significant update to our popular Gather tool. We introduced a new reporting dashboard with a range of new metrics to help you better understand the overall performance of the tool.

The report is available in the Results section of the Reporting area, and includes three key sections containing various information: Summary, Overview and Data. This format brings Gather’s reporting capabilities in line with the popular upgrades we previously made to Form reporting.

We’ve made several improvements to The HiVE’s reporting capabilities over the last few years and this is the latest, allowing you to take what you’ve learned from the community and communicate it back with illustrative, highly visual and ready-to-present reports. We think these new reports increase the value of this powerful tool, allowing you to go beyond flat data exports and illustrate feedback in a visually engaging way, as well as gain valuable insights on the analytics and performance of individual Gather tools to inform future activities.

Thank you!

This is a good opportunity to pause and say thank you to our customers for making 2019 such a wonderful year - together we provided more people the opportunity to engage, contribute and participate in their communities.

We were thrilled to grow our User Community, including helping several customers migrate and upgrade from other platforms. Our customers’ successes are our passion, and it has been exciting to watch so many people take The HiVE and achieve remarkable outcomes, crafting engaging experiences and helping citizens participate meaningfully in the future of their communities. We look forward to celebrating your successes in 2020 and beyond!

If you have any questions in relation to our new features and how to apply them, please do not hesitate to reach out to us - we would love to discuss ideas with you. Please contact your Account Manager for assistance.