Digitally enabling project teams to better capture and analyse community sentiment

Harlow and Gilston Garden Town Digital Insight Support

Over the next decade, plans for Harlow and Gilston Garden Town (HGGT) include building over 23,000 new homes and associated infrastructure, as well as a rejuvenated town centre. The HGGT team, alongside the Quality of Life Foundation (QoLF), sought to better understand what community members wanted. The asked our team, a Crown Commercial Services Digital Outcomes 6 supplier, to help.

In 2022, we were asked help analyse data gathered from an extensive community-wide, digitally-led consultation. We interpreted hundreds of detailed community survey responses and aided in the development of a future digital monitoring framework to continue to track sentiment.

Discovering that the HGGT team’s data skills and digital tools needed support, we worked with them to access Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) PropTech funding. We worked alongside the HGGT team to help them fully understand the challenges they faced and explored digital prototype solutions. Additionally, we encouraged them to recruit new digital professionals to their team and introduced new tools, such as AI, to increase their efficiencies and data handling ability.

Through these efforts, the HGGT team remarked, 'It has been and continues to be an absolute pleasure to work with the Stantec team who bring creativity, innovation, open-mindedness, and skill to their approach every day—essential to working with such a complex partnership group including five local authorities, developers, community, members, consultants, and other key stakeholders.'

Ultimately, this project has improved their digital capabilities, and they now have a system in place to track and keep community members’ desires front of mind.