Budget Consultation Market Research

Budget Consultation Market Research

Understanding the views of residents and businesses is critical to inform decision-making and help assess the potential wider impacts of budget settlements. As a specialist community research and consultancy practice, a key priority for us is to make a positive difference to organisations and wider society and thus we can assist with both traditional survey based budget consultation market research as well as providing support and insight in to the design of a programme, and undertaking more formative work through our participatory budgeting approach.

In response to pressing budgetary questions that have emerged, we have developed a range of solutions to make sure that communities can have a clear voice regarding the decisions that will affect them in the financial year, so that councils can make informed choices.

To support this process, we can deliver a survey of your residents, speaking to a representative sample of residents in your area, or we can use a participatory budgeting approach. This latter approach involves designing, recruiting and running workshops or deliberative online communities to identify and understand residents’ service priority areas and the importance they attribute to discretionary services. In these sessions, or over a period of around a week via an online community, we lead a discussion on a range of key services and the pressures currently faced by councils. This discussion is then followed by brainstorming of solutions and culminates in a trade-off style exercise where participants can allocate where funding should go.

We have completed specific budget consultation projects recently for a range of local authority cliients including:

However, we also have extensive knowledge of the local government sector to support our wider contextualisation of findings. These include experience acrosss a range of service areas such as:

• Measuring resident perceptions and priorities
• Community cohesion and social capital
• Engaging business, residents and stakeholders to inform Local Plans / Transport Plans
• Analysis of general consultation feedback to shape service design and planning decisions
• Active travel
• Measuring health behaviours, expectations and needs – working with Public Health teams.

We also have a strong record of delivering employee engagement research within local authorities and of measuring satisfaction with social housing services. Our wider clients in the local government sector include: