The Commonplace 2024 wrap up

What a year it's been! While January feels like a distant memory now, we’ve taken a look back at the last 12 months and can scarcely believe all we’ve gotten up to. From hotly anticipated product features to our new range of eBooks and reports to some incredibly creative projects as made by our customers, we only thought it fitting to share our favourite moments with you. 

Throughout it all, our team would like to sincerely thank our customers and partners for their continued support and collaboration. Their insights and feedback have been instrumental in continuing to shape Commonplace as a platform that empowers people to create better places together.

So, what happened this year? Let’s give you the rundown. 

In numbers

 2024 marked 10 years of Commonplace! It was the perfect opportunity to take a look at our decade’s worth of impact as well as what we managed to achieve in a single year. Not only did we pass 9 MILLION visitors and 2500+ project launches in total but we took a deep dive into our data to see exactly how the Commonplace platform has helped our customers reach a much wider audience.

Download the full impact report here

Our favourite projects

This month saw the return of the Commonplace Awards where our team members nominated their favourite projects that were launched or updated this year. It was a tough decision with 2024 being a year of real change and creativity amongst out customers. Who were the winners? Take a look below…

🏆Most Innovative Project: Wandsworth Night Time Strategy

We present to you London's first nighttime strategy!

🏆Best Collaborative Project: Smart Docklands 

A powerful trio: Smart Docklands, CONNECT, and Dublin City Council join forces on a Commonplace consultation aimed at understanding how people feel about Smart Cities and Dublin Docklands. 

🏆Best Inclusion Effort: Milton Keynes New City Plan

Their ambitious new City Plan prioritised inclusive engagement and they did a LOT of leg work to ensure young people could have their say. 

🏆Biggest impact on the community: Your Fund Surrey

Surrey County Council's "Your Fund Surrey" is a community powerhouse going three years strong! 

🏆Best engagement: Basildon Waste

Your bins. Your say. Basildon Council is working to create a waste service that works for everyone! This project was also our best-performing one of the entire year.

🏆Best Closing the Loop Strategy: 

Project CAELUS: This project continues to impress with its communication strategy. As they explore the possibility of using drones as a new mode of medical transport, respondents and visitors to their Commonplace are constantly kept updated with news and updates and webinars. 

🏆Best Local Plan: South Downs Local Plan Review 

We love a Local Plan strategy and the South Downs National Park Authority have impressed with their recent work. 

🏆Best Regeneration Project: Mayfield Manchester:  

A project packed with information, we were impressed with the response to all the proposals added to the website.

🏆Best Renewable Energy Project: Highgrove Solar: 

RWE used their Commonplace to show how much they value the thoughts of the local community and are ensuring that these perspectives will be considered throughout the design process.

🏆Best Transport Project

Central Bedfordshire Rural Local Cycling and Walking Infrastructure Plan: We have to shout out the Heatmap here.

🏆Best Looking Project: New National Park Galloway

NatureScot’s stunning imagery helped them win big!

Trends AI: the launch of our in-house trained AI model

Did you miss out on our biggest product update of the year? 

How much time do you and your team spend identifying common themes and sentiments from free text questions? Hours? Days? Weeks? And are you confident that you can identify all the topics mentioned? Trends AI is here to take away this repetitive headache and save you time so that you can focus on the tasks where you can add the most value.

With years of specialised training on three million built environment contributions, our natural language processing model ensures accurate insights, surpassing generic models like Chat-GPT for dependable analysis (No need to worry about rogue outputs!).

• Theme analysis: Long answers? No problem. TrendsAI automatically uncovers the key topics and attaches them to answers so you can easily get to the heart of community wants and needs. You can even filter responses by specific themes.
• Sentiment analysis: With Natural Language Processing (NLP), sentiment towards certain topics can be easily identified, letting you see how people feel at a glance.
• 90%+ accuracy: Thanks to years of specialised training, our model is specially designed for built-environment consultations and to pull out the most accurate data for you.
• Summarisation: Rather than trawling through every answer, the model summarises all comments that fit a selected theme so you can get a quick overview of public sentiment.

Trends AI has been trained and optimised by our in-house data specialists to find topics in 5 different domains:

• Active Travel
• Housing (Development / Local Plans)
• Regeneration / Public Realm / Neighbourhood Maps
• Post-occupancy / Quality of Life
• Climate & Environment 

Find out more here

PDF Clipper

Slicing and sharing aspects of long PDFs can be a long (and often painful process). Getting the relevant information to the right teams can be a real headache. And analysing survey answers and PDFs separately? It's a lot of extra work. With our NEW PDF Clipper, it's never been easier. You can now highlight, slice, analyse and share key information from PDFs with ease.

Our new (and free!) eBooks and reports

It’s been a big year for reports as well. As always, they are completely free to peruse and designed to help you make the most of your next community engagement project.

7 tips for engaging young people:

Trust us when we say that if you're lacking young people in your engagements, it's not because they aren't interested. Those we have interviewed most commonly say that when they do not engage it is because they feel it is just a tick-box exercise. And what's worse, they also feel that they are not being listened to. In this quick guide, we have put together decades of engagement experience to give you 7 tips on how you can attract younger people to your next project. 

Download for free

Renewable Energy: The Official Digital Engagement Guide

This comprehensive guide, crafted by Charlotte Bowen, our Private Sector Lead for England and Ireland, showcases the pivotal work we’ve been doing in the renewable energy sector and why digital engagement is the way forward.

Download for free

AI in urban planning engagement and co-design (everything you should know!)

It's just a fact that artificial intelligence is already EVERYWHERE, including in urban planning and real estate development. When speaking to partners and customers on this, the same few questions surfaced time and again: 

• How is AI currently being used and how will it be used in the future?  
• What legalities surround the use of AI in planning?
• How will local authorities benefit from AI?

That's what we're here to answer.

Download for free

Brownfield urban regeneration: how to deliver more homes

The report, commissioned for British Land, Landsec and The Berkeley Group uses Commonplace data to highlight changing attitudes towards development and urge the government to move quickly to unblock planning barriers or risk missing its 1.5 million homes mission. Read our joint report to discover research on what the public truly wants from these areas and recommendations for how the government can reach its housing goals by utilising such areas.

Download for free

A Greener Tomorrow: Build a Thriving Climate & Nature Engagement

As of this year, 82% of local councils have declared a state of climate emergency.

Since digital community engagement is already playing a major role in expanding this conversation, we've put together a free guide packed with advice on how to get as many people as possible involved in your nature climate or nature project.

Download for free

Company highlights

And now it’s time for some personal highlights from our very own team!

“A personal highlight this year has been expanding our private sector client portfolio, especially collaborating with the Crown Estate and their comms teams on three significant regeneration and development projects. I'm excited about the opportunities this account presents in other areas, including marine and renewable energy. It's also been fantastic to see growing interest from renewable developers in using Commonplace for planning, with new and happy clients like RWE through Ardent and Ørsted joining us. Very proud of the tools and services we are providing clients including our 24x Add-ons.”

“I couldn’t be more proud that we once again won the Award for Use of Digital Technology in Planning at the Planning Awards 2024! PlanApps was a lot of hard work but we are so happy it’s been recognised this year.”

“UKREIIF was a highlight for me. Not only was it the biggest real estate event of the year but we also got to lead a fantastic panel about the future of AI in this industry.”

“Being part of a company that became a B Corp organisation which recognises the positive social impact we are having with customers and communities!”

“Seeing our map edit mode go live! This was a huge team effort to help our Engagement Partners curate the world's simplest GIS.”

And that’s a wrap on 2024! We’ll be back in 2025 with even more product highlights and fantastic launches- we can’t wait to see you then! We’ll be kicking things off with a webinar dedicated to discussing AI and engagement on 14th January, so why not sign up here?

Have a wonderful holiday season and a restful new year.