Nonprofit Organization – Ethelo

Diabetes Canada

case-study — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 00:03:09 +0000

Ethelo Engagement to Inform Canada’s National Diabetes Framework

When the Canadian Government passed an act (Bill C-237) to establish a National Framework for Diabetes in June 2021, it imposed a tight deadline for public engagement. The Minister of Health was required to table a report in Parliament within one year of the bill receiving Royal Assent, meaning that capturing public input would be essential but also time-sensitive. Involving citizens and people with a lived experience of diabetes was a top priority to ensure the final framework accurately reflected the real-world challenges and ideas of those affected.

However, public consultation was delayed by the 2021 election, compressing the timeline even further. Traditional engagement platforms could not feasibly gather broad-based feedback and produce real-time, actionable insights at the speed required. Instead, the Public Health Agency of Canada partnered with the SFU Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue and the Ethelo engagement platform to reach more people faster, providing “a much stronger voice of people with lived experience than we got in either our key informant interviews or our online dialogues,” as Dr. Diane T. Finegood (SFU Professor and Fellow) explains.

884 people
participated in the engagement

91% of respondents prioritized access to medicine, medical devices, and financial support, followed by better tools for self-management (80%) and improvements in care delivery (70%

Dr. Diane T. Finegood

Professor

Health Agency of Canada to develop a comprehensive plan that included:

Key Informant Interviews: Gathering insights from diverse stakeholders and experts.
Virtual Dialogue Sessions: Facilitating discussion on issues and challenges related to diabetes.
Online Survey via Ethelo: Extending engagement to citizens across Canada to capture their perspectives.

These activities aimed to increase the Public Health Agency of Canada’s understanding of the challenges, priorities, and recommendations of people living with or impacted by diabetes. With the parliamentary deadline looming, the team needed a tool that could deliver real-time, transparent results to ensure participant feedback could quickly inform the national framework. According to Dr. Finegood, “that real-time transparency was very important because we knew we couldn’t finish the process and have the reports fast enough to meet the needs of the Public Health Agency. If the input of participants was going to influence the framework, then they would have to be able to see the results as they were coming in.”

The Value of Qualitative Data

Adapting the discussion guide from the dialogue sessions for the online platform, Ethelo provided both English and French versions of the survey. Over 800 people took part, contributing more than 5,000 comments during the five weeks it was open. These comments validated themes from earlier interviews and dialogues but also revealed new insights about how Canadians living with or affected by diabetes truly felt. Reflecting on this breadth of feedback, Dr. Finegood notes that “the comments were incredibly rich and the fact there were so many helped us validate some of the things we’d heard in the dialogue.”

Ethelo’s design allowed participants to see and respond to others’ comments, facilitating a dynamic dialogue rather than a static questionnaire. The project team—responsible for proposing elements of the national framework—could access evolving results in real time, enabling immediate integration of the findings. Dr. Finegood underscores the importance of this feature: “I think it was very valuable that people could see other people’s comments, could see what they rated highly, could look at the distribution. That immediate feedback to the participant provides them with valuable insight.”

To manage the volume of feedback, Ethelo’s team analyzed a representative sample of 2,000 comments, categorizing them into key themes such as access to interprofessional health care, diabetes awareness and education, lifestyle-related stigma, and differentiating between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. This analysis, Dr. Finegood explains, “reinforced the importance to people with Type 1 to not talk about diabetes but to talk about Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes as very different diseases. It’s not one thing,” underscoring the need to distinguish the two conditions when discussing stigma, prevention, and care.

Influencing the Framework

By the end of the engagement, about 55% of respondents reported having personal experience with diabetes or caring for someone who did—significantly amplifying the lived-experience voice in the final recommendations. Healthcare professionals, researchers, advocates, and private sector stakeholders also participated, creating a comprehensive view of differing priorities. As Dr. Finegood puts it, “theming of those comments was helpful in building the narrative in the report and understanding where the narrative came from. i.e. people with a lived experience had a particular point of view.”

Key priorities identified through the survey included prevention, care delivery, self-management, research, and access to medical and financial support. Notably, 91% of respondents prioritized access to medicine, medical devices, and financial support, followed by better tools for self-management (80%) and improvements in care delivery (70%). Real-time data allowed the framework’s authors to incorporate these insights while the survey was still active, ensuring the voices of participants helped shape the final report. “There is a strong similarity between the content of our what-we-heard report and what went into the framework…The report has had an impact on the framework,” remarks Dr. Finegood.

Finally, the wealth of data gathered offers a rich foundation for future policy and advocacy efforts. “There is such a richness of data that was collected that we don’t want to lose it. We need to determine how to summarize this in ways that will be useful in future and used for the next stage of engagement,” notes Dr. Finegood.

Conclusion

By leveraging Ethelo’s real-time transparency and capacity to capture extensive qualitative feedback, the project team successfully engaged a broad cross-section of Canadians in under five weeks. In doing so, they met legislative timelines, incorporated the lived experiences of those most affected by diabetes, and informed a national framework with concrete, data-driven insights. A summary of this engagement can be found

This case study shows how innovative engagement platforms, combined with thoughtful dialogue guides and structured analysis, can yield meaningful public input—even under tight deadlines—and ensure that key policy decisions are grounded in the voices of those they aim to serve. A summary of the overall engagement can be found on the Government of Canada’s website, describing all the phases of the engagement, including Ethelo’s contributions.

“Ethelo was very valuable because it gave us a much stronger voice of people with lived experience than we got in either our key informant interviews or our online dialogues.”
– Dr. Diane T. Finegood, SFU Professor and Fellow

Joint Strategic Planning

case-study — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 02:21:53 +0000

Collaborative Strategy Redesign: PHS Engages Staff with Ethelo Platform

After a major leadership shift, Vancouver’s Portland Hotel Society embraced a collaborative approach to strategic planning using Ethelo. The goal was to prioritize initiatives while addressing staff resistance to change. Ethelo’s seamless forum enabled over 90 staff members across multiple locations to vote and comment on proposals, blending their perspectives with operational constraints.

The process built confidence and support among staff while providing directors with clear insights into the most well-supported initiatives across five strategic areas. By streamlining engagement, Ethelo saved significant time, delivering immediate value and fostering a sense of shared purpose among the team. This participatory method ensured strategic decisions were grounded in both staff input and organizational priorities.

3600 scenarios
evaluated

88% support
for plan

Eamonn O’Laocha

Interim Executive Director

The Portland Hotel Society (PHS)

The Portland Hotel Society (PHS) is one of Vancouver’s largest advocates and service providers for disadvantaged populations in the downtown core. It is renowned for creating and overseeing Canada’s first Safe Injection Site, Insite, and pioneering many areas of health outreach for marginalized populations.

Despite its laudable achievements, financial irregularities forced PHS to bring in an entirely new management team and board of directors. Recognizing the significant organizational changes, the interim Executive Director initiated a highly participatory approach to strategic decision-making, aiming to engage both directors and staff in creating a shared vision for the organization’s future.

The Challenge

The former PHS management was dynamic and highly innovative, inspiring a passionate and dedicated staff. However, the newly hired executive team introduced a more stable but bureaucratic approach, creating a clash of cultures between leadership and approximately 400 staff members.

PHS needed a fresh start and a way to manage change that could build unity and buy-in, compensating for the challenges arising from the sudden management transition. The engagement of over 400 staff members was further complicated by their distribution across multiple locations and varied programs. In-person meetings risked fostering “group-think” and excluding less vocal employees, potentially hampering implementation success.

To address these issues, PHS turned to Ethelo, an open, interactive platform for strategy design.

The project called for staff and board input into five core areas requiring strategic attention.

Staff-Driven Ideation

A staff focus group generated initial ideas that were used to seed the Ethelo platform. These ideas were vetted by the executive team and distilled into 12 potential initiatives across five strategic areas. For example, in the “Advocacy” area, initiatives included:

Hiring an outreach worker.
Creating partnerships.
Researching the business case for a street market.

Each initiative was uploaded to Ethelo for rating and commentary. To ensure inclusivity, the platform allowed staff to add additional suggestions. The executive team reviewed these new suggestions, approving actionable ones for general evaluation by all staff. One such approved suggestion was hiring an Aboriginal outreach worker.ç

Management-Driven Constraints

While staff input identified potential initiatives, the executive team ensured ideas were actionable within organizational resources. Initiatives were evaluated based on:

Effort Units: The intensity of work required.
Time to Accomplish: How long completion would take.
Funding Mode: Donations, grants, or partnerships.
Stand-Alone or Partnered: The need for collaboration.

This information guided staff in prioritizing initiatives.

Engagement and Results

Of the 435 PHS staff members invited, 88 participated in the strategic evaluation, providing an overall participation rate of 20%. Participants voted on an average of 73% of the initiatives and contributed 12 additional suggestions. Each initiative received an average of 6.7 comments, fostering a collaborative atmosphere.

The platform ensured inclusivity and avoided the pitfalls of traditional surveys. Interim Executive Director Eamonn O’Laocha commented:
“Using Ethelo allowed us to overcome the limitations of engaging the organization’s staff in a collaborative, manageable, and timely manner. This enabled us to identify a relevant and congruent strategic direction for the organization.”

Optimizing for Support and Viability

Given limited resources, PHS needed feasible strategic scenarios. Management estimated the required effort level for each initiative, with Ethelo ensuring all plans adhered to a maximum of 30 effort units. This reduced 8,000 potential scenarios to 3,689, ranked by staff support. Ultimately, the optimal plan consisted of nine initiatives with 88% organizational support, all within the 30-unit effort budget.

Estimated Time and Cost Savings

Ethelo brought significant efficiency gains. Staff saved an estimated four hours compared to standard surveys due to the platform’s ease of use and integrated commentary. Management saved an additional 22 hours by streamlining analysis and initiative shortlisting. These efficiencies resulted in a 35% cost savings compared to other methods.

PHS quickly implemented one of Ethelo’s validated recommendations. O’Laocha emphasized:
“Taking the first step in strategy development was about connecting to the shared wisdom of the many capable and innovative people in the organization. Limitations in our ability to engage would have directly hampered our strategic possibilities.”

“Using Ethelo allowed us to overcome limitations in engaging the organization’s staff in a collaborative, manageable and timely manner. This allowed us to identify a relevant and congruent strategic direction for the organization.”

Eamon O’Laocha, PHS Interim Executive Director

Member Priorities

case-studies — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 23:40:37 +0000

Gen Squeeze: Ethelo Drives Member Impact

Following its mandate to advocate for the interests of millennials, GenSqueeze needed to shortlist between 36 initiatives popular among its members. The organization needed a platform that would allow not only to vote on what was important to them, but also to add comments and build on other people’s thoughts. The process needed to be transparent and guarantee that constituents felt truly heard.

400
participants

36 potential
initiatives

Erin Robinson

Vancity Mentor

Generation Squeeze is a Canadian advocacy organization supported by the Vancity Community Foundation, with a mandate to advance the interests of Millennials.

The Millennial generation is on a tight budget: housing prices have skyrocketed, career opportunities are increasingly competitive, and healthy food is hard to find. In pursuit of its mandate, GenSqueeze needed to distill and then shortlist from among 36 initiatives popular amongst its constituents. These included such items as life insurance, car shares, child care, and health assistance.

Process

Following several focus groups where initial possibilities were identified, GenSqueeze used Ethelo to extend the conversation to its 25,000 members. During a two-week period, the platform was open to public voting, allowing more than 400 participants to have their say and propose additional suggestions. In this case, the response rate to invitations was 30%.

Results

With limited staff and resources, GenSqueeze needed to move beyond “nice-to-haves” to pragmatic offerings with maximum member impact. For this purpose, each of the 36 potential initiatives was assigned a certain amount of “effort units” based on the amount of human and capital resources required to bring it into action. GenSqueeze staff determined that they had a maximum organizational capacity of 30 “effort units” to expend on realizing any package of initiatives.

Ethelo’s algorithm was deployed to find the overlap between what members wanted, how much they wanted it, and what was actually feasible given GenSqueeze’s limited staff-time and budget. Once each option was assigned a level of staff effort, Ethelo applied the overarching “effort unit” constraint to shortlist the billions of theoretically possible benefit packages down to 126,000 practically actionable packages. These packages Ethelo then ordered from highest to lowest member popularity.

“Our group, Generation Squeeze, is a national lobby group for folks in their 40s and younger, and we operate with very few resources. This means it’s difficult for us to find the opportunities to dialogue about the important issues facing our constituents. Ethelo’s platform allowed our folks to not only vote on what was important to them, but also to add comments and build on other people’s thoughts. The transparency was appreciated and our constituents really felt heard.”

Erin Robinson

“Ethelo’s platform allowed our folks to not only vote on what was important to them, but also to add comments and build on other people’s thoughts. The transparency was appreciated and our constituents really felt heard.”

Erin Robinson

Regional Transportation Policy

case-studies — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 03:30:12 +0000

Community-based public policy reform to ensure equitable transit fare structure

He Metro Vancouver Alliance (MVA), representing over 300,000 people through 60 organizations, used Ethelo to conduct a “listening campaign” on six transit issues. This input informed a policy platform advocating fair transit rates, which MVA presented to TransLink during its fare structure review, ensuring community-driven decision-making.

60 community
groups

1.2M
travelers daily

Deborah Littman

Lead Organizer, MVA

Community Engagement Coordinator

As the climate continues to change, water security is an issue that’s front of mind for governments everywhere. It’s a big topic in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, Australia—where water is becoming an increasingly scarce resource. Hunter Water, the community’s state-owned water provider, has been working on a plan to ensure the region has sufficient water supplies for a sustainable future.

Community engagement has been a big part of creating that plan. Over the past three years, Hunter Water’s Community Engagement Coordinator Clare Hogue and her team have used various methods to consult with residents, including online surveys, forums, drop-in sessions and a community liaison group.

“It’s about how water is going to be supplied to our community in the future, and it’s important that people understand the various benefits and costs associated with each of the options we were considering,” Hogue explains.

She adds that polarization amongst residents has been a big challenge during the consultations, as it is for many communities.

After the COVID 19 pandemic struck in early 2020, in-person engagement became a challenge, and online surveys weren’t cutting it. So Hogue went looking for a way to engage and educate people online that also helped reduce polarization. She found Ethelo.

“Ethelo is much more dynamic visually and allows much more complexity in how we’re approaching the community and getting their feedback than a straight online survey with Likert scale responses,” Hogue notes.

Getting a clear picture of community views

The Hunter Water team used Ethelo to get feedback from residents on seven preliminary portfolio options they had developed based on their previous engagement efforts.

The question they asked was: What kind of water security plan would you like to see for the Lower Hunter?

“We asked people for their preferences about water security packages and relative bill impacts, combined with what they supported across the seven portfolios,” Hogue says.

“Ethelo helped people trade-off levels of investment as well as program and project objectives. So they understood how choosing one option over another impacted the program more widely. It gives a clear picture, and we could have more certainty that the information we were getting was a true reflection of their views because they were really well informed.”

She adds that Ethelo was one part of a mixed-method approach her team used. The trends found in the Ethelo data were similar to outcomes from the previous work, giving her team confidence that they fully understood the community’s views.

“You can have more information in Ethelo than in any other program I’ve seen. So you can feel your respondents are well informed when they participate,” she adds.

Hogue notes that the Ethelo team went the extra mile to set up the engagement and ensure everything ran smoothly.

“It was complex—we made lots of changes and had many different discussions about ways to approach it,” she says. “Everyone at Ethelo was really responsive and amenable.”

Building a better plan with lower cost

The Hunter Water team is using the data on community perspectives they got from Ethelo to inform their ongoing water security planning work.

Hogue says that the solid understanding of community priorities they got from Ethelo will ultimately help make a better plan that the community can wholeheartedly support.

“We can build and develop our plan with a good understanding of the community’s priorities,” she says. “It’ll only make the plan better, and when we have it finalized and put it out on public exhibition, we can say, ‘We really did listen, and this is how we’ve incorporated your views.’”

What’s more, Hogue says doing online engagement with Ethelo saved Hunter Water money compared to the in-person engagements this kind of consultation would otherwise have required.

“Ethelo offered a way to get a lot of detailed information out there and get feedback in an online environment, which was a lot less expensive than it would have been to do it face-to-face.”

“Metro Vancouver Alliance organizes through relationships. The issues we tackle come directly from listening to our membership. We have found great value in using Ethelo for our transit fare consultation. Ethelo gave us a new option for consulting a large and diverse membership that was in line with our values and methods.”

Deborah Littman, Lead Organizer

International Peace and Security Institute

case-study — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 01:36:24 +0000

Collaborative Innovation: Tackling Extremism with Ethelo Insights

The International Peace and Security Institute hosted a symposium on ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ in Washington D.C. Over 250 leading policymakers, digital pioneers, religious leaders and development practitioners used Ethelo as an online tool to collectively evaluate a range of strategies. Experts identified the top strategies as well as approaches regarded as ineffective. The platform revealed levels of disagreement and consensus on different ideas, as well as (unexpected) areas of difference and convergence between diverse participant subgroups.

250 expert
participants

15,000
scenarios assessed

Cameron Chisholm

President

On April 6th and 7th 2016, the International Peace and Security Institute hosted a symposium on “Countering Violent Extremism” in Washington D.C.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon opened the gathering of 250 leading thinkers, policymakers, digital pioneers, religious leaders, military experts and development practitioners from around the world.

The specific objectives of the symposium, convened to advance the substantive outcomes from the White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism and the United Nations General Assembly, were to:

Challenge traditional thinking in order to identify innovative CVE solutions to disrupt the agendas of violent extremist
Take a different look at the problems to countering violent extremism and define gaps in methodologies.
Map the state of the art in CVE and set the new research agenda to further advance the evolving foundation of the CVE field.

The need for strategic insight

The organizers of the CVE symposium turned to Ethelo to coordinate a problem solving exercise on the strategic practicalities of countering violent extremism. More than 50 of the symposium participants collaborated

online, in parallel with the live event, to answer specific key questions critical to high level decision-making.

Ethelo was used to provide a structured online environment that allowed participants to collectively evaluate a range of ideas using both quantitative techniques and free dialogue.

Through Ethelo, participants identified the top strategies for addressing violent extremism, as well approaches regarded as ineffective.

The results were delivered on the final day. Participants evaluated 17 distinct perspectives and approaches in answering three fundamental questions surrounding violent extremism:

What should we be “countering”?
What causes violent extremism?
What approaches to CVE are most effective?

Outcomes

Ethelo focused the collective intelligence of the participants towards evaluating more than 15,000 highly nuanced alternative approaches to countering violent extremism. Ethelo was able to reveal levels of disagreement and consensus on different ideas, as well as areas of disagreement and consensus between different participant subgroups. For example, strong differences in opinion were exposed around the role of mental illness in extremism, and about the value of roles played by the private sector.

“Ethelo turned out to be such a huge asset to the symposium – thanks!”

Cameron Chisholm