A community engagement solution that bridges the gap between major infrastructure and development projects and the community is Social Pinpoint.
The company was founded two years ago by Colin Goudie and Charles Connell, aiming to remove the disconnect communities often feel, when they are directly affected by change.
Social Pinpoint is an online community engagement platform specifically targeted at government and large organisations who need to effectively engage with their communities. Since launching they have run more than 50 projects in four countries.
It has a fully configurable and moderated environment that enables it to be used in a wide variety of engagement styles, from informing the community, through to involvement and empowerment.
Cofounder of Social Pinpoint, Colin Goudie, says the platform is fully self-service and hosted, allowing small and large organisations, such as local councils through to large consultancies, to quickly setup their own projects without getting bogged down in information technology infrastructure.
“It can overlay vital project information on a spatial map, and provide graphical information and surveys to the community in addition to taking a wide variety of comments on a familiar map interface via drag and drop,” Colin said. “These comments and surveys are categorised and tagged, to help project owners analyse this information and then feed this into further stages of their projects or outcomes.”
“The spatial aspect to our tool not only encourages good behaviour, but genuinely enables great comments that would otherwise go unheard.”
“Take just one of the hundreds of comments on the current Lake Macquarie Parking Strategy. For example, one comment recorded was, ‘cars parking on the verge/footpath area due to no curbing and guttering is making people walk on the road which is not safe’. Living and working day-to-day in the area, the user is able to highlight issues the local council would never have known of.”
Colin and Charles have extensive experience delivering software solutions. Charles has more than 15 years experience in business development, technical sales and project management. Whilst Colin has more than 15 years experience in full stack development, and has worked in embedded real-time GPS mapping systems through to web applications.
“We’re having an absolute blast working on Social Pinpoint. Our clients have such passion about building great communities. Of course we want to run a business like anyone else, but we also genuinely believe that great community engagement leads to thriving and growing communities,” Charles said.
Social Pinpoint clients include, Lake Macquarie City Council and Newcastle City Council, through to NSW Department of Planning & Environment and VicRoads. Following several successful projects launched in the US last year the company is currently reaching out to investors in a bid to rapidly expand into the American and European markets.
Image | Charles Connell and Colin Goudie, cofounders of Social Pinpoint
