High-quality community engagement plays a central role in the planning projects at Destia’s Traffic and Urban Environment unit. This unit at Destia, Finland’s largest infrastructure service company, provides planning and design services for clients such as municipalities, cities, and state organizations. Close collaboration on projects with their customers has ensured the outcomes reflect the public interest.
“We work on projects that impact people’s daily lives, so the end user’s perspective is important. Interaction with residents is especially important in planning projects for municipal clients,” explains Matilda Hakumäki, a transport planner at Destia’s Traffic and Urban Environment unit.
While working on commissioned projects, the unit has found online map-based community engagement to be a significant tool for diversifying engagement methods, collecting valuable insights, and simplifying the participation process.
Versatile Participation is Key
The Traffic and Urban Environment unit prioritizes diverse community engagement methods. Alongside digital platforms, the team organizes various types of workshops, both online and on-site.
“We’ve found that we gather valuable insights this way,” emphasizes Hakumäki.
A good example is the community engagement process for Rauma’s bicycle parking master plan. Planners first collected local opinions via the GIS-backed Maptionnaire Community Engagement Platform, then organized a stakeholder workshop involving representatives from city departments and other relevant actors. The results of the public survey highlighted in the workshop were visualized on a map and used as background material in advancing the planning. This brought together the benefits of both online questionnaires and workshop interactions.
Online Participation Gains Momentum
A common challenge in community engagement is reaching the desired audience.
When switching to online platforms, it has often been noted that they enable a significantly broader reach, both in terms of total participants and underrepresented groups.
Improved accessibility and ease of participation are supported by the flexibility to respond anytime and anywhere, accessibility-friendly practices, and multilingual options. At Destia this has been observed as well as an increase in both the quantity and quality of responses.
“I believe online questionnaires are here to stay,” Hakumäki remarks.
However, one can’t expect all online participation efforts to succeed as intended.
“Especially online, there are so many activities competing for people’s time and attention that participation, such as in online questionnaire, must feel easy, enjoyable, engaging, and meaningful.”
User-Friendly, Map-Based Platform Expands Engagement Opportunities
Previously, Destia’s Traffic and Urban Environment unit used another tool for creating map-based questionnaires, but testing a new option became timely. Maptionnaire was an easy choice, as some team members were already familiar with it and it had proven an effective map-based community engagement platform.
The unit currently has a one-year trial period for Maptionnaire, with unlimited questionnaires and access to all Communicate-level features. The platform has been actively used by the team—it has been utilized in five projects within the first six months alone.
Now that we have Maptionnaire available, we aim to incorporate it into as many projects as possible at the proposal stage. We consider how it can be utilized and what valuable information we can gather via questionnaires. In more and more projects, the premise is that we’ll engage people using a map-based questionnaire.
Matilda Hakumäki, Trasnportation planner, Destia
A Versatile Engagement Tool Reduces Workload
Hakumäki highlights a bicycle parking master plan for the city of Rauma (summer 2024) and a preliminary pedestrian and bicycle path design for Highway 146 in Sipoo (autumn 2024) commissioned by the Centre for Economic Development, Transport and the Environment as examples of projects that benefited from Maptionnaire.
The platform’s flexibility and versatility have especially proven effective in different projects.
With this tool, we’ve found that we can include things in a single questionnaire that previously required two separate platforms. For example, we can now merge a traditional questionnaire and a geospatial questionnaire into one.
Matilda Hakumäki, Transportation planner, Destia
For the city of Rauma’s project, the team conducted a resident survey that received hundreds of responses, with one question gathering up to 600 map markings. Traditional question types were used to explore cycling activity, reasons for not cycling, and electric bike usage.
Maptionnaire’s map-based questions helped the planners identify areas with inadequate parking and potential locations for facilities like repair stations or secure bike lockers.
“Map-based questionnaires are useful in our work,” Hakumäki stresses.
Residents were also asked separately about the bike parking arrangements in Old Rauma, a unique UNESCO World Heritage site. With the platform, the response area for this question could be restricted to this neighbourhood only for clearer results.
Maptionnaire Platform Encourages Experimentation
In Sipoo, the planning team used Maptionnaire to collect feedback on a preliminary pedestrian and bicycle path design for Highway 146. The questionnaire included a pop-up map allowing respondents to select and comment on different sections of the path. Additionally, a select map was used to identify the most used bus stops in the area.
“It's been great to see that the feedback we received through the questions matched what we expected, which confirms these approaches work,” Hakumäki praises.
This trial of a new question type is an excellent example of how open-mindedness and bold experimentation can lead to valuable outcomes. Overall, Hakumäki emphasizes the importance of versatility and a fearless approach in community engagement.
“It’s crucial to approach community engagement with a willingness to try out new methods and options. Being open-minded and not limiting yourself in advance about the kind of feedback you expect from people is key,” Hakumäki concludes.
Response And Reports Go Beyond Expectations
The planning team has reached a significant number of participants through map-based questionnaires (maptionnaires) across various projects—sometimes even exceeding expectations, according to Hakumäki. Even better, the feedback received has focused on exactly the issues they hoped to address. With hundreds of responses, they’ve been able to identify trends and use the findings directly in their planning work.
“On one hand, the results have confirmed what we already noticed during discussions with the client or site visits, for example. But on the other hand, they’ve also highlighted completely new areas of development that hadn’t even crossed our minds,” Hakumäki shares.
For instance, in the city of Sipoo project, the feedback led planners to revisit one of the proposed bus stop plans.
The ready-made charts and maps from Maptionnaire’s analysis tool have been especially useful for spotting trends and preparing interim reports for clients.
“Clients are generally very interested in questionnaire results. Sometimes they even ask for interim reviews before the questionnaire closes, and it’s really easy to pull those directly from the platform,” Hakumäki explains.
For final reports, though, the team often creates custom response visualizations, for which the Excel export option in Maptionnaire is a handy feature.
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High-Quality Results Require Thorough Preparation
Producing meaningful data for the planning process starts with thorough groundwork.
For Hakumäki, a well-designed questionnaire leaves respondents with a positive experience. Achieving this means asking only the most relevant questions, maintaining consistency in phrasing and response options, and avoiding questionnaires that drag on too long and bore participants.
“It shows respect for the opinions of residents and other respondents when the opportunity to participate is executed with high quality. The fact that we receive responses is feedback in itself and a sign of a successful questionnaire,” Hakumäki concludes.
Sometimes, well-executed questionnaires that respondents find meaningful even receive praise in open-ended questions. Critical comments, on the other hand, are a rarity.
For Destia’s Traffic and Urban Environment unit, Maptionnaire has proven to be an essential community engagement tool. Its versatility and user-friendliness make it an excellent choice for planning projects of all sizes.
We aim to create high-quality questionnaires that yield valuable results. Our team has found Maptionnaire to be an excellent tool for achieving this.
Matilda Hakumäki, Transportation planner, Destia
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