The SmartCE launch

SmartSurvey already ran consultations for councils across the UK. But a capability is not a product. The brief: take our citizen engagement work and give it a name, a shape and a market.

Every launch should start in the market, not the feature list. I researched how councils actually run consultations, built the ideal customer profiles, and wrote personas for the people who own the work: the officers answerable to residents, members and auditors at once.

The obvious position was consultation management software. Accurate, and forgettable: a category that sounds like paperwork.

The research kept pointing somewhere better. A consultation is not an admin exercise. It is the vehicle for the voice of citizens. So SmartCE wasn't launched as a way to manage consultations. It was launched as the way to listen to your community.

Voice of the Community became the position, and every asset that followed inherited the choice.

Positioning became messaging; messaging became things teams could hold. Demos, documents, campaign assets, sales tools and web pages, all telling one story, all built alongside product and sales.

A go-to-market campaign, plus direct outreach to the exact profiles the research described. DigiGov put the story in front of public-sector buyers in person.