Search tips for the engagement database

• ‘What are you looking for?’ – Using this allows you to enter text to define your search. Your search will return results which include this text in the title or brief description. The results will be filtered by date so most recent activities will be at the top of the list. Continuous activities or those with no dates entered will be at the bottom of the list.

If you know exactly what you are looking for eg Citizens’ Panel, then this will work well. If your enquiry is more general it will be better to filter by issue or target group.

• ‘Between what dates?’– Using this will bring up engagement activities with either a start date or end date within the defined period. Some activities which have yet to take place or are currently taking place will have no end date entered. Also some activities are continuous and the date field is not relevant.

Information about some past activities has been transferred from a previous database which did not require an end date to be provided. In these cases an estimated end date has been entered.

• ‘Filter by geographical area covered’ – Ticking one or more of the boxes to select a district or borough council area filters the results to allow you to find activities on a more local basis.  

• ‘Issues covered’ – Ticking one or more of the boxes to select an issue filters the results to allow you to find activities which relate to a particular area of work. The category of ‘other’ will be used as rarely as possible and currently includes such things as consultation about constitutional issues and local government review.

• ‘Target group’ – Ticking one or more of the boxes to select a target group filters the results to allow you to find activities which relate to a particular group of people. 

Some activities may have been undertaken with a specific user group such as library users, which are not on this list. It is not possible to search by all such target groups as the list would be too long, so details may instead be included in the description of the activity. Activities which are wholly internal eg staff surveys are not included in the database.