Public participation software for environmental consultancies
Twelve live projects, nine clients, four authorisation types and one person who knows where the registers are. Tractivity gives consultancies one system for I&AP registers, notices, comments and evidence packs, with clean separation between clients and a record you can hand over.
Used in South Africa by Lesedi Nuclear Services, and by energy, water and public sector programmes across the UK and beyond
The record is the deliverable, and it is also your professional exposure
Public participation is one of the few consultancy service lines where the output is not a report, it is an evidence pack. And since 8 August 2022, the person who signs it off is an Environmental Assessment Practitioner (EAP) registered with EAPASA, with a personal obligation attached.
Regulation 13 of the 2014 EIA Regulations requires the EAP to be independent and competent, to perform objectively even where that produces findings unfavourable to the proponent, and to disclose to the proponent, registered interested and affected parties (I&APs) and the competent authority all material information that may influence a decision or the objectivity of any report. EAPASA operates a Code of Ethical Conduct and Practice behind that. When a process is challenged under the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act (PAJA), the defence is documentary, and the documents are the ones the practice produced.
It is not a competence problem, it is a systems problem
Meanwhile the practice is running twelve projects for nine clients across EIAs, water use licence applications, SLP rounds and SPLUMA applications, each with a different notice programme, a different comment period and a different retention rule.
The register for project four lives in a workbook on somebody’s laptop. The proof of service for project seven is in an email folder. The minutes for project nine were taken on paper. And a client has just asked for their register back because they are changing consultants.
None of that is a competence problem. It is a systems problem, and it is the one thing in the practice that nobody has time to fix.
Protecting the practitioner
Everything date-stamped, everything attributed, nothing overwritten without a trace. Spreadsheets are uncontrolled by default, which means a stakeholder comment can be altered or deleted without any record that it existed. A University of Hawaii study found that 94% of the spreadsheets audited contained at least one error. On a document you sign your registration against, that is not a productivity issue. Every action is logged against the person who took it, so when a regulator, a client or an incoming consultant asks who changed what and when, the answer already exists.
Pricing and implementation for a practice
The base licence is £9,495 a year plus £500 per additional user (quoted in pounds sterling), with no caps on stakeholder records, communications sent or engagements captured, and no per-user feature gates inside the platform. The Engage-360 public portal is a separately priced module, configured to the scale and customisation your participation programmes need.
Implementation runs four to six weeks on average from contract signed to launch, covering planning calls, system set-up, configuration, data import, checks and end-user training, with a minimum of 20 hours of onboarding and two 1.5-hour training sessions with a dedicated Client Success Manager. How long it actually takes depends as much on how quickly your data is supplied as on us.
Stakeholder data is handled in line with POPIA and hosted on Microsoft Azure, in the UK by default.
Bring us your busiest project
Not a demo script. Take the project with the biggest register and the messiest evidence trail, and we will walk through what it looks like in the system.
Worth reading next: public participation software for South Africa, stakeholder engagement for mining, and POPIA and your stakeholder database.
