Community involvement
Help make your voice heard!
We’re delighted to have recently launched Our Voice –our exciting new digital platform that will make it easier than ever to share your views with us!
Working closely with our customers is very important to Great Places and your involvement has already helped to shape and improve our services. We want to do more of this and make it easier for you to get involved and have your say… so have launched Our Voice to help us do just that!
Our Voice is an interactive digital tool that we hope you’ll use to tell us what you like about your home and the services we provide, but also where you’ll share your thoughts with us around what we need to improve and can do better.
The great thing is that you’ll be able to do this in the way that suits you best. Our first campaign is focused on asking customers how you would like Great Places to celebrate and recognise customers who do great things in your local area, neighbourhood, street or apartment block. In the past Great Places has hosted award ceremonies and invited customers to attend a venue to meet with our Board members, other customers and colleagues.
Last year, to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee, we supported customers to host their own celebrations. But rather than Great Places decide our approach on this going forward, we are asking you, our customers, to tell us what you think.
You don’t need to log in or register yet; just come along and share your ideas and opinions. We look forward to you joining us and hearing from you.
Over the next few months we’ll be setting up different topics and will be inviting you to post your own ideas and comments. You’ll be able to point to areas on local maps, post photos and videos if you’re up for it, participate in polls and surveys, share thoughts and tips and much more.
Some sites will be open to all of our customers. Some will be open to customers who live in a particular area, or who have received a particular service recently. Some will even be open to members of the wider community, so that we can make sure that we’re getting relevant feedback.
We’re really excited to have a platform dedicated to customers that will enable us to hear in a range of ways what is important to you and your friends and neighbours where you live. We hope you’ll enjoy using Our Voice and seeing what changes we can make together.
If you have an idea, suggestion or just want to sign up or find out a little more information please log on to Ourvoice.greatplaces.org.uk.
We have created a short survey on our proposed merger (see pages 22-23) to gather your feedback; if you complete the survey by 11.59pm on Wednesday 31 May 2023 as well as registering for the Our Voice platform, you’ll go in to a prize draw for a chance to win a £50 Love2shop e gift card.
Customers share their Insight!
At Great Places we feel it’s important that you are given the opportunity to scrutinise our performance to help continually improve the services we provide.
What is our Insight group?
Insight is a group of customers trained to examine services delivered by Great Places. The purpose of this group is to ensure you and your fellow customers can influence the way Great Places operates as a landlord and hold us accountable for the decisions we make and actions we take.
The group does this by finding out as much as possible about a service, by doing things like:
- Looking at information such as service offers, standards, promises and procedures;
- Reviewing performance data to check how services are performing against targets;
- Examining records to check procedures have been followed;
- Finding out about the service experiences of customers;
- Meeting and shadowing different teams who deliver the services to customers.
Following an investigation, based on their review findings, the group suggests recommendations and works with services to agree an action plan for improvement, which is reported on every six months.
Insight’s last review researched customers’ information needs to examine what makes information meaningful to different people. Members would like to thank all customers who gave their time to feedback views. Here are some of the common themes:
- Information should be jargon free and use a mix of images, graphics, charts and videos;
- Information should be relevant and accessible to a range of audiences;
- We should be accountable to customers by being open and honest;
- We should publish regular updates with feedback to give assurance views are listened to and acted on.
If you want to read about this review or find out more about scrutiny, please scan the QR code or visit www.greatplaces. org.uk/insightgroup
Check out our Customer Annual Report!
Our Customer Annual Report is ready and on our website – in video format and text.
This year we are focussing this report on customer commitments, set out by the government as the 7 key areas that customers prioritise for landlord performance.
The report lets you know how we performed in these areas in 2022. To make sure the information is as accessible as possible, you can view it via video, or see the text version beneath each section.
Visit www.greatplaces.org.uk/customerAR or find it here:
