Have Your Say! provides focused involvement but suffers from limited reach. Focused engagement occurs because the site is more suited for experts than the general public due to a lack of accessibility. The lacklustre public engagement with the platform can be traced to the EU. Declining participation rates need a wide effort of measures to be reversed. A general marketing strategy should be developed to guide outreach, using a combination of increased collaboration with national institutions and civil society organisations to improve general awareness of the Platform. Social media advertising and the development of a mobile application will help expand the reach to users including those with less access to technology. An increased number of female developers in the Platform’s team may improve women’s participation in public consultations.

We identified a number of issues with transparency of the Have Your Say! platform, namely the lack of information regarding the ownership of each consultation, the composition of participants, and the final use of feedback. In line with this, we recommend the following improvements.

Comprehensive guidelines about Have Your Say! public consultations should be created. These guidelines should include essential information from the Better Regulation Guidelines and Toolbox in simple language. IT improvements should include the introduction of AI content moderation tools, alternative bot-prevention tools; provision of a point of contact for each initiative as well as information on the reason for the delay; and the elimination of attachments, favouring replacement by direct textual feedback submission. Additionally, Have Your Say! should be equipped with a centralised dashboard to allow users to view and consult open data about public consultations in a user-friendly manner.

Generally, online consultation platforms should be easily accessible and designed in a user-friendly way, which efficiently provides information on both their functioning and content. Have Your Say could be improved in terms of usability. To make the website more inclusive, Portal2EU suggests a number of improvements.

To make Have Your Say more user-friendly the Platform should use generally accessible language and offer explanations for its search filters. Moreover, it should create easy-to-understand summaries of documents in all official EU languages. For citizens with disabilities, an accessibility toolbar and a mix of textual and visual formats should be introduced. The Platform should adopt a chatbot to assist citizens in navigating across the website and through policy initiatives. Translation tools, including AI-assisted translation, should be implemented to make the Platform more accessible across language boundaries. Furthermore, the EC should prepare an accessibility statement based on the evaluation of an independent certification body, that would be publicly available to citizens.