Ten years. One decade. No matter how you frame it, the time has passed quickly. It’s tough even for us to believe the numbers: well over a hundred consultations, engaging and collaborating with businesses and people on (almost) every continent, and hundreds of thousands of engaged participants. Thank you to our many partners, supporters, and participants.
Humble Beginnings
It’s hard to believe that what started as a simple PowerPoint presentation back in 2009 has led to the size of business we have today. Publivate, like many other businesses, came about by incredible frustration shared by our founders. The frustration was a severe distaste of the status quo: the overall lack of options for harnessing crowd and stakeholder opinion and feedback.
In January 2009, armed with a conceptual PowerPoint presentation, our founders met with a senior-level Federal Government official. What was intended to be a short meeting for validation and guidance developed into a 90-minute meeting and a contract for work—far from the planned outcome! The problem: a platform had to be functional by March 31—giving the unnamed company—soon to be branded as Publivate—two months to get up and running. This two-month design sprint, the overall results that came from the engagement, and the overwhelming satisfaction from our government client was the clearest validation we could have asked for. We had a business that had legs.
Forward!
Five offices and untold amounts of methodologies and online tools later...the future has never looked brighter for Publivate. We can’t wait to see what the next ten years brings!
Cutting Edge: Restless Development
Being first in the market does not guarantee success; from day one Publivate has been incredibly cognizant of this fact. Despite being innovators in the space of online public engagement in 2009, this did not suggest that we avoided pushing the envelope from a development perspective. This has led to our strong culture around continually asking ourselves ‘how can we do this better’ and ‘how can we add more value to our customers’. We continually empower each of our employees to own various development tasks in order to remain at the cutting edge of market trends for engagement, design, and development.
Part of the way that we ensure this is through being incredibly diligent in the selection process for choosing our employees. Our staff live and breathe engagement, design, and development. This drives results from passionate people who love what they do and immerse themselves in these topics day and night; whether working or not.
Publivate is consistently making a push to develop creative and innovative solutions to improve the value that collaboration and engagement is able to provide. Even today, while being a market leader in our segment, Publivate works restlessly to push the envelope with its work for online engagement. To learn more information on the impact and implications of Publivate’s most recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing, see our blog article.
Trailblazing: A Series of Firsts
Being first to market placed Publivate in quite the interesting position; it set up our business to provide a series of firsts for both the public and private sectors.
In 2009 we were the first company to facilitate and run an ideation exercise with the Canadian Federal government. This engagement was a significant milestone for both Publivate and the Canadian government in building a path to harnessing stakeholder opinion to help guide decisions affecting Canadians.
Fast forward several years later after a significant amount of research and development, Publivate had positioned itself—once again—to provide a unique first: Publivate became the first business to integrate AI into collaborative consultation for the Canadian government. Leveraging AI and natural language processing was incredibly impactful in providing tangible results from a large consultation.
Our ongoing commitment to technical development along with creative thinking in the world of online engagement have helped to place Publivate in a position of offering value in forward-thinking for both public and private customers. With our growing team and developmental advances, we are interested in what is to come in the next decade!
Forward Thinking: Next Decade
While it’s difficult even for us to believe we have the first ten years under our belt, Publivate has a big vision and ambitious goals for the next decade. By continuing to empower our growing development team to take risks to provide outside-the-box solutions to engagement challenge, we will continue to create and deliver unique solutions that lead to disruptive changes to the online collaboration and engagement space. We are confident the next decade will bring unique solutions to collaboration and more series of firsts.
We are looking forward to continuing our journey at the cutting edge of online engagement and being able to impact the ways that companies receive feedback from the crowd to inform their decision-making processes.
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