Engage Victoria
Powered by Civio Engage.
The Engage Victoria platform gives Victorian citizens a way to contribute to government projects and policies. With more than a million people using it each year, the platform runs surveys, polls and forums that help shape better policy and project outcomes for the state.
We rebuilt the platform on Civio Engage (formerly District Engage), our community engagement product, working alongside Digital Victoria to redesign admin workflows, modernise the front end, and migrate millions of records without taking the platform offline.
Where the platform was straining.
A platform tangled in its own data.
The database had grown into a maze of tables and relationships, slowing performance and complicating every integration.
1,200 administrators feeling the same friction.
Admin UX, terminology and reporting did not match how consultations actually run across Victorian government.
Reports that did not answer the real questions.
Export schemas were not structured the way engagement managers needed to analyse consultation data.
Help where it could not be found.
Documentation lived outside the platform, so admins bounced between tools to get straightforward tasks done.
Customising for Digital Victoria's workflows.
For Digital Victoria, a key driver of the move to Civio Engage was the ability to customise the platform around the experience of website administrators.
Development sprints were shaped by Digital Victoria's business requirements and acceptance criteria. We tested workflow improvements in a dedicated SUS environment before rolling them into production.
1,200 administrators, redesigned around.
With 1,200 administrators across Victorian government, improving their experience was critical. We held co-design sessions on workflow, terminology and reporting with the people running consultations every day.
New features included custom export schemas to XLS and CSV, opening up the reporting that engagement managers needed for both internal teams and the public side of the platform.
From co-design to migration.
50GB of data. 15 million records. No outage.
Over 50GB of data was moved across from the previous platform. We simplified the underlying database structure, untangled project data relationships, and reduced the number of tables by a factor of twenty.
Migration scripts were crafted across a series of sprints. Regression testing on every pass kept data integrity intact and locked in the performance gains. By the end, more than 15 million records — thousands of projects, admin accounts, and historical consultation data — sat in a structure that's faster to maintain and easier to integrate with.
What we delivered.
Co-design.
Workshops with Digital Victoria and engagement managers shaped every sprint.
The platform was built around how consultations actually run.
Ripple frontend.
The Victorian Government Design System applied across the platform.
Engage Victoria sits consistently alongside the rest of Victoria's digital services.
Best-practice security.
Aligned to Victorian Government protocols across every environment.
Admin functionality protected end to end.
Simplified data structure.
Tables reduced by a factor of twenty.
Easier maintenance, faster integrations, faster performance.
Improved admin workflows.
Workflow, terminology and reporting redesigned around 1,200 administrators.
The friction is out of the system.
In-app documentation.
Modern in-app overlay brings documentation inside the platform.
Admins stay in the work, not bouncing between tabs.
The outcome.
Looking at a platform like this?
Let's talk.
State government, public consultation, complex data, scale. This is the kind of work Civio Engage is built for.