Submission Protocol

The consultation hub is managed by the Stakeholder Relations team within Communications and Marketing (CAM), with help from colleagues in Governance and Strategic Planning and Edinburgh Research Office. 

Institutional university responses

• Institutional responses to consultations are expected to reflect the University’s priorities and policies and it is expected that these responses will be publishable and shareable where practical.  
• However, we acknowledge that consultations are wide-ranging in nature, and there may be submissions which contain very technical or confidential detail, where it may not be in the institution’s interests to overtly highlight via the Consultation Hub.  
• In addition, some consultations are not conducive to publication due to their format. Where appropriate, we would recommend that text is extracted for submission on the webpage (see submission guidance below). 
• Putting forward a submission for publication is at discretion of the response owner/coordinator. The Consultation Hub team must also agree that publishing is appropriate before this step is taken. 

Academic/research based responses 

• Although we will encourage responses from individual or groups of researchers and research centres to be published to the webpage, there is no requirement to do so. 
• Researchers employed by the University are experts in their field and submit responses to consultations autonomously. These will not necessarily reflect the views or position of the University, and a disclaimer will state this on the consultation hub webpage. As above not all responses will be suitable for publication. 
• As one of the benefits of the Consultation Hub is to provide a repository of responses to share good practice in the research community, we will ensure the academic responses included reflect this. By this, we simply mean ensuring the response is written in an accessible style and tone for a non-specialist audience. For advice and resources on writing for policymakers, our researchers can refer to this section of our Engagement for Impact Hub. 
• The webpage will feature submitted institutional responses and those submitted by researchers employed by the University. Responses owned by other areas, for example, student societies or individuals with an affiliation to the University community, are not within scope of this project. 

Overall Hub submission guidance 

• The team (Stakeholder Relations) managing the webpage will post contributions online when a submitted response is shared with us but will have no involvement in managing the submission of responses to the relevant organisation. 
• Stakeholder Relations will manage the webpage and will add content when a submitted response is shared with us in a timely manner.   
• Stakeholder Relations will only accept and publish responses to consultations that have already been submitted to the organisation conducting the consultation.  
• Responses must be sent to consultations@ed.ac.uk in a PDF or Word document (PDFs are preferred).  Please note that many consultations have short answer boxes for individual answers, so we advise that you note each question and save your answers to be transferred to a document; simply copy and paste the questions and answers you provided on the submission page. 
• To help with our records, and to help colleagues involved in drafting future consultation responses and policy documents, it would be useful to host a copy of submitted responses in the document library within the internal drafting space. This will already be the case for submissions developed via the drafting space SharePoint. These responses can be e-mailed to strategic.planning@ed.ac.uk.