What is effective community engagement?
By Angela Bensemann, Director Halo Communications
When working on projects that have an impact on people (and let’s face it, most of them do!) it makes sense to spend a good chunk of time thinking about how we can engage with our communities in the most effective way.
Community engagement is about working as a team to build better relationships with those we are engaging with. That means following a good process – the foundation to building the relationship.
A good engagement process provides a framework so people know what the objectives are, they know what to expect and when, they know what’s open for discussion and what the non-negotiables are, and they understand the benefits of being involved so they can influence the final decision or design.
If we give people enough time and the mechanisms to give their feedback, not only will we find out about issues early on, but we can build them into our projects helping us understand what’s important to the people in our communities.
This gives us a genuine opportunity to deliver outcomes that meet the needs of both our organisation and our community.
So, how can we connect with our communities?
The techniques we use are especially important and can give us totally different outcomes, it’s all about choosing the best engagement tools for our audiences.
Back in the day, many eons ago when I worked in health and we were consulting on hospital closures, public meetings were the engagement mechanism of choice, leaving all parties feeling somewhat sullied.
Understandably communities felt railroaded when closures were often already a fait accompli, dressed up as an engagement process. No-one felt heard on either side and no-one left feeling it was a good process. Relationships, rather than being built, were being burned before they even began.
Public meetings can provide a great venue for people to lay their views on the table and to vent but usually do not provide a forum for less vocal people to be heard. Often those running the public meeting struggle to get their information across as well – leaving everyone wondering what has actually been achieved.
Of course, there are ways to manage public meetings with strong facilitation and a tight agenda but personally I think the public meeting should be used sparingly.
Better community engagement means providing an environment that’s conducive to everyone being heard. For example, face-to-face workshops, discussions, and drop-in-sessions give people an opportunity to talk one-on-one with key people about their ideas, and concerns. Well-designed visual displays help get the message across and specialists and decision makers can answer questions directly.
Take the time to take your engagement to where things will physically be happening, that means on-site, to the street, to the playground etc. Let people get a feel for what the changes will mean in situ. Don’t underestimate the power of doing this.
Technology and social media add another dimension to your engagement with virtual discussions, video workshops and live Q&A sessions all part of the mix. This helps open-up engagement to a wider demographic and is particularly useful if Covid-19 restrictions mean social gatherings are off the table.
Whilst new technology adds additional engagement and feedback tools into the mix it doesn’t replace the more traditional face-to-face options, and actually getting out on site – it’s all about choosing the right mechanism for your audience.
Genuine engagement is a team effort
Genuine engagement must be a team effort – there can’t be just one person assigned to it in your team and no-one else involved. Yes, someone should take the lead but it’s a collective team effort, people want to talk to the decision-makers, the landscape designers the engineers etc – not only the assigned engagement person.
You will know that you’ve done a good job when people are ready to listen to what you have to say, feel comfortable about giving their feedback and when you can demonstrate the difference that feedback has made to the final outcome or decision. This helps you build goodwill meaning future projects will also benefit.
There are always things some people are going to be unhappy about, but if you’ve followed a good process people can understand the reasons behind what you’re doing, even if they don’t agree.
Photo credit: Bernard Hermant on Unsplash
