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ECF Celebrates Global Community Engagement Day!
By Megan Telford
To celebrate ‘Global Community Engagement Day’, we have been taking a trip down memory lane since our inception in 2018, to consider some of the key lessons learned in developing best practice community engagement. We have determined four key findings that we think have come to define our practice and we believe are key to delivering genuinely impactful and effective engagement:
- Creativity and Collaboration
One of our key aims as engagement practitioners is to empower local people to productively participate in planning and design decisions. In order to do this effectively, we utilise creative and engaging tools, and design innovative activities that not only generate genuinely valuable feedback, but provide training and skills to enable everybody to participate.
Recently, we facilitated the delivery of a number of co-design workshops to co-create a future vision for a much-loved community space and the green spaces that surround it. We formed a demographically representative group of people to participate in these workshops. The feedback received in this workshops was invaluable and will help shape the proposals going forward.
- Inclusive and Accessible
Ensuring your engagement and consultation programmes reach a diverse audience is an on-going challenge for project teams. It is essential that you reach all parts of a community during engagement processes and that nobody is excluded from these important conversations that can profoundly impact spaces, places and people. For too long certain groups have been underrepresented from these conversations and that is something we seek to rectify.
Through comprehensive desktop and on-the-ground research, we seek to identify and then engage underrepresented groups. In October 2022, ECF facilitated an interactive workshop with Sutton’s Young Commissioners, a diverse group of 13 – 18-year-olds from different backgrounds and schools across the borough, as part of The Future of Sutton Town Centre project. The group was given the opportunity to create a vision of a revitalised town centre in Sutton and provided crucial feedback on how youth groups interact with the built environment.
- Open, Honest and Transparent
Being genuine and transparent about what your engagement is setting out to achieve (the key objectives) and what it is you’re asking respondents to take part in, is an essential aspect of creating good community engagement. Too frequently the questions we get asked are, “have you already decided what you are going to do?” and “will my feedback have any impact?”
By being clear about what your project is setting out to achieve and the scope for influence, you empower respondents to provide valuable insight that will enrich conversations and benefit all involved.
- Mixed-Method and Hybrid
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we learnt how to engage communities effectively online. It was a fantastic opportunity for all industries to diversify their ways of working and learn to operate as effectively online as they do offline. For us, we now design and deliver hybrid engagement programmes that enable us to work flexibly and reach many more people.
Hybrid engagement is naturally inclusive and has enabled us to think more creatively about the tools and activities that we prioritise in the digital and physical worlds. Our mixed-method approach is robust, adaptable, and wide-reaching.
If you would like to hear more about our recommendations on how to create best practice engagement and consultation programmes, please get in touch with us at info@engagecf.co.uk and we would be happy to help!
