Step 4-6. Community Engagement

3a. Analysing Trends

Steps 4 to 6 (Where do we want to be, What do we need to address and How do we get there?) in developing a Community Plan largely involve community engagement. This section outlines processes for engaging community members as well as specific steps in planning during this engagement phase.

The Local Government Act 2009 requires Local Government to:

• Prepare and adopt, by resolution, a community engagement policy describing how the local government must engage with the community about preparing or amending its community plan.
• Ensure that the community plan is consistent with the community engagement policy.

The community engagement policy may also include a description of how the local government must engage with the community on matters other than the preparation or amendment of the community plan. The local government may, by resolution, change the community engagement policy. The LGAQ is developing a Community Engagement Policy template to assist Council with this task and this should be available early 2010.

For many Councils, the challenge is to meaningfully engage with as many people as possible across all sectors and geographic locations within the community.

This involves not just “consultation” with community members about what should be in a community plan document. The engagement process has multiple objectives and involves giving people a range of opportunities to be involved in ways that suit them.

The aims of the engagement process are:

• For community members to provide input to the community plan so that the vision, strategies and actions reflect community members views,
• To develop community ownership and mobilise a range of stakeholders to be involved in implementing action
• Build the capacity and confidence of community members and council staff
• To build and maintain an ongoing relationship with sectors of the community
• Engagement of other stakeholders that would have responsibility for some actions in the plan, particularly state and federal government agencies and non-profit organisations etc.

There are a range of frameworks and toolkits available to guide good engagement practice, some of which are mentioned in this guide under “More Information”. The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) also provides training and resources to assist in improving the practice of community engagement.

Not Just Public Meetings

Traditionally, Councils have sought to engage community members often through public meetings, workshops and surveys. These have been chosen because they are seen to give an open chance for a wide range of people to have input. These remain some of the methods that are available, but increasingly these approaches, ironically, attract fewer people.

Hence, engaging a broad cross section of the community requires innovative approaches based on existing social networks and achieving visible actions. Increasingly, broad community engagement requires more tailor-made and specific engagement of groups and individuals because of engagement fatigue.

People Want to Discuss Their Community

Many residents have limited interest in talking about the whole Council area or broad strategies. However, they are very interested in discussing the future of the community that they relate to. This can be a town, district or a sector, such as business or the environment. While community plans are developed on a whole Council area basis, participation in the process can be much greater if the engagement focuses on the community that people relate to. A whole area plan is often a compilation of visions, issues and strategies derived from local community and sector discussions.

Principles of Good Engagement

Good engagement in community planning relies on the following principles.

Understanding the community: It is important to understand the current situation of the community and how stakeholders are structured. This may involve talking with people and asking them how people would like to be involved and understanding the key people and natural “hubs” in the community. This may involve recognising previous poor engagement or particular community sensitivities.

Local relationships: What often carries engagement with the community is the personal trust and presence of community members and individual Council staff. These local connections need to be fostered along with broader protocols for engagement.

“Go to them”: Engagement often means having tailor-made ways of communicating with particular stakeholders. What suits Indigenous people, for example, may well be very different from the business community or service clubs. engage with the natural community “hubs” around which relevant stakeholders gather and through existing social networks.

Continuity and follow up: An often overlooked aspect of engagement is follow up and feedback to stakeholders. It is important to provide feedback about community input to the plan and to keep people informed about the community plan.

Maintaining focus on the majority of stakeholders: It is easy to spend a lot of energy and time on vocal groups or individuals. Managing these situations requires methods that allow all participants to be involved, facilitation that minimises dominance and good conflict management.

Logistics: Engagement activities need to be easy for people to be involved in. This involves neutral venues, good facilitation, events held at an appropriate time of day, conflict is managed, venues are easy to travel to, and food and drink is available.

Structures and procedures: Good engagement needs to be carefully planned and have appropriate structures and procedures for input and feedback. This includes some organisational structure to plan engagement and consider input, the selection of appropriate methods, and frameworks for evaluation and feedback.

Skills: Considerable skills are required to engage with communities. This includes interpersonal skills in discussing issues with people, facilitation of gatherings and capacity to gather, assess and feedback information.

Accountability: The measurement and evaluation of community engagement needs to be part of planning, not just a “report card” at the end of an engagement exercise. The evaluation of engagement needs to be rigorous enough to be defendable but workable and simple.

Influence: If stakeholders perceive that they do not have any influence over the community plan they will rarely engage. It is important that stakeholders have significant influence on the plan and perceive that they do. If people genuinely have little or no influence over a particular issue or action in the plan, engagement may only involve providing information. Creating expectations of influence over a particular issue when realistically there is little will be counter-productive.

Engagement goes at the community’s pace. Often the development of a community plan has timeframes set by Council’s processes and funding arrangements. However, engagement needs to fit in with the meetings of community groups the scheduling of community events or the availability of key people. This means that there needs to be flexibility in timeframes and that some engagement activities need to happen before others. Genuine community ownership may take a considerable time to develop.

Methods of Engagement

There are many methods of engaging people in community planning. Some common methods are as follows.

Working Groups

Working groups are often established to address specific topics such as youth, environment etc. Members can be invited as representatives of the community and they can also be drawn from organisations and agencies. Groups can also be formed from the general community to reflect the demographics of the community. Working groups tend to be used in major planning processes where considerable deliberation is required.

Workshops

Community workshops can be held on specific topics such as the environment etc. or they can be open for residents to raise any issues. They are held at suitable times, usually evening, half day or even full day events. Detailed discussion and plans are developed often with the use of a professional facilitator. A range of methods can be used to gather ideas and generate discussion, such as splitting into groups based on interest areas/themes and presenting back to the entire group at conclusion.

Public Meetings

Public meetings allow any resident to be involved but they need to be well advertised and managed to ensure that people are attracted to them.

Sector Forums

Forums can be focused on particular sectors, such as youth, seniors etc. These tend to work well because people often know each other and issues are focused. While detailed planning can be achieved with specific sectors, discussion can lack integration with other aspects of the community.

Some tips for conducting effective public meetings, workshops, and sector forums are:

• Keep them brief, about two hours is a good timeframe,
• Facilitate the process well, particularly to ensure that everyone has an equal “say” and that dominant individuals don’t command the “air time”,
• Minimise “butchers paper”, powerpoint presentations and detailed processes – there is considerable disillusionment about these methods,
• Hold them at a time of day and in locations that are convenient,
• Cater for people with different needs such as disability access or having interpreters available,
• Maintain focus and manage off-topic comments or complaints.

Surveys

Surveys have been popular because they allow a broad cross section of the community to have input, other than those who attend meetings or workshops. However, surveys there is increasing cynicism about them and can have low return rates. They can be an expensive option when the cost is considered on a per response basis.

Some tips for effective surveys are:

• Keep it short – no more than about 8 questions. Many surveys are long and quite detailed. This reduces return rates and the effectiveness of surveys,
• Minimise personal information - People often do not respond to surveys if personal information is required such as age, gender, location, income or name,
• Have a combination of “tick the box” questions and questions that require a more detailed response. Questions that require people to write a thoughtful answer provide valuable input but people need to be motivated to do this. Too many of these questions will dissuade people,
• Maximise access – have surveys available through many channels such as community groups, key community members etc. Make it easy for people to return surveys such as via email or in convenient return locations.

Utilise existing social networks

More innovative methods of engagement are often needed that engage different groups in ways that suit them, that use existing social networks and incorporate existing community “hubs”.

An example is the use of “community contacts”. These are key people who are identified as being well connected to a sector or geographic community. They are invited to be a contact for their “community” during the planning process and the implementation of the plan. They play three main roles:

• consulting with their community about how people would like to engage in the process. They help organise an appropriate engagement activity in line with this such as a sector forum, meetings with community organisations, individual discussions etc.,
• informing the community about the project and distributing feedback forms,
• They are often invited to provide ongoing community oversight of the implementation of the Community Plan

Community Conversations

Community “conversations” are informal discussions with relatively small groups of people in communities. The discussions are deliberately targeted and views are not necessarily representative of the whole community. They suit situations where there has been previous “over-consultation”, local people have limited time, issues are particularly contentious or people prefer “kitchen table” discussions rather than larger meetings. Community conversations often raise thoughtful and detailed issues and strategies but they need to be combined with more representative processes.

Focus Groups

Focus groups are used to gather information that is needed on a particular topic. A facilitator conducts a “group interview”, a focused conversation gaining a comprehensive range of views from a small group of people. The facilitator asks prompt questions and facilitates a discussion around the answers that people give. Participants may be asked for an opinion, give their view of community issues, or generate ideas.

Other Techniques

Other techniques for community engagement in community planning are described in Appendix 1.

A Combination of Methods

It is crucial that a range of methods are used to engage community members. Ideally, engagement should be based on the preferred methods of different sectors and communities according to community “contacts” or discussion with local informed people. People also need to have multiple opportunities to participate such as a combination of workshops, informal discussions, feedback forms etc.