Developing and evaluating an engagement plan
The involvement of stakeholders, partners and communities in government and agency planning, decision-making and service delivery is important for ensuring the responsiveness, quality and effectiveness of programmes and services. Effective community and sector engagement also contributes to broader social outcomes such as building capacity and supporting democratic processes. Rather than presenting a prescriptive approach to planning and evaluating community engagement activities, the resources here encourage practitioners to use their judgement in matching the approaches and methods to best support the objectives and budget of the engagement program in question.
Planning community engagement
Community engagement toolkit for planning
This 2017 toolkit has been developed by the Queensland Government with advice from community engagement specialists and their peak representative body – the International Association of Public Participation (IAP2). It points to the use of practical tools and information intended to support local governments meet their requirements to engage with the community. It is also intended to support community members and stakeholders in their interactions with the plan-making process.
Back to Basics: How to Make Stakeholder Engagement Meaningful
This Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) report by Jonathan Morris, Farid Baddache and colleagues aims to guide internal discussions on tools and approaches to stakeholder engagement. Use this document as a starting point when approaching stakeholder engagement for the first time, or as a refresher when revising a current engagement strategy. Although written for companies thinking about CSR, it is also useful for agencies and other organisations.
Community engagement techniques – Queensland Health
Community engagement ranges from simple information sharing to consultation and finally, to active participation. This document provides detailed information about techniques that can be used when engaging with communities.
Community engagement: Developing a strategy
This guide from the Centre for Sustainable Energy outlines some important things to consider when planning a community engagement
strategy for your project or enterprise. It stresses that achieving your desired outcomes means being clear about your aims, identifying your target audience, understanding your resources and capacity, and planning accordingly. Another short document highlights a range of approaches to community consultation and engagement.
Community Planning Toolkit
This toolkit from the UK-based Community Places provides guidance on the issues to consider when planning and designing community engagement. It focuses on
quality and effectiveness, process planning and designing engagement tailored to the particular issue, level of participation to be achieved, timeframe and range of stakeholders affected.
Evaluating community engagement
Evaluating Engagement Efforts
This set of web pages from the Center for Economic and Community Development, PennState University highlights some of the key concepts and considerations embedded in the broader context of evaluation. This includes sections on evaluation: planning, evaluation types, benchmarking and choosing what to measure.
Evaluating community impact
This set of web resources from the Tamarack Institute encourages us to use , and points us in the direction of, new ways of measuring change, exploring who is responsible for outcomes, developing methods that can keep up with the fast-moving pace of community change activities, alternative approaches for getting change makers involved in the actual assessment process, and using the results to drive new thinking, better strategies and deeper impact.
