Does the term ‘community engagement’ make you want to run for the hills or dive right in?
Your reaction is likely to depend on what type of engagement is included in your plan. For example, you may love or dread:
- presenting to an audience
- being available to meet with people at a public drop-in event
- standing on a street corner with a clipboard, asking passers-by to answer your questions about an issue
- coordinating special consultative procedures and digesting the written submissions in the privacy of your office
- facilitating focus groups or deliberative decision-making processes, where everyone gets to speak and you uncover ideas and perspectives you couldn’t have arrived at on your own
- having one-to-one conversations with stakeholders over the phone or in-person.
Overview
The six community engagement tools help you reflect on the types of engagement that come naturally to you while also helping you to include engagement methods that appeal to a wide range of people.
Each tool solves a specific challenge. The first two tools help you to clarify your overall approach to engagement – including understanding your own engagement style and considering ideas for engaging with a diverse audience. Tool 3 helps you to come up with good questions to ask.
Then Tools 4 to 6 help you to create an engagement summary and integrate these key insights into your community engagement planning process.
About the Whole Brain Thinking Framework
As noted above, Tools 1 and 2 draw on the Whole Brain Thinking Framework. Here are the four mental strengths of Whole Brain Thinking. Most people will favour one of these ways of thinking, or a mix of two or three of them. It is quite rare to be equally at home with all four of the following mental strengths.
- A/Blue— research, building on lessons from the past, great with facts and figures
- B/Green— great with detail, suited to project management and practicality, focused on implementation
- C/Red— focused on emotion, geared towards seeking consensus, and great with relationship management and resolving interpersonal conflicts
- D/Yellow— future trends and innovation, great with design and aesthetic considerations.
More information about the framework is available here:
Note: I’ve used the Whole Brain Thinking Framework in Tools 1 and 2 because it’s very easy to understand quickly, and provides a useful basis for understanding yourself and to reflect on how others think differently from you.
The downside of this framework is it’s a broad-brush approach that doesn’t capture the nuances in our personalities (such as where we fit on the introversion/extroversion spectrum) or the cultural and socio-economic differences that affect how we think, feel and communicate. You will always need to use your real world understanding of people to inform your engagement planning.
About the tools
Tool 1: What’s My Engagement Style?
The challenges:
If someone else designs a community engagement process for us it could include methods that aren’t a good fit for us. Alternatively, if we design it ourselves, we might dismiss engagement methods that we don’t value as highly ourselves, or feel uncomfortable about implementing.
What it does:
Tool 1 helps you identify your engagement style and reflect on how to make the most of your strengths when carrying out a specific project. Its purpose is to help you design an engagement process you can be confident of delivering well.
Example:
A library manager needs to engage with the community on a reduction in library services due to budget cuts. Her Red-Yellow engagement style means she is concerned that the voices of homeless people and children who rely on the library won’t be heard through a traditional consultation process with written submissions and oral hearings. The tool helped her identify ways to work with other librarians to ‘translate’ the substance of informal conversations and drawings from these two stakeholder groups into ‘council-speak’ to ensure their views can be factored into decision-making. Here’s the output from this example.
User guidance:
You can select more than one of the engagement styles when answering the multi-choice questions, if two statements are equally true for you.
Tool 2: The Whole Brain Engagement Adviser
The challenge:
Not everyone wants to read a consultation document and provide a written submission. That means councils relying too heavily on this approach don’t hear from large sectors of their community.
What it does:
The tool helps you to do a ‘walk-around’ of the Whole Brain Thinking Framework to identify a range of different ways you could engage with the community, in a way that works for you and your engagement style (identified in Tool 1).
Example:
A policy analyst with a strong Green-Blue engagement style who is working on a cat management bylaw. The tool suggests he could host some informal morning teas where people are invited to talk about the importance of the companionship provided by cats. He doesn’t want to do this – and doesn’t believe it will add value to the process.
However, using this tool helped him see he could show more empathy for cat owners through the language and images used in the engagement materials, including talking more about the value of microchipping for returning lost cats to their owners.
User guidance:
Notice your reactions to the options provided by the tool. As part of the interactive conversation with the tool, write about which ones you don’t want to do and why. The tool will help you to find middle ground that feels authentic and doable for you, while also expanding the range of methods you implement, to appeal to more of the people you need to hear from.
Don’t let the tool boss you around – you get to decide what methods to include in your plans. It’s important to avoid overloading your plan with more methods than you can realistically deliver with your resources and within your timeframes. Use the suggestions as a starting point for developing your own list of balanced methods.
Tool 3: Good Questions
The challenge:
Sometimes it can feel like we are going through the motions – we already know what people are going to say during our engagement process, but we have to do it anyway. A great way to gain more useful feedback is to ask better questions.
What it does:
This tool helps you to apply the key questions in ‘The Coaching Habit’ to your engagement process. More details about this are available in this article – Seven great questions to ask in workshops and 1:1 meetings.
Example:
A council is carrying out early engagement with key stakeholders about three potential locations for a new landfill. It wants to understand the pros and cons of the different sites before engaging more widely on the options. This tool provided a list of questions for a 1:1 meeting with a waste contractor, to fully understand his views on the three sites.
Here’s an example of a question generated from this process: “Of all the operational changes this will require, what’s the real challenge for you and your business?”
It suggests that asking this question could help identify their fundamental business concerns, which may relate to equipment investment, route efficiency, staff safety or contract viability.
User guidance:
You don’t have to stop using this tool when you get a set of overall questions for your engagement process. You can also ask for tailored questions for particular stakeholders.
Tool 4: Engagement Summary
The challenge:
It’s easy to note down a great idea and then lose track of it amongst everything else you’re working on.
What it does:
This tool brings your key insights and ideas from your use of Tools 1, 2 and 3 into a summary for you to upload to Tools 5 or 6 when you’re ready to develop your community engagement plan.
Example:
A Blue analyst comes up with a balanced range of ideas for engagement with residents who are directly affected by coastal erosion. It includes meetings that are likely to be highly emotional, so the plan includes working with a communications advisor who is good at relating to people who are frustrated with slow council processes or who are worried about the impacts of erosion on their property values.
The Blue analyst is keen to be involved provided she has this support from her colleague. But the thought of fronting up to a meeting with these people on her own is very stressful. She knows she can provide the most value by presenting clear information about the issue, her assessments of the options, and summaries of what solutions are working well in other regions.
But the community engagement plan is developed and signed off while she’s away at a conference and it doesn’t reflect her ideas related to this partnership approach. An Engagement Summary to share with the team (and/or uploaded to the Community Engagement Planner) before she went away would have ensured her preferred approach would have been integrated in the final plan.
User guidance:
You’re the boss – so review and adjust the Engagement Summary, as the next two tools will make use of this content as a key input to your engagement plan.
Tool 5: Community Engagement Planner
The challenge:
We can get bogged down in the process of creating a community engagement plan – and when we are working within tight deadlines this can lead to less time being available for the actual engagement process.
What it does:
This tool speeds up the process of creating your plan by giving you options to consider in each section. You still need to make all the decisions about what to include, from engagement goals through to engagement levels and methods, but it accelerates the process for you, and gives you suggestions to reflect on.
Example:
Here’s an example of a community engagement plan for informal engagement on a cat management bylaw prior to the formal consultation process. It includes the following categories: community engagement goals; stakeholder analysis; level of engagement using IAP2 spectrum; communication methods; approach to engagement; project plan and evaluation criteria.
User guidance:
You don’t need to print out each section of the engagement plan as you are developing it. Tools 5 and 6 both generate a full version of your plan at the end of the development process.
Tool 6: Consultation Document Analyser
The challenge:
It can be time-consuming to get to grips with a complex consultation document (such as a LTP Consultation Document) with multiple issues.
What it does:
This tool helps you to carry over the key points from a consultation document into a community engagement plan.
Example:
Here’s the draft engagement plan created from uploading Waipa District Council’s award-winning 2021 LTP Consultation Document.
User guidance:
Don’t over-rely on what the tool thinks are the key points from the consultation document. Instead, use this as a starting point for your own targeted review of that source document.
You Call the Shots
These tools don’t spit out generic answers. I’ve designed them to be as interactive as possible, so you will end up with something you can actually use. My goal is to give you a structured process to help you design a plan for engaging meaningfully with a diverse range of people in your community.
Next Steps
- Want to see what these tools look like and how they work? Click here to try Tool 1.
- Click on this community engagement planning link for all the details on how you can access all six tools.
- Click here to access a printable version of this information.
