Create Community Engagement Plans
You already know how to engage with your community. This training gives you AI-powered tools to plan your engagement faster, more thoroughly, and in a way that plays to your strengths.
Who this training is for
This workshop is for council staff and consultants who are responsible for planning community engagement. You might be a policy planner, communications adviser, community development officer, or project manager who needs to design engagement processes as part of your role. You don’t need any experience with AI. What you do need is real engagement work you want to get better at, and a willingness to try a new approach.
What is a community engagement plan?
A community engagement plan sets out who you need to engage with, why, and how. It defines your approach to involving people in a decision or project, and it guides your team on the methods, timing and resources involved. A good plan accounts for the different ways people prefer to engage, and it gives you a clear process to follow so nothing important gets missed.
The challenge most council staff face isn’t understanding the concept. It’s finding the time to think it through properly, and designing an approach that reflects the diversity of your community.
What you'll learn in the workshop
This hands-on workshop is built around six AI tools.
Each tool walks you through a structured conversation where you provide your knowledge of the project, and the tool helps you organise and refine your thinking.
You’ll work through your own real scenarios during the session, so you leave with practical outputs you can use straight away.
Six tools support this workshop:
Tool 1: Engagement Style Advisor
Based on the Whole Brain Thinking Framework, this tool helps you understand your own engagement style and consider how people with different strengths might experience your engagement process. It’s a practical way to check whether your plan appeals only to people who think like you, or whether it genuinely invites a range of perspectives.
Tool 2: Engagement Planner
This one helps you reflect on ways you can meet the needs of diverse stakeholders, not just people who think and communicate like you do.
Tool 3: Workshop Question Generator
Good questions are the backbone of good engagement. This prompt helps you craft questions that draw out genuine input rather than leading people towards a predetermined answer.
Tool 4: Engagement Summary
This tool brings together your key findings from Steps 1-3, to support the development of your community engagement plan.
Tool 5: Community Engagement Planner
This is the core planning tool. You provide the details of your project and it guides you through a series of questions to develop a community engagement plan.
Tool 6: Community Engagement Planner (alternative)
This tool is an alternative to Tool 5, for use when you already have a consultation document to support your engagement process.
This tool reviews your consultation document and uses it as the basis for developing your community engagement plan.
What's included:
- A three hour hands-on workshop (online or in-person), working through your own engagement scenarios.
- Six AI tools which you will be able to continue to use via a password-protected page on my website.
- A practical understanding of the Whole Brain Thinking Framework and how it applies to engagement planning.
- Confidence to use AI as a thinking partner for your future community engagement plans.
After the training
You’ll have a repeatable process for creating community engagement plans that are more considered, more inclusive, and faster to produce. Instead of starting from a blank page each time, you’ll have a set of tools that help you expand your current thinking about the upcoming engagment process.
These tools are designed to draw out your own knowledge and judgment, so the plans you create will genuinely reflect your understanding of the community and the project.
Case study - using the community engagement tools
Pauline Webby, a Senior Water and Wastewater Planning Advisor, used the community engagement planning tools to review her communications plan for developing new wastewater solutions in partnership with iwi.
She used ‘Engagement Style Adviser’ to understand how her natural strengths aligned with the project’s needs, and the Engagement Planner to think through how to meet the needs of people with different thinking styles during the engagement process.
The result? She validated her proposed approach, clarified tensions between traditional council processes and the relationship-focused method she was proposing, and built the confidence to communicate her thinking credibly to colleagues with different perspectives.
As Pauline put it, this type of reflective review wouldn’t have happened without access to these tools.
Try it for yourself
Tool 1: Engagement Style Adviser
Want to try one of the tools before committing to a workshop? Try using the Engagement Style Adviser for free. This tool helps you identify your engagement style and reflect on how your strengths shape the way you plan engagement.
Discover your engagement style
Community engagement plan template — If you’re looking for a community engagement action plan template to get started, I’ve created a practical template that’s been one of the most popular resources on my website. It gives you a clear structure to work from, whether or not you use the AI prompts.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need experience with AI to attend?
Not at all. The workshop is designed for people who are new to AI as well as those who have been experimenting with it. I’ll walk you through everything step by step, using your own engagement scenarios so the learning is immediately relevant.
Which AI platform do the tools use?
The tools are powered by Claude, within a secure third party platform called Pickaxe.
What if my manager has concerns about using third-party AI tools to develop council documents?
I will not be asking you to upload any sensitive or personal information to the Pickaxe platform. Any sensitive details can be added to your community engagement plan in Word after you’ve finished using the tools to develop your structure and draft.
However, we can also discuss adapting the tools as prompts for use in Copilot if you prefer.
How many people can attend a workshop?
Workshops are capped at 10 participants to ensure everyone receives individual attention and has time to work through their own scenarios.
How does this relate to the community engagement plan template on your website?
The template provides a useful structure for documenting your engagement plan. The workshop goes further by giving you AI tools that help you think through the content of your plan, from identifying your engagement style to designing methods that reach people with different perspectives.
Ready to start engagement planning?
Get in touch to discuss how this workshop could work for you. I’m happy to tailor the session to your team’s needs and the engagement challenges you’re facing right now.
Email: debra.bradley@writingforcouncils.co.nz
Phone: 021 215 4698
