We've got a free Community Engagement Checklist E-book available.

Don and Brett here at Engagementworks are passionate about community engagement and the benefits it can unlock for organisations who are really committed to its practice. We’re a couple of experienced blokes who have done a lot in the engagement space – from face-to-face to online.

While we have a commercial interest in the practice of community engagement, we’re also keen to grow a vibrant community of practitioners around New Zealand. That’s one of the reasons behind our seminar series, the second of which is being held this week in Hamilton.

It’s also a reason behind some free E-books we’ve got planned. We’ve just completed the first of these – a Community Engagement Checklist. This is available as a Word document, so that it can be used as an electronic template and also manipulated however its users want. If you’d like a copy, send us an email with your email address and we’ll send you one. There’s no cost. We just ask that you respect our product and don’t give it away to others, or charge for it! If you think we can make it better, we’d appreciate your feedback.

If you need some advice about how to use the Checklist, don’t hesitate to give us a call. We don’t always charge for advice we provide. Quite often the coffee’s on us!

If you need something more comprehensive for an engagement strategy or project, we can help with that too, whether as advisers, consultants, implementers or trainers.

On our website there’s a range of training courses we’ve developed to cover most needs. If your organisation has specific needs that aren’t covered by these courses or which need bits from several, we’re happy to build something that meets your needs. We can also deliver those at your place, if you’ve got a venue.

So if you need something to help with your community engagement delivery, or not exactly sure what you might need, please give us a call. We’re happy to listen and to advise.

It’s interesting to see how different organisations categorise “engagement”. There appear to be two major approaches:

1. Those who believe that legislative compliance is the main driver of everything they need to do
   
2. Those who see value in having regular interactions with their communities and key stakeholders.
   

At Engagementworks, we really enjoy working with organisations in the second group. They’re excited about making sure the products and services they offer fit well with end users, and that their organisational activities are understood. That’s important for organisations like manufacturing businesses and other ventures that consume resources and have an environmental impact. Organisations like these are strong on building partnerships and listening carefully to what communities say.

The first group is harder to categorise, other than that they have a narrow focus, see legislative requirements as a maximum level, and are reactive rather than proactive when it comes to dealing with external feedback. This group can include small businesses that have limited resources, which is understandable. It can also include government agencies and councils, which is much harder to understand, particularly when they have responsibilities to taxpayers, ratepayers or levy-payers. There are occasions when this approach will cost more than if an investment had been made in engagement activities, particularly when something goes wrong and the cost of putting it right is high.

Legislators who believe that engagement is important, particularly for government agencies and councils, may choose to impose standards of compliance in an expectation that low achievers will get better at it. Planned changes to the 2002 Local Government Act are a signal of what legislators believe are important. Such thinking presumes that there is value in engagement for the organisation in question and for its stakeholders. But that’s a hard sell to organisations who only see additional costs being imposed on them.

Benefits to an organisation from engagement include:

• Higher quality decision-making
  
• More effective and efficient service delivery
  
• Better management, by identifying risks early and reducing costs associated with those
  
• More streamlined policy and programme development
  
• Delivering services and outcomes that meet community needs
  
• Increasing community confidence in projects undertaken
  
• Great levels of innovation.
  

Benefits for communities and stakeholders include:

• Greater opportunities to participate in policy and programme development
  
• More open and transparent communication driving innovation
  
• More efficient and responsive levels of service
  
• Better integrated and comprehensive solutions to complex policy issues.
  

Organisations in the second group get this. They believe in it and are committed to driving organisational practices that support it. Community engagement is something they do because they really want to.

Organisations in the first group don’t really get this. They see additional work and compliance costs. They are fans of Tick Box compliance to a level that keeps their auditors happy. The happiness of their communities and key stakeholders isn’t afforded a similar level of priority. Community engagement is something they do because they have to.

So effective community engagement is about an aligned organisational culture. Changing the culture of organisations in the first group won’t happen overnight. But at Engagementworks we’re Rachel Hunter types (remember those Pantene advertisements of some years ago?), believing that change will happen. That’s one of the reasons we have a commitment to building strong communities of interest in engagement, and why we’ve developed a series of workshops and tools that are designed to help organisations progressively lift their engagement games. While we’re happy to help where we can, we believe that the best results will come from organisations that believe in the value of great community engagement, who own their own strategies and who are committed to delivering those.