A growing number of organisations recognise the value of building meaningful relationships with stakeholder and community groups. Some of those organisations have built engagement strategies that outline the principles they will apply to this relationship building.

‘Community engagement’ is a generic term covering what are widely regarded as three levels of engagement: Information Transfer; Consultation; and Active Participation.

The word ‘community’ is also a broad term used to define groups of people; whether they are stakeholders, interest groups, or citizen groups. A community may be a geographic location (community of place); a community of similar interest, concern or passion (community of practice); or a community of affiliation or identity (such as an industry or sporting club).

‘Community engagement’ is therefore a planned process with the specific purpose of working with identified groups of people, whether they are connected by geographic location, special interest, or affiliation or identity to address issues affecting their well-being. The linking of the term ‘community’ to ‘engagement’ broadens the scope, shifting the focus from an individual to a collective, with associated implications for inclusiveness to ensure consideration is given to the diversity that exists within any community.

Community engagement should be a significant part of how a connected organisation goes about its daily business.

Some organisations, such as central and local government agencies, do engagement because there is a statutory requirement for them to do so. Some engage because they value the knowledge and differing perspectives that members of their communities have. Some engage because they rely on the involvement of community members to make things happen for them. Some engage because there are communities that value and understand what that organisation does and who want to learn more about that.

Many engagement practices are formulaic: organisations always do what they’ve always done. This can make it hard for them to get new perspectives or information in different forms. Consultation is often done by various operational teams within an organisation and there are few opportunities for them to learn from others about other options that may be available for consultation and also to learn when another part of the organisation may be planning to deal with the same community that they want to consult with or may have dealt with recently.

Enhancing community engagement responsibilities and activities should be based on an aligned and supportive organisational culture and international best practice. While engagement projects may come and go with elected representatives and staff, the organisation’s relationships with its communities need to endure and should be managed with a long term view.

‘Success’ for community engagement is as much about organisational culture as it is about skills and tools. Therefore it is important that engagement is ‘owned’ by senior managers and organisational leaders as well as by engagement practitioners. It needs to be role-modelled from the top down.

Engagement should be a regular agenda item for divisional, departmental and team meetings, just as health and safety is in many organisations.

Engagement criteria should be included in key performance indicators, particularly those of the CEO, engagement practitioners and their managers. The level of those criteria should change depending on the extent or priority engagement has to the individual concerned.

It you’d like to learn more about community engagement strategies and practices and how these can add value to your organisation, please get and touch. We’d be delighted to help you. Email us at [email protected] or join our mailing list.

It is always surprising how many Communication Managers can recount stories about the first time they heard about one of their organisation’s initiatives was when they read about it on the pages of a daily newspaper.

‘No surprises’ is a much bandied about philosophy. Its ethos makes resoundingly good sense, yet its practice can be sporadic. Dropping the ball is bad enough. Even worse when the organisation’s owners or elected representatives didn’t know that the ball was in the air in the first place.

So why does this happen? Poor risk management? Yes. Poor project management? Yes. Poor internal communication? Definitely.

Although they’re easy to create, checklists are surprisingly uncommon. Their absence and other poor planning shouldn’t be blamed on a project leader, that’s because that person’s manager, and possibly even the next manager above, would have viewed the Cunning Plan and ticked it off. A budget would have been approved and other resources made available. So why weren’t other parts of the organisation, particularly its senior leaders, given a pre-launch presentation? Why weren’t operational parts of the business that may have been impacted given a chance to contribute to a risk register?

Too many rhetorical questions, I know. But a key lesson here is learning from failures. They are a significantly more effective learning tool than are successes. Why? Because they hurt. Most people don’t like getting things wrong, particularly if other people’s reputation and the reputation of their client or employer is hurt in the process.

Yet too often the same mistakes are made. People come and go without really caring about learning what should be important to their organisation. “So what if Stage 1 was a bit untidy. It’s now time to roll out Stage 2 and the noise created by Stage 1 will pass soon enough.”

The task of formally engaging with communities is also a great example of where surprises happen and organisations can get themselves embarrassed publicly. A particular department may be charged with a task, forgetting to ask whether other parts of the same organisation may be interested, have something similar planned involving the same communities, or have recently concluded an engagement process with those same communities.

While communities generally welcome an opportunity for genuine and meaningful engagement, they don’t appreciate being asked the same questions by the same organisation. While members of a department within an organisation may see value in their department, people outside the organisation don’t care a jot about how an organisation arranges its tasks. Their expectation is that once they’ve told an organisation something that that organisation should not only hear but remember. They shouldn’t have to worry about organisational structures and whether departments talk with each other.

At Engagementworks we have some processes and systems that have been well proven in practice which minimise the risks of internal inefficiencies and miscommunication, and which help organisations build strong and meaningful connections with communities. We’d be happy to talk with you about those and how you may be able to put them to work for you.

Communication practitioners may have often been part of or listened to a conversation about the difference between “communication” and “public relations”. I have on several occasions.

I don’t like the term “public relations” because of the negative responses it triggers in the minds of many. It’s become associated with Spin Doctors, slick event or product promoters and others more involved with competitive positioning, diversion, and general hype and hoopla, more than with credible reputation management. In other words practitioners who may grudgingly accept that while it may not be possible to polish a turd, it can be rolled in glitter quite successfully.

I think that the world of corporate communication sometimes needs a bunch of “PR” tactics in its arsenal but that it is a bigger game. A game central to an organisation’s vision and values and helping to express those in a way that resonates strongly with that organisation’s stakeholders. It’s the reputation management game, one of protection and enhancement. Big picture, big thinking. How that game is played depends on an organisation’s needs and its resources. Yet there are tools that corporate communicators don’t often use.

In an organisational context, corporate communication, like its PR toolbox, is also a part of a bigger game. That game is community engagement. In this context “community” means groups external to an organisation, be they customers, ratepayers, service users, or folk affected by or interested in what a particular organisation is up to.

Corporate communication is a key part of the engagement game, as it manages the channels that get an organisation’s information out to external people. While it may engage with externals who are significant “opinion formers”, like journalists, business leaders, and market researchers, that’s often as far as any external connection goes.

Community engagement covers a spectrum from informing at one end to active partnership or empowerment at the other. It also presumes that enlightened organisations do not act until they have engaged meaningfully. Organisations committed to engagement believe that involving citizens in what they do enhances their performance and lets them deliver better products and services. Government agencies particularly should embrace this, as community engagement should be what happens routinely in a democracy. Regrettably that highway is littered with carnage from citizens who believe they weren’t asked about things or not listened to. Such road kill is avoidable. Outcomes can be much better with strategic thinking and canny implementation of an engagement plan.

An often quoted phrase from the movie Field of Dreams is “Build it and they will come.” A better version of this that simply expresses much of what engagement practice is about is “Build it with them and they’re already there.” That second quote comes from The Power of Co-Creation by Venkat Ramaswamy and Francis Gouillart.

Engagementworks Limited has skilled people who can help organisations come to terms with their community engagement needs and train people to develop engagement strategies. We can also provide consultancy services to help with immediate or upcoming community engagement needs. Please get in touch to learn about ways we can help.