Working for community enagement

Creating a community project is exciting and challenging all at once. How do you manage diverse opinions? How do you deal with varying levels of support? How do you involve people – and still get stuff done?! Whether it be a community project, a campaign or an event, engaging the community is essential.

So how can you start to engage your community in a project that you are developing? Here’s a few guidelines for community engagement:

Define your aims and objectives

• What’s your goal? What need are you hoping to meet in your community?
• Do you have the expertise to make it happen, or know people that do?
• What will it take to get this expertise involved?

Research your locality

• Do you know what’s already in place in your locality? Don’t replicate a service for the sake of it. Assess whether it’s really needed.
• What provision has occurred historically? What worked? What failed? What community learning is there that can inform your project planning?
• If there is existing provision, work out if there is a ‘gap’ or ‘specialism’ your project can start to address. Better to develop an initiative that can complement and work alongside collective provision in the area.

Understand your audience

• What are the key concerns of each community stakeholder?
• What is your target audience? Where do they live? What do they need? How will they benefit?
• Which people/groups within your community may not agree with your proposals?

Collaborate

• Who’s out there already and what are they doing? How can your project add to the local community offering?
• Make sure you contact other community groups so that everyone is clued up about what your service offers. Who are the key individuals, agencies and organisations that you could be speaking to about your initiative?
• Partnering with other groups can be a helpful way of achieving your goals and bringing specialist expertise in to your project. By partnering with others it is essential to establish a clear set of goals, responsibilities and outcomes, so that everyone knows what is expected of them.

Communication

• Build understanding. Outline as clearly as you can the aims of your project. What is your project here to do – and what is it not?
• Listen. Are you genuinely listening to the need? What do local people think would be useful? What are the existing attitudes, perceptions and misconceptions about what you are trying to achieve?
• Ensure you tell the story and communicate regularly with your audiences. How do they like to hear about your project? What’s the best mode of communication for your target audiences?

Involve

• Ensure that people feel that they have been ‘worked with and not done to’. You are far more likely to get local support and take up of your project if you have made people feel part of the process.
• Set up an advisory group, or a focus group, hold community update meetings, invite practical feedback opportunities on key milestones of your project.
• Identify some local champions for your cause. There may well be a great deal of local knowledge, expertise and experience from which your project can benefit. Who are the key local people that can really help you?