Idea 2: Fish where the fish are...

One ‘problem’ that many practitioners get hung up on is how to drive prospective consultees to their online or offline engagement projects. In a social media context, many (most) Councils or Government Agencies have social media followings in the hundreds, or low thousands, but rarely of the sort of scale to provide any real confidence in reaching the wider public through social media channels. 

But there’s another way of thinking about this: fish where the fish are!

In any given area there will a wide range of groups and agencies that have a much wider network of social media followers, and you can usefully consider how to promote your key engagement messages through those networks. In one recent example of a local authority that we are working with, the corporate facebook and twitter network of just under 5,000 likers/followers (many of which may be duplicates) but their wider partnership organisations (police, fire & rescue, college, newspaper, football club) had almost 110,000 follow/likes between them. Again, many of these will be duplicates, but even so...

Getting these partner organisations to retweet or like Council engagement messages could potentially increase the network of consultees from 5,000 to 110,000 with no need for additional resources or budgets.  Now that’s got to be something worth considering!

So when you’re mapping your stakeholders for a particular engagement process, try asking yourself not how to bring those people to you – but where do these people meet and engage already and how best can we tune our message to that audience and place?

Giant:
Ian Morris

Principal Business Consultant

Objective

ian.morris@objective.com 

07833259224

http://uk.linkedin.com/in/ianraymondmorris

Idea 1: Use the 6 P’s...

The old adage ‘proper planning prevents piss poor performance’ certainly applies to community engagement activity.

Here at Slough we have a developed the following 8 staged checklist to help staff get the most out of running their local community engagement activities:

1. Set your objectives

• Do you understand the context for your engagement activities and what’s driving them? 
• Do you understand where your engagement activity sits within the Councils policy/planning cycles?

2. Set project parameters

• Have you identified all of the goals, outputs and outcomes you want to achieve?

3. Understand your community

• Have you undertaken enough research to understand the communities you need to engage with?
• Are you clear what you need to know and from whom?
• What level of engagement do you need to use with each groups?

4. Set up your engagement activities

• Have you chosen the right engagement methods/techniques to reach the groups you need to engage with?

5. Identifying and managing risk

• Have you developed plans to deal with all of the risks associated with carrying out your engagement activities?

6. Publicity

• Do you have a social media strategy and  or communication plan to advertise your  activities to the groups you need to work with?

7. Launch

8. Close, analyse and feedback

• Are you clear what methods and criteria you will use to evaluate your engagement activities and feedback to residents? 
• You’ll get the best results from your engagement process if you plan it properly.

  

Giant: 

Amanda Renn

Policy & Communications Team

Slough Borough Council

amanda.renn@slough.gov.uk

01753 875560

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

A compendium of hints and tips for online consultation & engagement

Here, at Objective HQ, we’re a bit geeky about public policy and engagement.

Sure, we provide software that is used for collaboration and engagement by around 6,000 public servants in almost 200 public sector agencies so we do have a commercial interest!  But actually we just think it’s a really cool thing to be interested in and we love working with others who share our interest and care about helping to build a better world through high quality public services.  It’s that sociability, that constant drive to work intelligently with others who share our obsession that makes us geeks – and keeps us from straying down the path of nerdiness.

And it’s with this sociability in mind that we’ve worked with other public policy & engagement types to come up with a few ideas for improving online engagement in the public sector. With contributions from ‘giants’ from UK Councils, Government Agencies, Social Media companies and our own Consultation and Policy consultants we hope that it will prove to be a useful starting point for discussion.