How culture change equips councils for better community engagement

March 17, 2022 By Vanja Pantic, CitizenLab

CitizenLab share their top tips for community engagement and explain the value of a dedicated digital engagement team.

Carnegie UK’s recent report on democratic wellbeing found that two in five people in England say that democracy is not working. 74% reported they were not involved at all in local decision-making.

But we know that community engagement is the key to helping build trust between governments and their communities, and to supporting the creation of more inclusive, responsive policies.

The good news is that more and more local governments are engaging their communities in decision-making. Whether it’s to increase trust or create more inclusive policies, community engagement has become a central part of local government.

At CitizenLab, we’ve found that digital engagement methods have led to 51% more participation on average. To help local governments make this happen, engagement teams are being formed in cities all across the country.

What is a community engagement team?

Engagement (or participation) teams help ensure local governments have a dedicated capacity to community engagement work, backed with expertise. They often play a central function between stakeholders:

Building relationships with community members and local groups
Internally advocating for widespread adoption of engagement principles across departments
Coordinating communication between community members and council leaders.

On top of managing so many internal and external stakeholder relationships, engagement teams are also usually charged with creating, managing, and implementing a city-wide plan for community engagement.

Given all that these teams manage, it should be no surprise that councils with dedicated engagement teams have a competitive advantage compared to those who run their engagement projects ad-hoc.

One committed engagement team can help:

Play a neutral, mediating role between the diverse stakeholders needed to make engagement successful: local residents, stakeholder groups, elected officials, and others.
Serve as goalkeeper to ensure information flows consistently between teams and departments, and between the local government and its community members.
Contribute their expertise for a more strategic approach to community engagement with the right participation methods and processes.
Ensure a balance between different types of engagement projects, balancing lighthearted vs more serious projects.
Tap into their networks of community ambassadors in different fields (such as urban planning or social work).
Be accountability partners to ensure everyone practices what is preached, including the participation vision and moving up the participation ladder where possible.
Ensure participation is continuous, highly-participatory, truly inclusive, and responsive.

We see the impact in places like Newham, one of the biggest and most diverse boroughs in London. Newham has run large, successful engagement projects on everything from a £4.1 million urban planning project to large-scale community assemblies.

Top tips for community engagement without a dedicated engagement team

But what if you don’t have the capacity or funding to put together an engagement team?

When you don’t have a committed engagement team, it can be hard to coordinate internally and fit engagement into your day-to-day responsibilities. However, it’s still possible to run (good) engagement initiatives by internally organising across departments and planning carefully.

Here are some of our top tips for local governments that want to run engagement projects without a dedicated team:

Formulate clear goals and deadlines from the start, and communicate them internally to ensure collaboration is set up for success.
Plan proactively for some of the challenges that could emerge without a centralised team managing engagement.
Coordinate responsibilities across different teams and departments.
And on that note, consider creating a working group made up of individuals from different teams/departments to ensure good collaboration (these individuals will also be your internal community engagement ambassadors).
As much as possible, it’s important that teammates tasked with engagement can delegate some of their other tasks to give more attention to their community efforts.
Plan a way to update other colleagues on your engagement initiatives, such as with an internal newsletter.
Try to spot conflict early on and delegate between stakeholders so it doesn’t impact your timeline and process.
Make sure that engagement is a continuous and meaningful process, so it doesn’t end up feeling like something to check off a list simply.
Share learnings and insights from your engagement initiatives to inform the process for new participation methods/projects across different departments.
Keep feedback loops open, both internally and with your community members.

One example of these tips being used well is in The Municipality of Den Helder, in the Netherlands. They set up a working group that meets every two weeks. Through this method they’ve found they “could switch quickly between departments and, at the same time, you create ambassadors everywhere who can propose projects and make the community engagement platform known among colleagues who do not participate in the working group” says Steven de Groot, platform manager of Den Helder’s participation platform.

Getting started with (digital) community engagement

Wherever you are in your community engagement journey, the key is to start somewhere. Digital resources can help you do that.

Authorities working with CitizenLab have seen a 55% decrease in the time they spend analyzing and reporting their engagement results – and instead, are able to spend the time saved on continuous engagement with their communities.

Inspired to launch your own community engagement initiative? Here are some resources to help you get started, wherever you are:

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

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