This section provides guidance to help nurture effective community engagement relationships. It is not an exhaustive list, but highlights important issues that deserve careful attention.
Commitment
- Pledge to work in a genuine and locally appropriate way - and mean it!
- Remember that community engagement is about walking not parachuting! It is about working together; building the capacity of a local community to develop itself and the capacity of a major Authority to relate. It is not about dropping in and dropping out!
- Take time to look beyond symptoms to causes and from causes to lasting solutions
Focus
- Use locally agreed aims to create focus that can produce results ~ Don’t try and do everything at once!
- Create agreed outcomes, milestones and targets
- Consider what success means. Does success for an Authority mean the same thing in a community?
Flexibility
Good relationships rely on emotions, thoughts and feelings being expressed in a variety of ways. Community Engagement relationships require similar opportunities if they are going to work
Create a MENU of communication channels for partners to express themselves, such as:
- Meetings, Forums, Seminars or Conferences
- Virtual Meetings – web discussion / interaction
- E-mail, Letters, Fax
- Phones including conference calls
- SMS (Short Message Service) or text messaging
- Celebrations, Events
- Campaigns
Accessibility
- Find safe, accessible venues in which people feel comfortable
- Be sensitive to personal and cultural issues
- Consider transport, childcare, shift workers, the weather!
- Remember places may not be neutral. A venue may create unhelpful power shifts or difficult memories
- Use ‘friendly’ options for communication, be flexible about times, keep things simple and effective.
Recognition
- Recognise the range of local interests, experience, groups and concerns that may be present
- Recognise that relationships require patience, understanding and trust
- Be aware of personal, political, cultural and professional anxieties.
Trust
- Make representation and leadership meaningful
- Don’t promise more than can be delivered
- Don’t say maybe when you should say no
- Don’t waffle
- Handle Politics and politics sensitively
Genuineness
- Create meaningful relationships; ensure that appropriate funding, help and advice are available in proportion to overall resources
- Remember that not everyone will like everyone else! People don’t have to get on personally to get things done professionally
- Remember that some will be trying to sabotage the process. The media is often used as a potent weapon.
Inclusiveness
- Invite potentially-excluded groups
- Use personal invitations, provide transport, protect the vulnerable
- Ensure that meetings are well facilitated encouraging the quiet voices to be heard
- Create opportunities to build confidence
- Encourage all round involvement and mutual support
Openness
- Listen, feel, watch, sense
- Avoid patronizing language – show courtesy and warmth
- Simplify messages for non-specialist audiences Technical Officers are sometimes good at using incomprehensible terms and poor at ‘reading’ community feelings
- Produce jargon free documents
- Simplify procedures, put people at ease
- Use language that unites rather than divides. Think of ‘everyone working together’ rather than ‘you and your problem’
- Work together to handle the media
Honesty
- Be open about what can and cannot be changed
- Provide information about what is going on, timetables and plans
Be practical
- Effective community engagement considers a myriad of small but significant practical needs from providing the right food to thinking about seating arrangements; from remembering the kettle to cleaning up for the next group. Oh and don’t forget to turn off your mobile phone!
- Be alert, don’t do everything yourself, get everyone involved in looking after each other
- Remember Health and Safety issues – not forgetting your own.