6 Steps and Tips to better practice the art of Community Engagment

Barbecue is a highly competitive industry in the US. People create unique flavours using secret ingredients and special techniques. Franklin’s BBQ is an incredibly successful business in Texas. Every day of the week they have a line going around the block that lasts until they sell out. A few years ago, Franklin did something unexpected. He created an in-depth YouTube series to teach people how to barbecue. He describes exactly how to build a smoker like his, what kind of meat to choose, how long to cook it at what temperature, every single detail. It’s odd because most chefs hold those details quite close. When asked about it Franklin replied that “the technique is simple enough, but it takes years to master. There is an intuition that you only gain through the repetition of practice” (Story credit to @AustinKleon)

 Community Engagement similar to BBQ in this way. It is a craft, honed through years of practice, experiences and many awkward, terrible conversations.

Today I’m excited to share with you some of the tips I’ve picked up. My background and education in the field will be quite different to most of yours, and I hope that you find something new and useful to add to your tool belt.

The most simple way to define community engagement is as a relationship between the community and an organisation, like a business or a government institution. Like any good relationship, it a has a couple of important things to keep in mind.

Communication is king. Developing strong communication between you and the community takes work. It requires authenticity and vulnerability. You must create a space where people feel safe to share their true feelings or concerns. The communication must be ongoing, always checking in and circling back to see how your community partners are going, what they are thinking and feeling, and how that is changing over time.

Ongoing communication helps you understand the community at a deeper level. Not just what makes them react, but why it makes them react. And by talking to people, you learn the history. Which in a place as parochial as WA, can be critical.

Communication also involves things not said. Who has ever been in an argument with a partner over something that was omitted? Often that argument ends in, “I wouldn’t be mad if you just had told me!” Similar to Communities, they just want to know. If you don’t tell them something, they first feel upset that they were left out, and then create theories of what or why you excluded that information. And we all know the human mind is quite creative.

Good relationships also require compromise and collaboration. You gain something, while the other person gives something. You lose something, but the community gains something. There is a give and a take in Community Engagement. And the more you practice collaborating with communities, the easier it gets. Building up trust allows both sides of the relationship to be more accommodating.

There is a common narrative going around right now that community trust is eroding, and that business need to reestablish and focus on building trust. The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer indicated an overall trust decline in institutions, with the US falling at record rates. This research also indicated that 64% of respondents expect businesses to lead on change, and that the number one job of CEOs is that building trust . This is a priority for all businesses, that will be enforced by the community and investors, as we’ve seen with the Blackrock letter to CEOs outlining “a sense of purpose”. Community Engagement is a clear way to build trust.

Another trait of a good relationship is that both entities have a shared understanding of the situation. What we are trying to achieve, how and when it will happen, and how will it affect things moving forward. Creating a shared understanding is done by sharing information, answering questions, and confirming that the other person understands. Later we’ll discuss how using the communities own language for describing the project is often the most powerful message.

The last key to a positive and lasting relationship is to know and understand one another. Knowing what makes a community tick, helps an organisation manage risk and reputation before challenges occur, because you can avoid or mitigate those concerns early in the process. I cannot emphasize how important early engagement is. Especially if you know there are reputational risks or challenges surrounding the project. It’s very challenging to manage a risk you don’t understand.

It also helps to know what inspires a community, understand their desires. There are many many positive and unique solutions available when you know what a community loves, and build with that in mind.

Aim to build genuine, meaningful, relationships with your communities, and you will build trust.

In the last year and a half my philosophies around community engagement have grown and become more specific, more aware of the macro and micro economic factors that affect the community. A year and a half ago I started working at CGM Communications, learning from Daniel Smith. Gaining, maintaining, and renewing a social license to operate has been a distinguishing feature of his work. For those of you who don’t know, CGM stands for Community, Government, and Media, and it’s no accident Community is first. All of us at CGM have been instilled with a people focused, storytelling mentality so Community Engagement is in all our work, whether it is in Media, Government, or Digital communications.

Community Engagement must be an ongoing activity because there is not a one size fits all solution, no stock and standard approach that delivers the same outcome every time. Every community is different, every problem is different. Communities change, businesses change, and the problems change.

It is not a compliance check that is crossed off once a year, it must be an ongoing activity. Community Engagement requires adaptability.

The process I’ll outline below is a simple structure that can be adjusted or stretched to match a specific situation.

1) The first step is to Define the Project Scope.

Clearly articulating the context, scope, and initially stating what is a “win”, what is the ideal outcome, is where every project must start. It is how you create alignment, whether that is internally with a project manager, or externally with clients. Alignment, alignment around the purpose has to be the foundation.

Like a game, all projects have rules. You need to know the rules and limitations of the game to understand how to manoeuvre, and to win.

Here's my tip for this phase: clearly identify the community whom you are engaging. Sometimes the word “community” gets thrown around, but we need to start with an aligned and clear idea of what “Community” we’re engaging. Is it bound by geography, industry, interests, demographics, or any other factor? Define your audience for engagement.

For WA says Yes!, we limited the community to Marriage Equality Supporters in Western Australia, and more specifically focused on Perth Metro where the majority of voters are. That’s a big bucket, but even that definition helped our team. When volunteers and stakeholders asked us to do persuasion campaigning and try to convince No voters we were able to explain that was not the community we were targeting. We knew that was not a strategic use of our valuable time, and quickly made it clear that we focus solely on Supporters as our primary engagement community.

2) Start with research.

Everyone probably starts with Desktop research, and if you don’t please do. Simply using Google to research the topic and the area can reveal news articles, community blogs, interest organisations, all of which paint a history and a basic profile of the situation.

Here’s my tip for the research phase, and it’s an oldie but a goodie. Pick up the phone and call people. You don’t know what you don’t know, and someone embedded in the community will give you more information and insight than you can Google. They will add color and context that you cannot gain through the internet.

3) Schedule meetings with stakeholders

After you’ve done some research and you have a better lay of the land, it’s time to start scheduling meetings with stakeholders. The purpose of this step is to build relationships from the top down, to identify community leaders who command a constituent base.

One of the greatest successes on the WA says Yes! campaign was how CGM managed the diverse stakeholder groups. By the second week on the ground, I had met with the Labor, Liberal, Greens, the Socialist Alliance, Equal Love, Rainbow Rights, Pride WA, and a dozen other LGBTIQ activists and activist. I utilised the first meeting to achieve three things – first to introduce myself and begin building a relationship, second to convince everyone that the focus for our engagement was Marriage Equality Supporters, and third was to get buy in surrounding the campaign brand of Positivity, Respect, and Dignity. Each week I would email and ring through these stakeholders, offering updates and get their feedback on our next steps. I also used these calls to reinforce the brand guidelines, especially as the campaign heated up and got more combative. What I’m most proud of, is that each of these groups did uphold and embody Positivity, Respect, and Dignity, and as a result the narrative of those “aggressive Yes campaigners” simply did not stack up in WA. We were incident free, riding along on the high road, united in the most bizarre and broad coalition. We often remarked what a strange moment this was, standing side by side with those whom in other circumstances are not political bedfellows.

Here’s my tip for the stakeholder phase. Some stakeholders will be difficult, or resist alignment. To ease this, seek to understand what the root of their issue is. How you do this is to ask 5 Whys.

4) Develop a strategy

After you have done your research and met with your stakeholders, you now have an idea of the resources and constraints of the project. This is when you develop a strategy.

For the WA says Yes! Campaign, there were definitely a few constraints. The advertising and research components of a traditional campaign were managed quite closely out of Sydney HQ. Another challenge was that some of our stakeholders here on the ground would only participate within a narrow set of conditions. And in addition, we weren’t able to control who we were calling for our phone banking efforts.

So CGM developed a clever strategy using what we do have here in WA.

We often joke that WA has two degrees of separation. We figured, if we could mobilise our supporters and activists to call their own personal networks and remind them to return the survey, we’d probably talk to most of our target audience.

We developed conversation messaging that incited action, and motivated Marriage Equality Supporters to become the vehicle for most of our campaign activity. We empowered them with the tools and messages to ask their friends to return the survey.  

The tip out of this section is that empowerment is exponential. If you empower people to become ambassadors of your message, and encourage them to ask their community peers to participate, your will reach audiences that are usually hard to find. Individuals occupy different spaces within the community. They might be a member at the local PnC, bowls club, mens shed, or community choir. If the public becomes the vehicle for the message, they will take that message to a variety of audiences organically. 

Empowerment is exponential because passion is contagious. If the community feel empowered as change leaders and have owner ship over the outcomes, they will galvanise and surprise with their commitment, dedication, and output. It is hard to resist joining a community driven movement. And with more people who join, you get more advocates going out into communities, spreading the message.

In today’s digital age, people want to connect face to face. This “traditional” way of mobilising a message, using word of mouth and in-person communication not only cuts through and impacts the audience in a much deeper way, but the public craves it. Most interactions have been digitised and we most frequently communicate with our loved ones through a screen. The simple act of sitting in a room one another and sharing a conversation about a meaningful topic, that is what people want. The public grabs on to these opportunities to connect with one another.

When the community own the engagement, it’s reach is exponential.

5) Execute the plan

For this step, put into place structures and processes that support the strategy. If there is one thing political campaigns have taught me, it is how to build systems out of nothing, and usually overnight. It’s like building a small business in 6months, and often it needs to be open and operating within two weeks.

Build a process, then measure the process.

How can you know where to improve if you don’t know how you’re doing? Knowing how you are performing is the first step to tweaking and adjusting that process for maximised return.

Data is powerful. The tip here is to measure everything.

Let’s say I’m running an engagement in a local suburb. Based on my resources and strategy, the method I have selected is running a series of events. I’ve had three events now, have been tracking for each event how many total calls I’ve made, how many people said they would come, and then how many people actually come to the events. For this example, let’s say I call 1000 people, 100 say they’ll come, and 80 people actually show up. That means from total call to actual bodies in the door is an 8% conversion for recruitment for that event. The next event I do a bit better and get 12%, and for the third event I get 10% conversion from total calls to attendees. My average rate for how many calls I need to make to how many people get in the door is 10%.

Within this simulation, an exciting moment occurs. They’ve added my issue to the council agenda for next month. Since I have been tracking my attendance conversion rates, I know exactly how many calls I need to make to get a guaranteed number of people attending that council meeting.  

This is an excellent example of how tracking and recording data will help your engagements. And you can codify and track everything! You can track the number of conversations, the content of conversations, the engagement rates on SMS, email, or social media. 

Aggregated data tells a story, but first you need to collect the right data points.

6) Evaluate and change the plan

The last bit is to evaluate and change the plan. This step is basically a feedback loop, where you assess the information you’ve collected and use it to adapt or improve your engagement.

You can measure and evaluate the plan for example by tracking the conversations, regularly checking in with stakeholders, conducting research and polling, and measuring against milestones. As I said earlier, situations change, problems change, and Community Engagement must be constantly evaluating to ensure the strategy is productive, and that the relationship between the community and the organisation is healthy.

My tip out of this section is one of my favourites. The tip is to use the language of the community.

A few years back I had a client on a national survey project in Mexico. The plan was to go to a members door, show them an ad on a tablet, and then conduct a survey to collect feedback on how the video can be improved. They did three rounds of this process, each with a new ad that reflected the feedback people had given. Not only did the ad get better through these revisions, the messages resonated with the community in a way that simply could not have been created by the “experts” in head office. That program won, getting over 80% of the votes cast.

Community Engagement works because it is the audience driving the research, ideas, decisions, and in this point, the messaging.

As you go through a project, you become more familiar with how the community responds to or describes the project. Keep an ear out for a clever way someone describes the situation or asks a question. As you evaluate and revise your program, go back and update the language in your messaging to reflect what you’re hearing from the community.

Community Engagement is not “the soft stuff” or to be looked down upon. It is a high skill, that automation will never be able to replace. It is a craft, one which can always be honed. It can be measured, and while engineering may be more precise, Community Engagement requires creativity and flexibility in order to be successful.

So, what are the five things to take away from today’s talk?

1.    Community Engagement is a relationship between an organisation and the community. Treat your engagements as such and you will be more successful.

2.    Community Engagement is not static, there is no one-size-fits all stock and standard method, and be wary of anyone promising a sure fire thing.

3.    Early engagement is best. The sooner you engage the community in the process the more successful your engagement will be.

4.    Community Engagement must be an ongoing activity, not checked off the list once a year.

5.    People first messages and tactics resonate more than ever. In the digital age, the timing is right for face to face conversations.

6.    Follow the simple process outlined above to begin practicing effective Community Engagement.

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This was presented as a talk at the Committee for Economic Development Australia in Perth, WA. Thank you to everyone at CEDA WA for their help with the event.

Photo credit: Energy Images