Compensating Community Members: Increasing Equitable Participation in Community Engagement

Meaningful, authentic, and impactful engagement is not a transactional relationship. It should honor the time, opinions, and the lived experiences of community members. This requires long-term vision, investment, and resources.

At Civility Localized, we believe in seeing communities grow with dignity. Compensating community members for participation is one of the strategies we use to ensure that happens while conducting engagement on behalf of our clients. As with any engagement strategy, there are both clear benefits and potential challenges to consider. We’ll touch on both below.

Conducting community engagement and outreach in communities with diverse backgrounds is what we do best. Over the years, we’ve developed nuanced strategies anchored in our commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging to increase trust, build bridges, and overcome barriers to participation. All of these strategies aim to increase participation and equip communities to grow with dignity.

Let’s look at the benefits, drawbacks, and implementation of compensating community members, and utilizing Community Ambassador programs to increase both the equity and efficacy of engagement.?

Benefits

Increase Equity

Engaging impacted communities is essential to achieving equity. By providing compensation to honor the time, wisdom, and lived experiences of community members we access broader and deeper representation of disenfranchised communities. This leads to more effective problem-solving. We know that those with first-hand experience often have the deepest understanding of how to address and overcome local challenges. Community members are, in fact, experts! It’s time to recognize that they should be compensated as such.?

Develop a Greater Sense of Community

In addition to bringing about better solutions, getting input from underrepresented communities helps build buy-in and community support for local government initiatives. It develops a sense of community ownership and pride, which in turn results in deeper levels of engagement in the future.?

For community members who are economically marginalized, the stressors associated with poverty can make engaging challenging. Monetary incentives alleviate some of these pain points and encourage participation in civic processes.?

“It is our experience that compensation helps bring out community members who previously felt that invitations to participate were not intended for them,” says Christine Edwards Pitkin, MPA Edwards, founder of Civility Localized.? “We have often discovered that these very community members have meaningful insights that might otherwise have been missed.”

Increase Participation?

Of course, in addition to direct monetary compensation, public forums should be designed to support attendance. This can be done by providing food, transportation, child care, translation, interpretation, disability accessibility, and more.?

We recommend raffling prizes as incentives for participating, or even for staying until the end of a listening session or meetings! These strategies have proven to be significant motivators in multiple settings.

How to Know When To Use a Paid Community Member Plan

First: Consider the engagement goal. If the goals include increasing participation, equity, or a sense of community, a paid community plan may be necessary for your project.?

Second: Consider assembling an ambassador program. If you are in need of feedback and participation from a specific population or community that is not readily accessible to your project team, then creating an ambassador program is a smart way to go.?

Third: Goals, budget, and time constraints will all contribute to determining the format of compensation. This could be a whole other blog post, so we won’t get into details here, but we are experts in this area, so reach out to us!

Considerations

1. Identify the preferred format for participation. Provide clear explanations of why and how participants will be compensated. This should include amounts and forms of compensation, as well as circumstances under which participants may or may not be compensated.
2. Ensure that participants completing equal tasks receive equal compensation.
3. Prioritize participant privacy and data confidentiality.?
4. Compensation is not a benefit of participation and should not be discussed as such. It is simply a way to honor the time and energy of the community. The task for which compensation is given must be extremely well defined. Managing expectations here is critical.
5. Finally: when low-income status intersects with other material or social vulnerabilities, such as homelessness, chronic illness, and/or minority social status, special care must be given to simultaneously avoid either exploiting potential participants by virtue of underpayment, or unduly influencing them by offering excessive compensation. Research what amounts, forms, and methods of compensation might be most appropriate. Reaching out to organizations working with those populations for guidance is a good place to start.

Other Ways to Honor and Compensate Community Members

• Advisory Board or Steering Committee Membership: Honoring community members and stakeholders with positions that are directly involved in steering the direction of a project goes a long way in garnering authentic and equitable reach. ?
• Reducing Meeting Barriers: We’ve touched on this before, but it cannot be said too much. Providing food, child care, transportation, translation, wheelchair accessibility, virtual options, masks/sanitizer, etc. go a long way to increasing equity, inclusion, and belonging.
• Prizes, Swag, One-time Incentives: Incentivizing participation and contributions has proven to increase a sense of belonging. Something as simple as offering a chance to win a donated gift card or offering a travel stipend can increase the authenticity of engagement. https://measuringu.com/offering-incentives/
• Community Ambassadors: Community Ambassadors can connect historically disengaged communities to your engagement initiative. Too often engagement initiatives miss the mark when attempting to include young people, seniors, communities of color, immigrant communities, and more. The use of Community Ambassadors, otherwise known as regular people who have connections to businesses and organizations on the ground, can greatly enhance any engagement initiative.?
• Ambassadors receive training, instructions, and support. They are tasked with reaching out to their local networks to raise awareness, as well as with attending local events and recruiting community members to attend meetings, focus groups, interviews, and more. Ambassadors receive a stipend for their time and efforts. In short, developing a community ambassador program is a proven strategy to enhance engagement.
• Side note: As engagement experts, Civility Localized has extensive experience developing and implementing Community Ambassador programs as part of both large and small engagement initiatives. Reach out to us to learn more.

Work With Us

Honoring the lived experiences, input, and time of community members during engagement initiatives is incredibly nuanced. We won’t pretend to have touched on every aspect of the process here. Rather we’ve sought to hone in on some of the universal guiding principles that can serve as building blocks for quality interactions. So while we’ve just scratched the surface, hopefully it’s gotten gears turning as you consider ways to develop robust engagement strategies.?

If your organization is looking to enhance its capacity to engage historically disenfranchised communities, reach out to us. This is an area of expertise that we have both a depth of knowledge and extensive experience in.?

It’s kind of our thing, and we love putting our expertise to work in new communities every day!?

Reach out to us at [email protected] to set up a consultation call.

Originally published on our blog at civilitylocalized.com by Elizabeth Flemister