As facilitators who love to design community engagement processes, you know we love a good check-in! And, since we can’t stop talking about community engagement this year, we thought we’d host a mid-year check-in on our community engagement work and projects:
- In the last six months, we have designed and facilitated dozens of community engagement sessions to receive feedback on events from participants in order to learn about how to do things differently in order to better serve the community. Through these conversations, organizations have been able to assess their events and their impact, and discuss different ways to move forward.
- If you don’t think a conference or a summit can be a part of community engagement, think again! This year we’ve designed and facilitated sessions at conferences to better connect participants, allow for authentic networking, and provide a space for community input on important conference topics. In addition, we recently helped a government agency think through their own conference planning to ensure attendees are engaged and receive value. It’s a great way to focus on defining targeted audiences and designing meaningful discussions. Conferences and events can be another piece of the community engagement puzzle with thoughtful planning.
- We’ve always known that communities of practice offer cross sector learning and best practice sharing, relationship building, collaboration and trust building, and in the last six months we’ve seen how this benefits grantee cohorts. We have loved working with grantees but we really, really love involving the grantors in the cohorts as well. Breaking down power dynamics and barriers is our superpower.
- Strategic planning is more effective with community engagement. It’s way more fun, it creates stronger relationships among board and staff, allows for buy-in from stakeholders, and gives the community a voice. We love designing and guiding community-centered strategic planning and we love the organizations that invest in this important process.
So, what have we learned this year?
If you’ve ever engaged in our programs or worked directly with us, you know we take learnings from our work and then apply them back to the work. It’s a feedback loop that creates opportunities to pilot things, incorporate new ideas, pivot, make important changes. Here are some of the learnings we’ve shared over the past year from the sessions and projects we’ve facilitate:
- You can invite folks to your community engagement event, but you can’t make them participate. Think of it as quality over quantity, as well – focusing on a high turnout may cost you getting the information you’re seeking. Get clear on who you want to invite and why, and what you are asking them to participate in.
- Speaking of what you want them to participate in, define what is needed for the sessions to have high engagement. How long will it be? What are the best hours to hold it? Where should it be held? Should it be in person or virtual? What accessibility issues should you address and provide? Don’t ask your participants to define these things for you. Create the container, and then invite community members into the container.
- There are ways to gather information before and after your event. Short surveys as prep for events or follow up are a great additional way to get further input or for participants to give feedback if they didn’t couldn’t attend or weren’t able to give feedback during the event. Those folks who had to leave the room for a phone call? They might really have some valuable input to provide in a post-event survey. Give people different options for participation to receive the most input.
Now it’s your turn!
Tell us … what have you been doing for community engagement? How did it go? What would you change? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear more!
And, don’t forget to dive into our blogs on community engagement to learn more:
Doubling Down on Community Engagement
NPQ: How to do Community Engagement Right
Community-Centered Strategic Planning
