Community engagement is an approach to community development that empowers residents to shape their own future. For it to be successful, however, community engagement must include participation by a range of stakeholders with differing ideas and priorities.
Surveys and questionnaires can collect quantitative data to assess community needs, while interviews and focus groups provide qualitative insight. Interpreting feedback accurately is key to successful community engagement.
Conventional Engagement
Traditional engagement typically takes place in public settings where citizens are separated and addressed from a podium by officials. Citizens have only brief opportunities to respond to public policy projects, which may not reflect what community members truly want.
Thick engagement involves facilitated small-group discussions that provide participants with an opportunity to consider various perspectives and policies from their shared experiences. It requires greater involvement and deliberation than conventional engagement methods, taking several hours up to several months.
Successful community engagement strategies require time and resources. Assessing the time commitment needed at each step will enable you to plan accordingly and set realistic goals, such as preparation, engagement activities, evaluation and extra time needed for unexpected challenges or follow-up activities.
Thick Engagement
Thick participation involves intensive, deliberative processes like community dialogues with hundreds of participants that include facilitated small-group discussions, deliberating issues and options, and action planning. Such processes tend to take more time than thin engagement methods such as surveys, public meetings, or petition-signing campaigns that take place primarily online.
Though thick participation is the goal, its organization can be challenging and not everyone may be able to participate. Furthermore, engagement may backfire if it excludes cultural diversity or fails to support those with differing ideologies or perspectives.
Thin engagement, on the other hand, is simpler and faster to coordinate than its thicker counterpart, from voting and petition-signing to ideas crowdsourcing and social media activism. While some forms of thin engagement may have no direct effect, others can have profound ramifications (think Ice Bucket Challenge or defeat of SOPA/PIPA).
Thin Engagement
Community engagement is both an orientation and approach that acknowledges how residents’ lived experiences shape interactions between government organizations and communities, and themselves. It fosters the idea that residents can influence policy decisions directly while also seeking to foster better relations, trust, and understanding between the two groups.
Thick engagement involves intensive, well-informed discussions among small groups with the help of an experienced facilitator on critical issues or topics, lasting anywhere from several hours to several months and leading to a comprehensive decision-making framework.
Thin engagement offers more casual opportunities for feedback. Examples of thin engagement include public comment or online polling; both processes can quickly capture many participants; however, their ability to provide deep insights or consider tradeoffs involved with policy decisions is limited.
An ideal digital engagement platform should feature various engagement methods, such as idea forums and surveys that offer participants a balanced level of influence. Furthermore, multilingual support should ensure residents can participate at their convenience.
Self-Assessment
At the core of all community engagement strategies and tools is one core principle: all members of a community have the right to be informed, consulted upon, involved in decisions about them and empowered. To achieve this goal requires transparency, open communication channels, ongoing collaboration between community members and genuine commitment towards improving its wellbeing.
Preparatory and planning participation involves asking members of a community for their thoughts on an ongoing development project. Not only is this civic duty but it gives valuable insight into practices and values held dear by local residents.
To create an effective and sustainable community engagement program in your jurisdiction, it is critical that you first assess its current level of capacity. Our self-assessment tool can help identify community engagement strengths and challenges to create an action plan moving forward. Both online and print versions of this assessment tool are available so it can also be utilized within workshops with other APPR stakeholders.