Community engagement is a form of cooperation that empowers individuals to bring about positive changes in their local communities. Its basis lies in democratic principles: that every affected party should have input on an issue at hand.

Stakeholders can be identified through social network analysis (SNA), which involves delineating your network boundaries and collecting data on its members and relationships.

1. Identifying Stakeholders

Community engagement encompasses an array of tools and strategies, but its foundation lies in identifying stakeholders. This involves exploring diversity within the community as well as any imbalances in power between different segments, while making sure organizations understand local cultural nuances and history.

Identification of stakeholders may involve hosting a facilitated community meeting or survey and using feedback analysis software tools that provide statistical analysis of qualitative and quantitative data to help the organization approach each stakeholder group appropriately. Analysis can then reveal patterns or key nodes within the community network that help refine and improve future efforts.

2. Developing a Strategy

Implementing an active engagement strategy within your community will enable people to learn about and benefit from participating in your project, while building a solid base upon which to build upon in the future.

Set goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound when setting engagement efforts goals. Be sure to include both long-term goals as well as shorter ones to cover all activities planned for completion.

Utilizing relationship mapping, analyze the network of stakeholders within your bounded area by identifying roles, interests, influence and relationships of all involved. Also identify barriers and work with your community to overcome them – for instance by offering childcare or translation services during meetings this could increase participation from marginalized groups.

3. Developing a Communication Plan

Community engagement refers to actively engaging members of a community in discussions and decisions that affect them, whether that’s through community surveys, town hall meetings, collaborative projects or any other means.

Create a communication plan is key to successful community engagement. Your plan should reflect the goals of your program, whether that means informing, consulting, collaborating or empowering the local population.

Internal reporting is the process of sharing results and learnings from your community engagement efforts with team members and stakeholders, in order to encourage open dialogue and accountability among them. Sharing both positive and negative feedback allows for open discussion as well as providing an opportunity to refine and improve community engagement strategies based on lessons learned.

4. Developing a Communication Calendar

Establishing and nurturing long-term relationships are an integral part of community engagement, not only benefitting current initiatives but also creating the framework for future opportunities to engage.

Communication calendars help organizations stay organized and on track with their community engagement efforts, adding consistency while forcing teams to think strategically and collect data.

Communication calendars can be powerful tools to foster community engagement, especially among newer members who may need extra incentive to return and become contributors. Producing fresh content regularly provides them with motivation to come back and be active participants.

5. Developing a Feedback Loop

Implementing a community engagement strategy involves setting clear, attainable, and timely objectives. Relationship mapping tools are useful in understanding how stakeholders tend to cluster together and how they may act as advocates for your project.

Discover and nurture community leaders to ensure the future success of your project. SNA metrics such as centrality or betweenness can help identify members with significant influence who could serve as models.

Engagement through community participation allows members of the community to share decision-making power with an organization, while simultaneously creating two-way dialogue and feedback loops to foster trust between all participants, creating an atmosphere in which everyone feels heard.

6. Developing a Post-Engagement Strategy

Community engagement involves forging meaningful connections and empowering people to make decisions that affect them. To do this successfully, organizations must be open and honest with stakeholders, provide ongoing communication channels, and demonstrate genuine care for the wellbeing of their local communities.

Start with a clear purpose and set SMART goals – these should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound – before conducting an assessment of community needs, assets and priorities using methods like surveys, interviews and focus groups. Next identify resources and existing partnerships which could support your initiatives as well as potential barriers that could impede participation such as cultural sensitivities, economic issues or systemic disenfranchisement that might hinder participation – these could include cultural sensitivities, economic issues or systemic disenfranchisement which should all be identified so you can work to address them and address them!