How to Create an Effective Community Engagement Plan

Community engagement lies at the heart of good government. Building and maintaining that community takes effort and intentionality.

Enter the community engagement plan. This strategic document:

• Identifies your engagement objectives, goals, and key audiences
• Outlines the strategies and initiatives you will use to reach those goals
• Includes a timeline and framework for implementing those activities

Below we discuss how to create and evaluate your community engagement plan, as well as tools and tips to increase its effectiveness and likelihood of success.

The Power of Community Engagement

Community engagement requires partnering with members of your community on issues and initiatives that affect them. The overarching goal is to build a relationship with the people you serve and allow them to feel ownership in the process.

Inviting as many voices as possible to the table yields better outcomes for your entire community. It can also build bridges between groups that would not have had the opportunity to interact otherwise.

An engaged community better understands and accepts government policies, as they have had a hand in shaping them. These citizens also have a better understanding of how government processes work and have more trust in their elected officials.

For constituents, engagement can mean different things for different people. It may include sharing their thoughts on an upcoming ballot initiative, liking an agency’s social media post, raising an issue with an elected representative, or participating in a survey or poll.

Key Principles of Community Engagement

While each community requires an engagement plan tailored to their specific needs, there are some rules of thumb to guide the process. Here are six principles of community engagement.

1. Understand Your Purpose

Knowing your purpose drives all areas of community engagement – from determining your engagement objectives and scope to defining levels of influence and potential outcomes. Be very clear on what motivates you to partner with your community. Are you seeking feedback on a particular issue? Looking for consensus on a proposal? Don’t start your plan until you’ve clearly identified what you hope to accomplish.

2. Know Your Community

Understanding the makeup of your community – age, occupations, homeownership, primary languages, marital status, and more – helps you determine how best to engage with each demographic and provides insights into their wants and needs. Using a civic engagement tool can help you easily build and maintain a robust community database.

3. Keep Community as the Focal Point

Community is all about relationships. Building bridges and empowering individuals to make connections should sit at the core of your community engagement plan. Aim to develop initiatives that move your projects forward and also help bring together community members with shared interests.

4. Remove Barriers to Participation

Provide community members with multiple avenues for engaging with your office, from traditional phone calls, letters, and town halls, to web forms, email, and social media.

Remember that building relationships is a key part of community engagement. Mix some lighter content, such as a photo contest or a fun poll, in with news and announcements to connect on a more personal level and reach individuals who would not normally engage with your office.

5. Practice What You Preach: Engage!

Community engagement involves give and take. You want to create avenues for community members to speak to you, and you also want to show that you’re listening by responding to their feedback and adding to the conversation.

6. Stay on Track and Be Consistent

It takes major effort to build an engaged community, and just as much effort to maintain it. It pays to keep focused on your engagement goals, follow through on your plan, and remain a dependable source of information for your constituents.

Government Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) software can provide your team with the tools to stay on top of your goals. A government CRM supports your efforts by helping you manage and deploy your outbound communications, tracking key metrics like engagement rates and casework resolution times, and creating workflows that empower your team to answer every constituent who reaches out with a prompt and personalized response.

What to Include in Your Plan

Create an actionable, meaningful community engagement plan by incorporating the elements below. These will help you keep sight of both your big picture vision as well as the detailed strategies to implement it.

Background Information and Research

Start by compiling any existing data you have from previous community engagement projects that relate to your current initiative. This information will help inform your strategies and project structure.

Purpose and Key Objectives

State what you aim to accomplish and your reasons for pursuing this goal. Key objectives reflect the accomplishments you expect to achieve as your plan goes into action.

Success Metrics

Pulling from your key objectives, identify the metrics that you will use to measure the success of your strategy.

Key Principles

Your key principles will provide a guideline for how you interact with the community.

Potential Risks, Challenges, or Roadblocks

Create a list of obstacles you may face in implementing your plan, including time, budget, and resource constraints. Rate the likelihood of each obstacle occurring and brainstorm ways to overcome each issue.

Level of Engagement

This section outlines how much involvement, if any, the community will have with the project. Will you communicate progress with them? Will they provide input to shape it? Help implement it?

Negotiables

Here you will define the scope of the project to set expectations on what can and cannot be accomplished with this particular initiative.

Key Stakeholders

Determine which members of your community have an interest in or will be affected by your project. Consider how they can support the initiative and the ways in which you can make participation easy for each impacted group.

Methods of Engagement

This is the meat of your plan. It summarizes the different strategies you will use to interact with the community. You can leverage a CRM system to help you effectively communicate with your constituents.

Reporting Internally and Externally

Establish who needs to be informed of the results of your plan, both internally and externally, and how you will report outcomes to them.

Evaluating Community Engagement

It’s important to take a step back and review your community engagement plan to make sure it empowers all community members to participate in areas that have an impact on them. You want to ask questions such as:

• Are we engaging the right community members for this project or initiative?
• Have we structured the process in a way that allows all voices to be heard equally?
• Do we include community members in all phases of the process: development, implementation, and analysis?

If you’re unsatisfied with the answers to any of these questions, it may be time to revisit that part of your plan.

Tools to Support Community Engagement

Adopting a government CRM can help support your community engagement efforts. Indigov's platform offers capabilities that can help you develop evidence-based initiatives that run smoothly and efficiently, including:

• The ability to develop a robust database on community demographics
• A platform to respond to every communications channel quickly and meaningfully
• A toolkit for implementing proactive communications

Leveraging these tools enhances your ability to create the strong relationships and deeper trust you hope to achieve with your community engagement efforts. Contact us to learn more.