Developing your strategy
Internal review: current strategy
When thinking about any new approach to community engagement in an organisation, it is important to understand and take into account the current or accepted approach. The following checklist is designed to help you determine what the current approach is, the reasons for this approach, and to assess its strengths and weaknesses. You will probably find that you will need to have discussions with key people, and to do some desk research, in order to answer all these questions.
Since this is the first step towards up-dating or re-creating your organisation's strategy, it may be worth bringing together a small team to work on the review process who can then also discuss the development of its strategy. This team should ideally consist of people from different parts of the organisation, able to feed in knowledge and views from a range of perspectives. One member of the team could also usefully be selected to act as organisational 'champion' for community engagement.
Current strategy checklist
- Does a written document exist about community engagement in your organisation?
- Do you have a copy?
- Do other people?
- Is it known about and used?
- Is CE activity monitored through use of the strategy?
- Is the strategy updated?
- What is the context for community engagement activity in your organisation? Is it seen as an integral part of delivering and managing services, an "add on" or irrelevant, for example?
- Has the work been targeted at/ involved particular sections of the community or has there been widespread involvement across the community?
- Do these patterns of involvement reflect strategic priorities and/or community needs?
- Does an accepted approach exist to CE activity, regardless of whether a written document exists? What are the reasons for and history behind community engagement in the organisation? Has it been driven by internal or external forces or particular people?
- Have there been champions or opponents of community engagement activity in your organisation? Who are they?
- Does the real picture of community engagement in the organisation match the theory
- What does the strategy/approach to community engagement include, in terms of
- Methods (information/communication, quantitative research such as surveys, standing groups such as community police consultative groups/neighbourhood/local forums)
- Communities (general public, different geographical communities, different demographic communities; older/younger people, ethnic groups, faith groups, community leaders)
- Issues (neighbourhood challenges, anti-social behaviour, strategic priorities, critical incidents, community relations, young people etc)
- What does it leave out (particular methods, communities)? Why are these areas left out?
- How is the effectiveness of community engagement monitored; individual projects, through scrutiny and accountability processes etc?
- What happens to the findings? How are they fed back internally, to the participants and to the community?
(NB. on the Tools and templates page there is an even more detailed checklist which you can use to assess the format, content and impact of your organisation's current strategy.)
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