Developing your strategy
Internal review: organisational needs
Now that you have a clear understanding of your Force or Authority's current approach, you need to determine the needs of the organisation with regard to community engagement. You can do this by working through the following checklist. You may find that the information available is incomplete - if so, it might be worth undertaking a short 'staff survey' to get a range of views about what has worked, what has not and what might usefully change. Alternatively, you could bring officers and/or staff together in one or more workshops to share and generate ideas and information. All that you/ your team have learned can then be used to revise or create a new community engagement strategy for your organisation.
REAL LIFE EXAMPLEA police authority was planning to rejuvenate local approaches to engagement in its area. An audit of community engagement activity was carried out and gaps in activity in rural areas were revealed. As a result, a decision was made to target neighbourhood action planning activity in two contrasting rural areas as trial projects, with a view to rolling out activity across the force's other rural areas, if successful. |
Organisational needs checklist:
- Are there general opportunities for the public to feed their views in to the organisation on your performance? (suggestion boxes, websites, comment forms)
- What mechanisms exist? Do they allow for input from all types of community?
- Are there opportunities for the public to influence key corporate and service delivery activities , such as:
- Priority setting
- Budget setting
- Service management and review
- Corporate performance
- Local service delivery
- The response to critical incidents
- What methods are used? Questionnaires, written feedback, websites, forums, meetings, citizens' juries/panels?
- Are a combination of methods used for individual projects or workstreams?
- Which methods are not used? Why is this?
- What kind of responses are achieved by these mechanisms? Are sufficient people being engaged from different groups? Are communities (of interest, geography) being overly consulted or left out? How do you know this?
- Do we get new and fresh information from these processes? Do we need to? What other mechanisms might be used to reinvigorate community engagement?
- What are the public/ the organisation's assessments of the success of these techniques in the past?
- What were their aims, in terms of information gathered, resources used, sustainability of the process for example? Have they achieved these?
- What were the success and weaknesses of such approaches?
- How can things be improved in the future?
- Is the right balance being achieved between information sharing and consultation? Are some processes open to all and publicised? Are others targeted and recruited?
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