Developing your strategy
Defining the strategy: detailed objectives

Strategic and planning goals

For community involvement to be effective, it needs to be linked in to your organisation's strategy and planning.

When setting objectives for a community involvement project, it will help to ensure the sustainability of both the project and community engagement in the organisation more widely if they reflect the organisation's goals.

REAL LIFE EXAMPLE A police authority project identified the following goals, which fitted strategically with those of the authority overall and helped the project to be seen as having corporate value: .  to improve the quality and usefulness of community engagement .  to drive a more effective contribution from communities in identifying local problems .  to actively involve communities in providing solutions to these problems .  to provide better feedback for communities on the results of consultation and engagement .  to implement a more strategic framework to secure community involvement

Operational goals

REAL LIFE EXAMPLE The following aims were developed to link with a neighbourhood engagement project to ensure that the local service was addressing community concerns Community Beat Forums Beat action plans Micro Beats Linkages to community networks Beat team publicity Beat team voicemail/communications Beat websites Media links Community Beat Teams Examine roles and responsibilities Beat managers Develop Beat Team Community Engagement Pack Examine Training for community beat managers in policy and practice of community engagement and customer service

Think as well about what detailed plans community engagement can fit with.

You may need to review this as CE activity progresses; for example, it might be unclear how job roles might change and service direction might shift as a result of CE activity at the start of a project.

Relevance to stakeholder departments/units and partners

For success of your project, you will need to make sure that what you plan fits with others' activities and projects. Consider:

• matching strategic and operational goals of others;
• identifying quick wins for potential partners
• sharing time/resources
• being able to piggy-back on other pieces of work
• use of the local media to push buttons
• linking to other decision making forums

It is also critical, as noted above, to make sure that your activities are relevant and meaningful to the community.

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