Embedding engagement
Skills: developing in-house skills
Staff who get involved in developing your organisation's approach to community engagement, or in a specific project, may need briefing, training and development. You should consider:
- Whether training and development take place in-house?
- Who would take responsibility for this?
- Is there time and resources to allow this to take place before the planned activity?
Training and development for community engagement strategy or project
- Team briefings on the community engagement strategy or project. An initial briefing is needed to set the context and framework for community engagement. People need to understand why community engagement is needed, how it is going to happen and how the outcomes are going to be used. They also need to know the expectations for project reporting, consistency of inputs and outputs such as notes from meetings, timescales etc
- Awayday on introduction to community engagement (key principles) - this can be particularly useful when trying to encourage people to buy into community engagement
- Presentations and roadshows for large organisations where staff are spread across a large area - often community engagement can become marginalised in large organisations. Different types of staff will need to be approached in different ways
- Communication of community engagement in a staff publication and in corporate plans and strategies - people need regular reminders that community engagement is a core part of how the organisation operates and is not a temporary bolt-on
Skill-based training and development
You will be able to match the training needed to the skill areas used from the list presented earlier (link back to the 'skills set' in the box). You may need to consider the following training and development areas:
- Project management
- Facilitation practice
- Interviewer training (with some theory but based around the specific project, using the interview schedule for the project as part of the session)
- Role playing to practice interview skills
- Ethics of research and community engagement (confidentiality, respect for participants' input etc)
- Practicalities of community involvement - recruiting to focus groups and meetings, housekeeping and hospitality arrangements, making people feel comfortable and respecting contributions before, during and after the community involvement process
- The use of particular research methods and data analysis
 |
 |