Embedding engagement
Impact

Outputs

When you carry out community engagement work, you will need to be clear about the outputs from the exercise, their nature, timescales and so on. It is critical that the outcomes from community engagement not only go to the right person, but also feed into policy-making and the appropriate budgeting cycles. In this way, your work will have a wider organisational impact.

When deciding who needs information about the outcomes of community engagement, you will need to think about the following:

What is the nature of the feedback expected by key internal stakeholders ?

commentary on proposals or initiatives
recommendations from the public
decisions that the organisation will have to stand by

In what format is the output (eg report etc) going to be provided?

raw data
analysed data, with summary or recommendations

Is the feedback required for reporting to a committee?

What are the deadlines for this, including lead in times?

Will the feedback from a community engagement exercise be needed in isolation or will you need to cross-reference the outputs to internal policies etc before presenting the data?

Dissemination

As noted above, your stakeholders - which includes participants, colleagues, partners and the wider community - will need some feedback. Here are some tips on making that feedback as effective as possible.

Audience receiving the feedback

Think about the audiences you are targeting - for example people involved in the engagement directly, people who helped to set processes up, partners and the wider community. Different language and style may be needed to communicate with different audiences, such as young people and partners, for example.

Detail given

A summary may suffice for some audiences, but other individuals may wish for more feedback. You could check this while running the process, or send a summary document to everyone and say where the main document can be found. Also, are you feeding back to people to simply say thank you, to give detail of what they said or say what the organisation has done as a result of your feedback? This could happen in stages rather than all at once, but it does mean a commitment to using more resources.

Context

If you are presenting a report in the local press or on your own website, for example, you will need to give the background to the consultation, numbers of people involved and so on.

Chances for further involvement, comment and further feedback

You may find that the participants are keen to be involved in further activities. If you can, try and make use of this enthusiasm! Participants could be invited to comment on later drafts of a policy, or to monitor how a local policing action plan is working. You might also suggest to people within your organisation that the participants are given chances to be involved again. If you do this, you need to have permission from the participants for their details to be shared

Follow up

REAL LIFE EXAMPLE

A local prioritisation project for beat policing raised visibility as a key issue - with a proposed action to make the police station more accessible to people. However, there was a related issue about modifications required under the Disability Discrimination Act which made this difficult in the short term. The project leaders had to communicate with the Police Authority's estate managers about how best this issue could be addressed.

Have you set processes in place to capture follow-up actions required as a result of community engagement? As mentioned above, some feedback you receive may not relate directly to the project you are running but will need to be addressed. This might include actions for other partners or needing to sustain the community engagement project for a longer time, or to involve more people. If you have developed a communications strategy for the project to include all stakeholders, it will be easier to feed this information to the people who need to know.

In addition, what arrangements are there to review impacts of the community engagement activity? It will be worthwhile re-contacting those people involved to assess whether they feel things have changed and improved as a result. This will help you to assess the success of the engagement process and its outcomes.

Monitoring and evaluation are covered in more detail in this Guide, in the sections on Finalising your approach and Evaluating your project

Embedding engagement Impact