Making the most of Community Engagement

Discussions from the Town Centre Working Group

Public assets should be spaces which truly reflect their surrounding communities. Going beyond the standard consultation of communities to encourage their active participation in decision making can help to achieve this. Having communities be a part of the design of town centre regeneration projects can also help to improve perceptions of the area and increase the use of public spaces.

The Town Centre Regeneration Peer Working Group in October focused on the question "How can we engage local communities and keep them engaged to develop wider community benefits from capital investment?". This blog reflects the discussions about effective communication, maintaining flexibility in the delivery of projects, and leveraging social media.

Community engagement presents high risk, but can deliver high reward

The benefits of putting communities at the heart of town centre regeneration projects are well known. Their importance was further cemented following COVID-19 and communities seeking places and public amenity to dwell in and explore. Community engagement can be resource intensive and come with risks, particularly around increasing the delivery time of schemes. The Town Centre Regeneration Peer Working Group focused their discussion on two main challenges: the importance of maintaining energy amongst participants and improving transparency in decision-making processes.

Where’s my energy crew?

One of the hardest aspects of community engagement can be maintaining participants’ energy throughout the project timeline. Council officers and project delivery teams should be mindful of the best time to bring community members into the project, to strike the balance between engaging in a way that meaningfully contributes to the project and at a time when the community can recognise their impact and contribution. Access to funding is a catalyst that helps to energise people to spring into action and provides natural timescales to focus the mind.

By extension, this means that the council is often best placed for the bidding process, which can be more draining on community energy levels. Working group participants shared their experiences of times where their community members have not had the capacity or capability for these processes. Whilst community members might play a smaller role in the bidding process, using this stage to identify some key community members was found essential for mobilising a larger community group quickly if and when funding is secured. Building flexibility into scheme bids for funding was also discussed as a key step to incorporating community ideas. Creating spaces within bids for changes based on the outputs of community engagement can help to build flexibility into bids. Leveraging outputs of pre-engagement and highting engagement plans to showcase the points in the future where the scheme will be more concrete also helped one member to create some reassurance for funders whilst maintaining flexibility within the design.

Productive relationships are built on trust

Transparency in decision making is crucial for building trust and for effective communication in community engagement. Recording and sharing decision-making processes amongst partners can address perceived transparency issues. An on-the-ground space, where the public can come to find out project details and where decisions can be made, helps to enhance openness. It can remove the sense of decisions or key actors being kept behind closed doors. Using data and market demand to provide evidence can help to manage stakeholder expectations when having to rule out specific ideas within decision making. This can enhance understanding for more productive sessions on envisioning the designs for projects.

Delivering large-scale programmes is challenging; a team ready to embrace the learning process is key

Delivering large-scale programmes often involve new challenges, from trying your hand at a new task, to project sites throwing up new, unexpected issues. Council officers who are skilled in managing projects iteratively, enabling them to develop more flexibly to account for new ideas or arising issues, are key for incorporating community engagement into projects. A team who truly embrace the challenges to see them as opportunities to learn and to grow together is key.

The third sector can be brilliant delivery partners

The third sector are an incredibly skilled and potentially under-utilised resource by local authorities. As delivery partners, their knowledge of revenue funding in particular can be very helpful in creating a critical source of funding for early project stages. Their partnership also helps to share grants by retaining money and jobs locally.

Social media can be a vital tool for enabling the public to open up

Social media is a key tool for councils to effectively communicate with the public. It can be used to promote projects to different audiences, to improve community engagement, or to gather feedback on issues or ideas. Providing regular project updates on social media channels relevant to target community groups can help to maintain local interest and momentum. This can further energise the public and fosters a sense of inclusion, building upon the principles of transparency and trust. Existing council social media platforms often have significant activity, which can make it hard to follow the progress of specific projects, and have strict engagement guidelines and approvals, which can impact the speed of updates.

The Peer Working Group discussed two different approaches to help the public open up:

Third sector delivery partners: Using a third sector partner for social media channels can provide more flexibility than council platforms. This can also create a separation between the council and the key messages, enabling the public to discuss more meaningful topics online and focus on the project, rather than broader council topics. This was an especially helpful approach for a member who had previously attracted some negative publicity around the council efforts in the project.
Project-specific social media pages: Creating separate social media pages for projects can also help to create independence from the council whilst enabling council officers to retain control of social media channels. Choosing the most appropriate social media sites for the targeted audience is key.

The value of community engagement

The insights from the Town Centre Regeneration Peer Working Group highlight the importance of flexible, inclusive, and transparent approaches to maximise the benefits of community engagement. The positive outcomes discussed by the Group were a gentle reminder of the reason why many continue to undertake these challenging programmes: the ability to have profound impact through creating vibrant and thriving communities, shaped by and for locals, who get to have a stake in their own futures.

If you have any questions on this topic, or would like support, please contact your Delivery Associate, or email DeliveryAssociatesNetwork@Arup.com