As the independently ranked #1 community engagement platform, it’s fair to say we know a thing or two about reaching residents. Effective engagement builds trust, equity, and means community members will be more likely to respond positively to future communications. A well thought out, structured engagement strategy is the best way to achieve this. Without it, even projects with the most noble of intentions can do more harm than good.
What is a community engagement plan?
A community engagement plan is strategic guide for working with the people who are impacted by your project. It’ll help you identify all the project’s stakeholders, then create a structure for communicating clearly with them every step of the way.
But it’s more than just a checklist… It’ll help you identify potential pitfalls and review your project’s progress on-the-go, ensuring your engagement is intelligent, informed and effective.
Let’s look at how to create plan geared for success by following 7 actionable steps.
7 steps for an effective community engagement plan
1. Align internally before going external
Before you start creating your plan, establish why you’re doing it in the first place. Understanding your intentions and having a clear objective will ease and speed up internal buy-in, avoiding clunky, stop-start launches and teething problems.
Ensuring everyone has a clear sense of a project’s purpose will promote consistent and intentional communication from all collaborators, right from the start.
How can an organization expect to effectively engage with its community members if it isn’t completely aligned on its objectives? An actionable way to implement your ‘why’ is first by defining it, then seeing if every communication you put out seeks to answer or explore it. If it doesn’t, then modify it to do so.
2. Scope out the project
Define the project’s parameters, including its size, goals and expected outcomes, forecasting potential challenges, the timeline, and whether community engagement has occurred in the past.
Action this by analyzing previous projects and community engagement plan examples that share potential similarities. Perhaps they were completed in a similar area, targeted a similar demographic, or they concerned a similar field. What worked? What didn’t? How can you apply their outcomes to your planning?
3. Identify potential risks
One of the most significant risks in community engagement is failing to reach a broad and meaningful segment of the population, which can directly affect the quality, credibility, and acceptance of your project.
Tangible risks include:
- Low turnout due to recent political or institutional distrust – For example, if there’s been a local scandal, public inquiry, or protest, people may feel engagement is performative and choose not to participate.
- Public backlash if the topic is sensitive or polarizing – Issues like housing, environmental changes, or services for minority groups may provoke strong reactions if people feel blindsided or inadequately informed.
- Engagement scheduled during public holidays, religious observances, or school breaks, leading to poor attendance and limited input from key community members.
- Language or cultural barriers that prevent full participation by migrant or minority communities, especially if materials or events are not adapted to their needs.
- Over-surveyed or fatigued communities, especially in areas where multiple consultations are taking place, reducing the willingness to engage.
- Short timelines or rigid planning structures that don’t allow time to adapt if turnout is low or feedback is unbalanced.
4. Conduct stakeholder analysis
Effective communication knows its audience.
Conduct research into your project’s internal and external stakeholders, assessing their potential levels of interest, their engagement history (including whether they’ve previously been effectively or poorly communicated with), how greatly your project will impact them, and any barriers they might have to future engagement.
Profiling all potential stakeholders is crucial to baking in inclusivity from the get-go, making your engagement accessible to groups that aren’t usually heard from.
An actionable way to achieve inclusivity is by looking at demographic data and creating stakeholder profiles. Each demographic should have a profile detailing their social categories and characteristics.
For example: socio-economic status, gender, disability, race, sexuality, age, location. When you’ve completed your profiles, use them to model your communications.
5. Choose the right participation methods
No matter the project, we recommend a hybrid engagement strategy that combines online and offline participation.
It’ll give community members more opportunities to get involved and therefore generate more consistent engagement, not to mention capturing demographics that often fall through the cracks (caregivers, shift workers, etc).
To choose the best methods for participation, first clarify the level of influence the community’s engagement will have – whether they’ll be informing, consulting, or directly collaborating on the project.
Then, tailor your methods to the community and the type of project. Finally, match your chosen methods to your organization’s resources and capacity, avoiding overreaching and underdelivering.
We’ve gone into more depth on how to choose the right participation methods here.
6. Ensure high-quality comms
Communication comes down to messaging and distribution. Yours should be clear, concise and consistent. For optimal distribution, you have to pick mediums/channels based on research into:
- Accessibility, including inclusive and culturally relevant language research, and even translation.
- Tone and objectives, giving information in a brief, comprehensive manner.
- Distribution channels tailored to a community, giving members a range of opportunities for involvement both on and offline.
After identifying any potential communication barriers, provide multiple channels for members to get involved.
You may find that a rural community with older residents responds better to offline engagement, such as letters instead of emails, or an in-person hub in the town center as well as a follow-up email reminding them about your project.
Finally, show your appreciation for the time community members have given in participation by highlighting how their input will be used and why it matters. At the end, share the outcomes and next steps of the project in a comprehensive community engagement report to foster trust and respect while encouraging future participation.
7. Measuring success and next steps
Projects evolve as they go, and an effective community engagement plan understands and accommodates this.
After defining what success looks like and how to measure it, include checkpoints in a project’s trajectory to take stock and analyze the current engagement. Then, use your findings to influence how you move forwards.
Defining the metrics of success with clear KPIs will give insight on how effective your strategy is and help you refine your participation processes as the project grows. KPIs to look out for on engagement projects include rate of response, quality of data and impact metrics.
If, for example, you receive a low rate of response, it could suggest your project hasn’t considered the community’s potential barriers for engagement effectively, or that there is a lack of consistency. KPI metrics are an excellent on-the-go diagnostic tool and implementing them at checkpoints along a project’s lifecycle can help to avoid larger errors down the line.
Download our free Community Engagement Success Plan template
Are you ready to create an effective strategy to maximize your engagement? Download our free Community Engagement Plan Template to get started.
And if you liked that, see how Go Vocal can better connect you to your community members by booking a chat with our experts today!
