Planning your community participation

Defining your aims and objectives

Before undertaking any community participation activity, you should be clear about the reasons why you are doing it and the outcomes you are looking to achieve.

Think about what you are going to do with the information you gather and what decisions this will influence. Engaging the public raises expectations and requires people to volunteer their time and effort to the activity. You therefore need to ensure the community’s involvement is going to be meaningful and be honest and open about how you plan to act on their input.

Questions to consider

• What are the key aims of this project?
• What do I need to find out through this activity?
• What is the change I am seeking to make?
• How do I want the community to contribute?
• What happens next - what will the outputs of the project be?

Planning how to involve the community

There’s no single approach to involving communities. We have different relationships with different groups and the topics we engage on can vary widely. How you want communities to participate in your project or activity will depend on a range of factors, like how much influence community members will have and how deeply they will be involved.

If the community won’t be able to influence the process or outcome, it‘s better to be clear and honest about this rather than raise expectations that you can’t meet.

The most common way we involve the community is through consultation and engagement - where we seek feedback to inform decision-making. Sometimes we may go further to codesign, coproduce or codeliver improvements (check out our glossaryfor definitions of these terms). As we try to bring greater community power to Barnet, it may be that in some projects communities actually take the lead.

Sometimes a piece of work might include more than one approach to participation e.g. consultation on overall plans for a park, and codesign of a play area within it.

Here are some examples of approaches that could be used for different purposes.

• Seeking opinions on a proposal: Communities are shown some options and invited to give their views.
• Informing a new proposal:  Communities are invited to share their thoughts on the current situation and suggest solutions for how it could be improved.
• Understanding what the most important issues or priorities are: Communities are engaged in an open discussion about what they most care about.
• Prioritising spending: Community views are sought on budget decisions, or community members are empowered to making funding decisions themselves. 
• Shaping what services are delivered, or how they are delivered: Communities are engaged in a coproduction process to help create new services or a new strategy.
• The community takes the lead: A community group or forum is given full responsibility for the project and its outcomes.  

Get the timing right

Start your community participation as early as possible. This helps build trust and gives people a real chance to be involved throughout the project. This makes the final outcome more meaningful and more likely to be successful If you wait too long (a common mistake), their input can have little or no impact.  

Consult at the right time

If you’re running a consultation, it must take place when the proposals are still at a formative stage. The law recognises that it’s pointless to consult on something which has already been decided and doing so could lead to legal challenges.

Avoid pre-election periods

Councils usually pause community engagement of all kinds during pre-election periods. So avoid launching a project too close to an election.

Allow enough time

Remember to factor in enough time to:

• plan your activity, deliver it and analyse the findings.
• obtain the necessary approvals and sign-off for your project and its materials.

Planning who to involve

Who are the communities affected by your project and its aims? 

This question should be at the core of your participation plans. The stakeholders in your project might not just be residents. They could also include local businesses or community organisations.

Consultations must be open to everyone. But for many projects there will be specific communities that are more affected by the outcomes than others, so you may just want to involve them.

You should consider:

• Communities of place Groups or individuals who are affected because of where they live, work, study, travel etc.
• Communities of interest: People who share a common interest or concern. For example, cyclists or library users.  
• Protected characteristics: The Equality Act 2010 sets out nine demographic characteristics that public sector bodies must consider when making changes to services. Conducting an Equalities Impact Assessment (EqIA) will help you understand any disproportional impact that your project could have on certain groups of people. Community participation can be used to answer the questions in your EqIA, so the two activities should ideally be done in parallel.

Accessibility and enabling participation 

Once you have an idea of the groups or communities to focus on, you can consider what factors are important to their participation. One of the five principles of Barnet’s Community Participation Strategy is ‘we go where people are’. This doesn’t just mean going to a physical location, it’s about making the effort to engage communities in a way that makes them comfortable and able to participate meaningfully. This might include:

• Physical accessibility: How will participants get to a venue, is there disability access, provision for childcare etc?
• Financial: If members of the public are giving up time to participate in an activity it is best practice to reward them. Our Rewards, Recognition and Incentives Policy gives more detail - please email us if you want a copy.
• Timing: Consider appropriate times of day when people will be more able to participate.
• Cultural factors: Will you require a prayer room, dietary requirements etc?
• Language: Will translated materials or an interpreter be needed?  
• Online accessibility: If you are engaging the community online, consider how accessible this is. Do you need other methods as well?
• Trust and credibility: You should also consider the impact of any factors which might undermine people’s willingness to engage. These might include negative historic experiences, or specific recent incidents. You might need to make specific plans to address these issues or think on a more basic level about how trust can be rebuilt.