Managing Community Engagement

Glossary

Community: Community generally means a collection of citizens, groups or organisations with a common interest. For example, some communities have business interests while others have social or environmental interests. Some communities have local and regional interests and others have interests in specific issues such as education, health, children, older citizens and so forth. Many communities connect through cultural background, religion or language. Some communities are well organised with administrative structures to support them while others are loose collections of individuals. Many communities are local face-to-face groups while others may be linked more widely through common interest. Some communities now use the Internet to organise themselves.

Communities have different levels of engagement with government. The exclusion of some communities from the process of government needs to be addressed to create fairness in government and community relations. This will be a significant challenge for government to address.
Community profiling: A way of summarising and describing who your stakeholders are to assist with development of an appropriate method of engagement..

Engagement: Engagement recognises the role of the citizen and communities in the processes of government. Citizenship usually refers to the legal, political and social rights of people. The Department of Communities embraces a more extended idea about these accepted rights – the idea of active citizenship.

Government: Government means the State Parliament, the elected Government and government agencies that carry out the policies of the elected government and provide services such as education, health and police among many others.

Media research: An activity undertaken early in a community engagement activity to identify salient community issues and/or the existing level of awareness and interests.

Stakeholder and issues analysis: A diagnostic method to assess the stakeholder, their issues and level of concern, to help complete a risk assessment and decide on an appropriate method of engagement.
Stakeholder segmentation: A way of clustering your stakeholders into meaningful groups to assist with balanced data collection and analysis of different sectoral viewpoints.