Community segmentation
Community segmentation is a way of clustering your communities into groups. Doing so helps you develop an engagement program that will tap into all community sectors, so you can obtain a balanced account of community issues and perspectives.
The results of a community segmentation exercise are shown below.
Different engagement strategies may be necessary for each sector, due to their location and interests. For instance, communities in remote areas may best be surveyed electronically, whereas nearby communities may participate in face-to-face meetings. For large communities, a representative sample for a face-to-face, electronic, mail or telephone survey may be necessary to establish trends economically.
It is easy to segment the community. The key questions to ask are, “Which groups within the community are likely to be interested in the project outcomes or processes?” and “Who might be able to provide useful information in relation to our issue?”. This requires careful planning to ensure representative involvement by identified communities. It is important to remember that communities may be based upon the following factors, or a range of other factors:
| Factor | Example |
|---|---|
| Geography | Residents of a suburb |
| Cultural affiliation | Buddhist community |
| Age | Seniors community |
| Interest | Landcare group |
Make a list of the groups that you think exist within your target community and clump them together into meaningful clusters. If you have completed a community profile, your clustering becomes more robust as more objective information becomes available.
You may segment your community before or after conducting a community analysis.
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