• Community engagement in context
  • Community engagement - an overview
  • Community engagement in a representative democracy
  • Key challenges for the public sector
  • Implications for public sector managers
  • The context for engagement
  • Clues to good community engagement
• Planning CE
  • Community engagement and the policy/planning cycle
  • Project goals
  • When is engagement necessary?
  • Community engagement objectives
  • Community research
    • Media research
    • Community profiling
    • Community segmentation
    • Community and issues analysis
  • Key communication messages
  • Selection of engagement techniques
  • Managing risk
  • Evaluation planning
  • Planning transition and exit strategies
• Implementing CE
  • Working with communities
  • Organisational culture
  • Resourcing
  • Structures and processes
  • Continuity and follow up
  • Representation and control
  • Coordination
  • Other issues
  • Embedding good practice
• Methods
  • Overview of methods
  • Methods of information-sharing
  • Methods for consultation and deliberation
  • Methods for active participation
  • Advanced participative methodologies
  • Choosing an engagement method
• Event management
  • Event engagement processes
  • Choosing a facilitator
  • Structuring the event
• Evaluating CE
  • Introduction to evaluation
  • Principles of evaluation
  • Identifying outputs and outcomes
  • Purpose and approach to evaluation
  • Evaluation criteria and indicators
  • Methods of measuring community engagement
  • Steps in evaluating community engagement
• Risk management
  • Identifying risks
  • Assessing risk
  • Managing external risks
  • Managing internal risks
  • Risk assessment and management plan
• Skills
  • Community engagement skills profile
  • Options for skills development
  • Building the skills of your team

Embedding good practice

Community engagement practice goes beyond the event or project or even the program. It is about the ways in which good community engagement practice is embedded in the systems, policies, structures, processes, relationships and activities of government departments and communities. Your ability as a manager to make a long-term impact on community engagement in your region and locality and on your communities will depend on the ways in which you have not only delivered engagement events but also ensured that departmental, government and community activities sustain engagement over the long term.

Your role is also to reduce dependence on a few active people in departments and in the community who take a significant part of the engagement load in almost every engagement activity. You must seek to engage the disengaged and unengaged.

Ways in which you can make the greatest long-term impact include:

• Maintaining awareness of current Government policy and practice. Government policy and practice regarding community engagement are continually being updated. One of your roles as a public service manager is to maintain your knowledge of what is going on in community engagement. The Department of Communities can provide this kind of information. Your own department’s community engagement or policy staff can also help.
• Contributing to community engagement policy and practice in your agency. Use your practical experience in community engagement to enrich community engagement policy and practice in your agency. Actively feeding back good case studies and examples of what worked well and what could have worked better will continue to build community engagement capacity within the public service and deliver better outcomes to communities and citizens. Case studies can be shared in-house and/or uploaded to Get involved web site.
• Building engagement into recruitment , selection and performance management processes. The Office of the Public Service Commissioner web site contains a number of checklists designed to support the inclusion of community engagement skills, competencies, roles and responsibilities in job descriptions, selection processes and performance management and review processes.
• Linking community engagement to the planning cycle. Engaging Queenslanders: Community engagement in the business of government (Department of Communities, 2003) provides very good guidance in relation to:
  • engagement in the policy planning cycle
  • engagement in strategic planning
  • engagement in service and program planning.

Guidance on strategic planning in the public service and the key elements of the planning process at whole-of-government and departmental level can be found at the Queensland Treasury web site.

• Using the outcomes of community engagement. Ensuring that the information, feedback and actions suggested through community engagement activities are actually used is one of the key issues raised by citizens and communities when they are providing input. It is also important to let people know how their information has been used.
• Linking community engagement to agency business and project management models. Explicitly linking community engagement processes to agency business models and project management processes is an important strategy for embedding engagement within agency core business. It is important to test that language about community engagement is used consistently across the range of corporate policies, programs and services.
• Improving engagement practice based upon community feedback. Seeking community feedback regarding what they did and did not like about engagement processes is a useful way of gathering information to improve engagement practice. For larger-scale engagement activities, funding an external evaluation can also provide extremely important information from a range of internal and external stakeholders that can be used to design more effective engagement processes in the future.
• Building community engagement capability and leadership. As a public sector manager, you will be required to run information, consultation or active participation events and engagement strategies. However, working with the community to jointly build the skills of members in engagement and leadership will provide a number of benefits, including:
  • Sustainable action in the community with a broader group of people who are able to engage on key community issues quickly.
  • A basis on which any public sector manager can work with individuals, community groups and non-government organisations. This will reduce issues of succession planning if you move from the area.
  • Building a stronger understanding of government intent and practice and therefore reducing some of the issues that can arise in community engagement around suspicion of motives, decision-making, etc.
  • Providing you with information that will assist in planning future community engagement events.
• Developing partnerships with the community and stakeholders. Building effective working relationships is the most effective way to support future engagement efforts. Practical ways in which you can build these relationships include:
  • Allocate regular times to meet people in an informal setting or in their work location.
  • Identify a community or government project that you can contribute to in your official capacity that will benefit the community.
  • Identify other government agencies at state, federal and local level, and build relationships with key people to reduce duplication of approach and effort.
  • Meet regularly with all non-government agency groups or their representatives.
• Building a network of experts to call on in your region. You may want to build on networks already in place in your region, such as the Regional Managers Coordination Network (State Government), and Regional Heads of Government Forums (Federal Government) and any other key network, to build a group of people who are actively involved in community engagement and who are interested in continuing to build their capabilities in this area. The benefit of this approach is that you have a group from which to seek feedback, source ideas and ask for assistance. You will also be able to share key knowledge that can feed into other engagement improvement practice.