When the Going Gets Tough: Strategies for dealing with community engagement challenges
- How decisions are made about scope and intent
- Challenges working with council colleagues who are sceptical about the merit of engaging
- How do we map our stakeholders/community and what are the alternatives?
- Knowledge management and tools/apps for tracking organisation wide engagement
- The business case for earlier engagement
- Complex and controversial projects – how do we know how much is enough?
- Playing the long game – how important is reputation, trust building, and what do we want people to say at the conclusion of engagement processes
- Dealing with very well organised, articulate and well-connected interest groups
- Dealing with groups who seek to undermine engagement processes
- Groups/individuals that intimidate
- Facilitating angry meetings
- Dealing with those who bypass the process and lobby decisionmakers
- Ensuring safety for all concerned
- Looking after each other when things get very stressful
- Making sense of, and utilising, lots of data
- When internal support for process/scope changes midway through a project
- Strategic questioning
- Data analysis tools/apps
- Deliberative engagement
- Community-led approaches
- preparation, facilitation
- workbooks
- course evaluations
- debriefing
- travel time and
- a follow up meeting to discuss options for ongoing support
Evaluation Essentials for Engagement
Learn essential information about evaluation for community engagement from this team of experts.
Join Allison Hendricks (Darzin Software), Max Hardy (Max Hardy Consulting), and our founder Megan Girdler for a one-day course to equip you with new frameworks, tools and techniques for evaluation.
Gain new expertise with our practical advice and take-away resources. During the interactive workshop, we’ll walk through how to create an evaluation strategy, tools you can use and techniques to make the process of reporting back on your engagement easier.
This course will be available in Melbourne on 16 October and in Sydney on 27 November 2018. Click here for further information.
Deliberation & Digital Community Engagement Course
Learn and experiment with deliberation & digital community engagement.
Experience a mock deliberative process face-to-face and online through this six-week, part-time professional development program led by Max Hardy and Megan Girdler. The course will include face-to-face training sessions and online activities.
Add deliberation and digital engagement to your personal community participation toolkit. There are only twenty tickets to the world-premier of this course in Melbourne, AU – from 2 October to 8 November, 2018. Click here for further information.
Fresh Ideas for Community Engagement
Objective:
- To equip Council officers with a range of tools, ideas and resources for engaging the community
- For Council officers to feel enthused and more confident about engaging their communities.
Structure of day:
- Welcome/intros
- Questions people have brought with them
- Foundations for engagement – quick recap
- Morning tea
- Process for generating questions for community engagement
- Key trends – codesign, collective governance, deliberation, community-led processes and use of technology (eg, poll everywhere, social pinpoint, augmented reality, story pods)
- Lunch
- Key trends cont – codesign, collective governance, deliberation, community-led processes and use of technology (eg, poll everywhere, social pinpoint, augmented reality, story pods)
- Scenario presented
- Activity – groups design their own process using some new ideas presented
- Afternoon
- Groups present their approach – we use poll everywhere to rate the design approach.
- Reflections – have we answered key questions; and opportunities to apply
Fees: $5000 Exc GST
Includes resources, facilitation materials, poll everywhere fees, and travel costs.
Questions Change Everything – the course
In community engagement, there are stupid questions so learn how to start your community engagement activity with a great question and achieve the successful outcomes you’re after.
Susan Carter of The Community Studio and Max Hardy of Max Hardy Consulting invite you to join them in an online community engagement training opportunity – Questions Change Everything.
Click here to find out more.
