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How can organizations implement an intentional community engagement process to increase confidence in their services, policies, and impact?
By Kris Cummings & Suhanya Ketheeswaran
Research has shown that people who have a voice in influencing the services they’re utilizing will often experience better outcomes. While this has long been conventional wisdom among organizational boards, leaders, and staff, there’s now a groundswell of support and indeed expectation—from donors, funders, and program participants alike—for organizations to engage in two-way dialogue with the communities they serve. For lots of reasons we all know, it just makes sense, and it doesn’t have to be overwhelming.
Organizations face an exciting opportunity to use community engagement strategies that enable them to learn from the myriad parties connected to their organization, so they can design and adapt services, policies, practices, and initiatives that are responsive to their needs and wishes. Community engagement can help organizations test assumptions, collect proof points, adapt practices, enhance programs and services, and strengthen relationships with their communities.
In this blog post, we’ll take a look at some of the questions we’ve been exploring with our client partners as they develop and/or refine their approach to community engagement:
- What is community engagement?
- Why are organizations facing a growing imperative for community engagement—how does it help?
- What are the steps organizations can take to implement a community engagement process?
- How does community engagement set the groundwork for improved outcomes for everyone?
What is community engagement?
For our purposes here, we can think of community engagement as an intentional method an organization develops and implements to identify, listen to, and learn from the interested and affected people and parties connected to its work. It does so in order to develop or deepen its communications and relationships with them and utilize what it learns to be as relevant and responsive as possible to their needs and wishes.
An organization’s interested and affected parties are all those who are impacted by the organization’s mandate, program offerings, or ongoing viability. This could include participants and clients who use the organization’s programs and services; people who believe and invest in the organization’s mission, such as funders, donors, and volunteers; and any groups or partners that work alongside the organization.
Why are organizations facing a growing imperative for community engagement—how does it help?
Community engagement has become fundamental in community service, perhaps from the convergence of perspectives from at least three groups of people who are central to any organization.
Firstly, staff and leaders are deeply aware that a one-size fits-all approach to program delivery simply does not work. This awareness creates an intrinsic motivation for mission-driven organizations to engage in two-way dialogue with the people and parties connected to their work, so that programs and initiatives can be adapted to meet the unique and changing needs and trends in their communities.
Secondly, those who provide material support for organizations—i.e. donors, tax-payers, funders, sponsors, and volunteers—are aligning with the knowledge that services and organizations are more effective when they’re in tune with what people want. As a result, supporters want organizations to be able to say with confidence that they know what their communities are looking for from them.
And third, many people are dissatisfied with the experience of being passive consumers of what organizations have to offer. What they want instead is to be able to influence the programs and services they’re engaging with and the practices and policies that affect their experience with those organizations. The type and degree of involvement individuals desire vary depending on their wants, needs, and capacity.
In all three perspectives, the central ideas are that organizational missions, funding mandates, and—most importantly—the needs of people are better served when clients and other interested parties have had a meaningful say.
The process of clarifying and naming the interests and needs of individuals and parties connected to an organization through the engagement process often leads to programs and initiatives becoming more people-centered. This reduces guesswork and provides organizations with a pathway to maintain or enhance their relevance and responsiveness to the people and communities they serve. It also gives organizational staff and their leaders a way to authentically live out their values around being people-centered in their approach to program design and delivery. And, it gives all of those, internal and external, parties who support the organization confidence in the organization’s work, with the knowledge that it is steered with the expertise of many perspectives and focused on what matters most.
What are the steps organizations can take to implement a community engagement approach?
Engaging their communities, and consequently becoming more people-centered, means an organization is intentionally paying attention to the ways in which different individuals and parties like to be engaged (for example, through what means, on what topics, and in what frequency). It also means seeking an understanding of how different parties see their interests and values reflected in the organization’s mission, and how they wish to contribute. Do they want their involvement to be as straight-forward as providing input? Or do they wish to engage at a deeper level by helping the organization with sense-making and decision-making? These are all important factors that should be considered when diving into community engagement.
In its simplest form, a community engagement approach can be broken out into 5 key actions:
- Identify the different people and communities who are interested and affected by the organization’s mission, program offerings, and ongoing sustainability.
- Learn how they wish to be engaged (e.g. surveys, meeting attendance, focus groups, interviews, town halls, etc.), to what extent (e.g. providing input, sense-making, decision-making, etc.), and on what topic (e.g. the specific service they’re using, all of the services the organization has to offer, the decisions and directions of the organizations at large, etc.).
- Implement an intentional plan for engaging all of these different people and communities in a systematic, reliable, and sustainable way.
- Determine how insights will be analyzed and used in organizational decision-making and priority-setting.
- Determine how learnings and decisions will be shared back to close the loop with all interested and affected parties.
To get started, an organization might decide to start small (i.e. with a single service, single audience of clients, or single initiative like engagement in a strategic or service planning process). Or, an organization might decide to develop a comprehensive engagement strategy from the start, and then phase-in its implementation.
A community engagement process may also require an organization to widen, and sometimes flatten, organizational structures and extend open processes for listening to their audiences and engaging in meaningful dialogue with them.
How does community engagement set the groundwork for improved outcomes for everyone?
Something profoundly powerful about engagement is the array of benefits it creates for an organization and all of the people and parties connected to it. Through purposeful engagement, people and parties feel seen and heard as they observe their knowledge being valued and used to inform decisions within the organization:
- organizational staff, leaders, and volunteers develop deeper understanding and in turn use their insights to adapt services, practices, and initiatives to match the needs and interests of the communities they serve, while feeling able to practice in ways that match their professional ethics and personal values
- donors and volunteers deepen their sense of affinity, feelings of purpose and contribution, and loyalty to an organization
- program participants increase their sense of agency and influence over the services they’re accessing which often leads to them being more satisfied with their experience as a client and experiencing better service outcomes.
The positive effects of community engagement can be observed through a variety of tangible measures or indicators. These include higher satisfaction rates in program and service evaluations; participants more consistently indicating that services are responsive to their needs; more people taking the organization up on engagement opportunities and actively supporting the organization; staff and leaders experiencing greater alignment between their values and practice, contributing to satisfaction and retention; more return users of services at the organization; and, eventually, an uptick in outcome measures themselves.
Whether it’s a long-term interest, piqued curiosity, or refreshed purpose, you might be feeling like you want to take a look at your approach to community engagement.
We’d be happy to jump on a 20-minute call to understand your current needs and capacities and explore whether a collaboration with Do/able can help kickstart or fuel your community engagement process. Get in touch with Do/able to schedule a call in the next few weeks!
