Determining your reasons for public engagement informs the messaging of your project, ensures team members are on the same page, and simplifies decision-making.

Whiteboard/poster-board and markers and/or digitally shared notes.

Copy the following sentence and make sure to leave space for the bolded sections:

We are seeking to (state program goals). We are engaging (name of community or group), because (reason for engagement).

Here are some examples:

We are seeking to... create better public housing policy in Boston. We are engaging... public housing residents, as well as abutters, in the Roxbury neighborhood because... we need to hear from as many voices as possible before creating policy.

We are seeking... to install urban sensors in downtown Houston. We are engaging... store owners and residents in the downtown area because... we want to understand privacy concerns and gaps in service delivery.

As a group, discuss each blank in the above sentence separately in order to create a compelling statement of purpose. Your statement should be concise and no longer than 2-3 sentences.

• Be mindful of constraints, i.e. limited budget and time. You might want to engage the whole city, but realistically only have enough time and resources to focus on a single neighborhood.

• Be specific about your goals and target audiences.

The Eight-Word Mission Statement
This article explains the value of a clear, concise mission statement for social and civic organizations, and explains how to think through the creation of one.

The more specific you can be about outcomes, the easier they are to assess. Good examples include concrete numbers and figures, such as “20% increase in voter registration” or “the establishment of four peer learning groups,” as opposed to vague descriptions, like “greater public participation.”

Writing surface, marker, sticker dots or sticky notes, or digitally shared notes.

Start with the following statement: "By the end of the project, we will have [blank] "

Each team member should take 5 minutes to individually list all possible desired outcomes on sticky notes (using the example sentence as a guide). One idea, one note. Try to come up with at least 5 each. In this case, more is more. Post all of the ideas in a central place. It’s okay to have multiple goals. Desired outcomes can include:

• % increase in something
• Policy ideas
• Projects,
• Volunteer database
• A shared understanding of something specific
• An agreement
• A tool or set of tools
• Long-term partners
• Revised standards
• A formed network

As a group, read aloud all the ideas and cluster them by themes. For example, you might generate multiple ideas related to forming an accountability structure such as a working group or coalition and can group those accordingly.

Once the group has discussed all the ideas, determine the top 5 and separate them on your surface. You can rank order them if desirable.

Finally, document all the desired outcomes for future reference.

• Be specific with your desired outcome. Simply writing “advisory board” is not enough information. How many people, and from what kind of backgrounds, should be on your desired advisory board? If one of your goals is to create a tool, don’t stop with just the tool. Who will create the tool? Who will maintain it?

• If you don’t want to prioritize the outcomes via sticker voting, you can try using a decision matrix.

Project Management for Dummies Cheat Sheet
This “For Dummies” cheat-sheet provides an overview of basic project management, addressing how to justify a project, schedule realistic, specific milestones, and secure accountability from team members and stakeholders.

Eight Outcome Models
This is an overview of tools, models, and methodologies for outcome-based planning and decision-making, briefly summarizing each approach, its strengths, and where each is particularly well-suited. By the Harvard Family Research Project.

Specifically describing your stakeholders and understanding their needs throughout the project helps ensure your decision-making remains human-centered. Other benefits include easier communications planning and partnership growth.

Whiteboard/posterboard, sticky notes, and/or digitally shared notes.

Each team member should take 5 minutes to individually list stakeholders. One idea, one note. Try to come up with at least 5 each. In this case, more is more. Stakeholders might include:

• Government employee
• Community activist
• Real estate developer
• Teen
• Single mother of three

Place stickies on a large, common surface. Cluster them into categories. For example, “parents, business interest, etc.”

Break into groups of two or three. Each group should pick a stakeholder from the list and write it down on the top of a large flip-chart sheet or whiteboard. Then, discuss and write down the following attributes of your stakeholder on the flip-chart.

• Name, occupation, age
• Interests, hobbies
• Level of current engagement: high, medium, low
• What their interest might be in your process.
• Public engagement habits
• A short summary of motivations, needs, resources

When finished, draw a picture of your character and give them a name.

Share the personas you’ve created with your team.

Keep these personas posted in your workspace or in a readily-accessible space for future reference.

• Be mindful not to use disrespectful stereotypes.

• Conducting further research can help inform your assumptions. You can read about potential stakeholders online, conduct preliminary 1:1 meetings, and ask other colleagues about their experiences of outreach and collaboration with stakeholders.

• Revisit and update the user personas throughout your project planning and design process.

Personas
The US Government’s official Usability Guide has a succinct introduction to using personas in the planning process, including different formats and a sample persona developed for a government agency.

Persona Creation and Usage Toolkit
George Olsen’s Toolkit is a thorough resource for the creation of personas, outlining valuable biographic/psychographic information, relationships, and characteristics that make personas more useful.

Smaply Persona Templates
Smaply sells persona editor/user-experience-design software, but their website also offers free templates for workshopping the process on paper.

Stakeholder Analysis: Winning Support for Your Projects
This article provides an overview for understanding who your stakeholders are, and how to secure support for your projects by analyzing both their level of influence and interest in your work.

Making Sense of Stakeholder Mapping
Murray-Webster and Simon offer a slightly more nuanced approach for mapping stakeholder analysis, with axes for influence, interest, and attitude towards your project, and profiles for different hypothetical stakeholders.

When conducting a field scan, you can discover potential partners, learn from previous successes and failures, and avoid redundancy in public engagement efforts. For example, if you are planning to use an online dialogue tool, have you compared examples from other cities?

Writing surface, internet-enabled computers for each person, and markers or digitally shared notes.

This activity can also be completed over a long period of time, either in a focused multi-day research sprint or over the course of several weeks. A brief, 30 minute version of the activity, is listed below.

Create a table with the following column labels: date range, problem, engagement solution, dept/orgs involved, how was success defined?, was it successful?, additional comments.

For ten minutes, each participant searches online for examples of similar public engagement efforts, tools, approaches, and populations. Ideally, in a shared document or using sticky notes, each person should fill out the table, with each row pertaining to one case study.

Discuss the examples as a group by comparing their similarities and differences. Write down any new approaches and initiatives for your public engagement project based on the examples and group discussion.

After this activity, consider continuing to research similar public engagement efforts through online searches and conversations with stakeholders. Keep track of what you find in the table.
Continue to review this database with your team during the early stages of your public engagement planning process.

• If it’s not too resource intensive, reach out to some of the projects you are cataloging to learn from their failures and wins.

• If possible, keep track of contact information from your examples. These contacts may help you if you encounter questions about implementation or outreach. Research can take many forms. You might conduct your field scan through searching the internet, interviewing stakeholders, reading policy briefs, creating surveys, etc.

Search and Synthesis
This page briefly overviews a cyclical model for managing knowledge and research, and offers guidelines for focusing research and making it more relevant to a project’s goals. By the NHSScotland Quality Improvement Hub

Equipt to Innovate Field Guide
Living Cities’ guide lays out a series of high-level markers/outcomes that serve to indicate if a city is “Equipt to Innovate” or is in the process of innovation.

Exchanging information is only useful if it’s through accessible means. This activity helps you articulate in-person and digital channels where your stakeholders congregate. Some channels are one-way (such as receiving a newsletter) while others are bi-directional (such as a town hall forum). It also emphasizes how marginalized voices can better be heard when there is acknowledgement of systemic barriers.

Writing surface and marker or digitally shared notes.

Create a table on a whiteboard or shared digital document with the five columns. Label the first column communication channels. Then label each additional column with a stakeholder you came up with in the Stakeholder Personas exercise. If you didn't do that exercise, feel free to use sample stakeholder categories such as youth, senior citizens, environmental science professionals, the homeless population, etc. Then add the following rows, labeling each as follows: community organizations, local leaders, broadcast media, social media, physical spaces.

As a group, list out the specific ways the stakeholders might be sharing and receiving information through each row’s communication category. If using a whiteboard, create one sticky note for each idea. Here are some examples of communication channels based on the category:

Community Organizations
Neighborhood associations, community development corporations, advocacy groups, etc.

Local Leaders
Church leaders, youth program managers, city councillors, etc.

Broadcast Media
Local TV, radio, newspapers, etc.

Social Media
Locally based Twitter accounts, specific hashtags, Facebook, Snapchat, or platforms like NextDoor.

Physical Spaces
Barber shops, cafes, libraries, churches, schools, front porches, etc.

Using a different color sticky notes or font, list barriers that each stakeholder group faces when trying to communicate. For example, some personal barriers such as shyness, racism, sexism, ageism, classism, lack of social capital, as well as access to technology, media, or transportation.

Part II

Now that you understand how stakeholders are communicating, you’re ready to brainstorm ways of reaching them. Take turns role-playing the stakeholder personas and their needs and take notes on the statements. Each person introduce him or herself as the stakeholder persona with this prompt:

I am (stakeholder persona). I currently get information from (relevant communication channels). In the future I would like to communicate on public matters through (relevant communication channels).

Pause between each role-play and take notes on the gaps and opportunities for communicating with stakeholders.

Create a new table on a whiteboard or shared digital document. Draw three columns and label them as follows: "Stakeholder", "Face-to-face", and "Online". Draw four rows and assign a row to each of the four stakeholders you used in part one of this exercise.

Based on your role play, document the channels you have chosen to reach each of your stakeholder personas. Separate them by face-to-face and online. For hybrid approaches, place the idea in both categories.

• Adjust the number of columns to represent the stakeholders you are engaging, as needed.

• Consult with stakeholders to understand where they receive and exchange information.

• Use approachable, jargon-free language in your communications.

Social Media
This page defines social media in the most broad, basic terms and introduces the loose categories that comprise it. By The NHSScotland Quality Improvement Hub.

Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation (SBAR)
Introduces the SBAR model for soliciting feedback, by creating a standardized framework for conversations about a project. By The NHSScotland Quality Improvement Hub.

Communications and Engagement Plan
Like the above “Social Media” resource, this page provides a broad, basic introduction to the concept of a Communications and Engagement Plan, and some basic examples for what such a plan might entail. By The NHSScotland Quality Improvement Hub

Visioning Outcomes in Community Engagement (VOiCE)
A web-based software that assists individuals, organizations and partnerships to design and deliver effective community engagement. It enables all users to employ a common system for analyzing, planning, monitoring, evaluating and recording their community engagement. By The Scottish Community Development Centre

Face-to-face interactions facilitate learning, connection, and dialogue. Sharing space, breaking bread, eye contact, laughing and even arguing are aspects of human connection that are difficult to reproduce in digital environments. While digital campaigns often enable a broader audience reach and faster connections, face-to-face methods, such as town hall meetings, community workshops, and ambassador programs, allow for deeper and more meaningful interactions.

Marketplace Nights is a ritualized structure for neighborhood exchange circles facilitated by Bill Trayvnor. Participants can make offers, requests, or announcements to broker exchanges. Advice, gifts, and favors are frequently shared. Popular, regular marketplace nights have been implemented in neighborhoods in Akron, Chicago, Tampa, Boston, Birmingham AL, Washington DC and have seen the exchange of thousands of dollars worth of materials, information, advice, tips, wisdom and favors.

First create a pros and cons list for face-to-face deliberation modalities of engagement. You will want to list as many benefits and challenges as you can think of. You might want to create a two column table and have your team actively brainstorm/contribute to the table during a set time limit. Here are some examples:

Pros: increased ease of relationship and trust building, improved quality of conversations through ease of facilitation and conversation-building, accessible to people with less access to technology.

Cons: need for translators, need for increased support such as childcare and meals, potential costs of training facilitators.

After you have your list, compare the pros and cons of Face-to-Face Deliberation in relation to other engagement modalities.

• Examine existing programs, such as a youth corps, that you can leverage or expand upon.
• If you’re working with a population where there might have been a particularly contentious history, consider the power of face-to-face interactions for rebuilding trust.
• If you are asking for deep face-to-face involvement, such as through a series of focus group, look into offering stipends, food or donated gift cards.
• Be cognizant of challenges such as: language barriers, work schedule conflicts, and dominant personalities.
• These facilitations can require more time, infrastructure and resources.

Knowledge Cafe
A sample activity for face-to-face deliberation among a group, lasting 90-120 minutes and oriented around a single open-ended question, designed to introduce a group to their collective thinking about an issue. By The NHSScotland Quality Improvement Hub

Communities of Practice
Introduces the concept of Communities of Practice, and suggests considerations for creating such a community that can create and share knowledge across its members. By The NHSScotland Quality Improvement Hub

Online environments have opened up several new, and unexpected avenues for deliberative process. While it is possible to see deliberative give and take within some popular online spaces, from Facebook to the Huffington Post, these spaces often quickly devolve into empty talk, and for this reason are rarely adopted by government as official spaces of deliberation. City governments can invest in digital engagement strategies that allow for meaningful conversations to occur and creative ideas to emerge. These tactics include virtual townhalls, Twitter chats, and social media campaigns as well as polls.

From Website to Weibo

The 2010 elections in Alhambra — a primarily immigrant Los Angeles suburb, were canceled after no challengers entered the race. The first English coverage came from Alhambra Source, a new trilingual site, informed by research, on how local news can increase civic engagement across ethno-linguistic boundaries. Since then, more than 90 community contributors who speak 10 languages have written hundreds of articles. Alhambra Source is the winner of three Inter-Ethnic Press awards and has generated other projects including a groundbreaking Weibo (Chinese Twitter) initiative with the Alhambra Police Department. A multi-level evaluation of the site’s impact is underway. Read more here.

First create a pros and cons list for online deliberation modalities of engagement. You will want to list as many benefits and challenges as you can think of. You might want to create a two column table and have your team actively brainstorm/contribute to the table during a set time limit. Here are some examples:

Pros: People can participate at their convenience, those who do not normally participate can get involved- such as younger populations, online participation could be easier to document and archive.

Cons: Inaccessible to people with less digital literacy and access to technology, could involve increased moderation needs, might generate more data than there is capacity to interpret.

Compare the pros and cons of online dialogue in relation to other engagement modalities.

• Many online tools often require moderation and maintenance.

• One aspect of trust-building includes strong feedback loops. Try to respond to online input in a timely manner.

NextDoor
Next Door is a social network for neighborhoods to share local announcements and requests.

Neighborland
A suite of online and offline engagement tools

Co-Urbanize
An online deliberation game focused on community planning

Community PlanIt
Community Plan It is an online deliberation game focused on community planning. Over the course of a month, participants answer trivia and discussion questions while communicating through a forum to debate planning ideas and compete for prizes.

Instead of talking about an issue, a design-thinking approach focuses on group problem solving and solution identification through experimentation and testing. Design-thinking approaches typically involve creative techniques such as drawing and performing, and emphasize creative process over outcomes. Cities can plan a variety of creative engagement activities that encourage ideation, such as design charrettes, game play, art festivals, and hackathons or design days.

The Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP) is a non-profit organization that empowers people to decide together how to spend public money, across the US and Canada. Through programs that PBP has launched and supported, 60,000 people have directly decided how to spend $80 million on more than 600 community projects in 10 cities. Participants create budget delegates who are tasked with researching community needs and submitting project proposals for residents to vote on. Participatory budgeting allocates funds for capital projects such as bike repair stations, wifi spots, bike lanes, and street lighting repairs. In 25 years of global practice, Participatory Budgeting has proven highly effective at engaging these underrepresented communities. This work is recognized by The White House as a model for open government, and by the Brown Democracy Medal as the best practical innovation advancing democracy around the world.

First create a pros and cons list for design-thinking modalities of engagement. You will want to list as many benefits and challenges as you can think of. You might want to create a two column table and have your team actively brainstorm/contribute to the table during a set time limit. Here are some examples:

Pros: Creative ideas can be generated, people can have more fun through this interactive approach, interdisciplinary collaboration can be occur.

Cons: Participants might be confused by the activities, some participants might want more traditional and straightforward means of participation, supplies might be costly.

Compare the pros and cons of Design Thinking in relation to other engagement modalities.

• Practice facilitating design-thinking activities ahead of time.

• Keep track of time for rapid brainstorming and prototyping activities to embrace the creative constraints that time limitations provide.

• Enlist volunteers who understand the design-thinking approach who can answer questions and support participants.

Ideas Generation
An introduction to brainstorming ideas in a group and testing the feasibility of these ideas by The NHSScotland Quality Improvement Hub.

Visioning Event
This page offers a “Visioning Event” tool as a way to bring stakeholders into the planning process at an intermediate stage, to evaluate the plan and insights gleaned from research and analysis. By The NHSScotland Quality Improvement Hub

Somerville By Design
This page outlines SBD’s model for participatory urban planning, explaining the philosophy at its root and the surface-level steps for producing a collaborative vision for a city plan.

Market Street Prototyping Festival
Over the course of a weekend, San Francisco’s annual Prototyping Festival transforms public and community spaces centered on Market Street into experimental “zones” where design happens collaboratively out in the open.

DiscoTechs
DiscoTechs has organized city-by-city events designed to inform the general public about the emerging role of technology in the creation of new co-ops/the co-operative economy.

Park(ing) Day
An organized annual event for creating tiny, temporary parks in metered parking spaces as a way to change thinking about public beautification and the use of public space.

Design Method Toolkit
A large catalogue of Design/Research methodologies, organized according to stage in the design process, methodological goal, and amount of time to complete.

Human-Centered Design Toolkit
IDEO’s Human-Centered Design Toolkit is an introduction to “Human-Centered Design” and catalogue of methodologies, and includes case studies demonstrating real-world implementation of such an approach.

Method Cards
18F offers a free deck of Design/Research methods that are commonly used in modern agile development, designed in a way that is meant to be friendly to less-experienced or new researchers.

Collecting and amplifying existing stories reasserts the value of local knowledge. An initial step in building trust and helping people feel heard is listening to their stories. Even in instances where some stories are very simple and straightforward, the act of storytelling takes on it’s own value as an empowering action. Storytelling is an opportunity to share perspectives, learn from different viewpoints, and consider a diversity of experiences. Whether it’s in the context of brainstorming new solutions or sharing painful experiences - stories have the power to transform relationships. Storytelling can be facilitated both in-person and online and can occur through many visual, oral, or even trans-media formats.

Your Story Goes Here is an online digital media teaching kit designed to help people craft, share, publish and ultimately discuss their stories about cities, places and people - building confidence and capacity for non-professional citizen planners. Through both physical and digital means, the kit is designed to highlight the importance of civic engagement in urban planning. This storytelling tool is intended for use by communities, organizations or schools with no age or experience limits in a 2-day workshop. The framework takes participants through an Urban Planning 101 session; introduces the concept of physical and critical site audits; teaches fundamentals of effective storytelling through language, keywords, digital audio, video, animation or stills; and demonstrates open digital platforms for publishing stories -- all meant to increase the capacity of citizens to identify the importance of civic activism in urban planning and to become active citizens themselves.

Create a pros and cons list for storytelling modalities of engagement. List as many benefits and challenges as you can think of. Examples include:

Pros: people can feel more connected to each other by empathizing with one another’s stories, a particular cause or issue might gain more traction the more stakeholders share their personal connections to it, stakeholder stories can source novel ideas and approaches

Cons: stakeholders who are shy or wary of public attention might not participate, vulnerable populations might not feel safe in sharing their stories, collecting and possibly editing stories might be time intensive.

Compare the pros and cons of storytelling in relation to other engagement modalities.

• Sharing and hearing the stories of disenfranchised communities is a sensitive topic. In places and populations where there is a historical lack of trust in government, consider peer-to-peer story collecting and telling initiatives.

• Reflect on technologically sustainable modes of story collecting and sharing. If you are recording your stories and sharing them online, consider site maintenance needs and responsibilities.

• How can social media amplify your story campaign? Consider creating a hashtag to accompany your project.

Storytelling
A basic introduction to Storytelling as a practice in Design/Research by The NHSScotland Quality Improvement Hub.

Storyboarding
A brief explanation of the value of storyboarding in a planning process by The NHSScotland Quality Improvement Hub.

StoryCorps
By enabling people to tell and record stories, Storycorps enlists the activity of storytelling (not the content of the stories) to engage publics. A small percentage of these stories are broadcast on National Public Radio, but Storycorps maintains a much larger archive of stories.

Play is any activity where the means are more valuable than the ends. It is not about motivating or incentivizing people to do things, but rather about providing the space for learning and interaction. Play can be encouraged through games, interactive displays, meme-inspired social media campaigns, among other tactics.

Race to the White House adopts the approach of using GPS coordinates for a treasure-hunt- -inspired game for civic learning. Participants navigate to a specific set of GPS coordinates and then attempt to find the geocache (container) hidden at that location. Through a program developed by Global Kids Inc., participants engaged in a summer-long process of finding, placing, and interacting through the geocaching network, all while discussing electoral topics. This case study can offer pictures, examples, and a theoretical grounding for how civic learning can be uprooted from books and digital screens for learners today.

First create a pros and cons list for playful modalities of engagement. You will want to list as many benefits and challenges as you can think of. You might want to create a two column table and have your team actively brainstorm/contribute to the table during a set time limit. Examples include:

Pros: participants might feel inspired and refreshed by innovative approaches to engagement, play can transcend language or literacy boundaries, play encourage new ways of thinking.

Cons: some rules might be more complicated for others to understand or participants might feel that a public topic is not being taken seriously enough.

Compare the pros and cons of Play in relation to other engagement modalities.

• Games or interactive installations often succeed through facilitation
• Commissioning games to be designed for your engagement could be costly

Boston Coastline: Future Past
This interactive art performance that entailed walking through the City of Boston to imagine how climate change will impact the City’s social and physical landscape.

Playful Engagement Leaderboard
This blog post by PlaceMatters explains playful alternatives to typical planning processes and obstacles.

Games for Change
Games for Change promotes the use of games and play as a force for social change, both through curating provocative titles and through outreach in the gaming industry and community.

The Art of Changing a City
A two-term mayor of Bogotá, describes his use of humor, play, and seemingly small measures to create larger change.

In the age of big data and the Internet of Things (IoT), there is a never-ending stream of information. Government can support an informed citizenry as an aggregator and dispenser of data. For instance, governments can help people deploy sensors for citizen science and hacking projects by sharing data sets. The technology market invests in creating intuitive uses of products through studying user needs, preferences, and behavior. Government will benefit from a similar investment in understanding information architecture and flow so that citizens have access to service delivery information and participatory decision-making.

City Digits: Local Lotto (citydigits.org) is a high school math class and technology platform, developed by interactive designers and math education researchers from MIT and Brooklyn College, in which students investigate the social implications of state lotteries by interviewing their neighbors, analyzing citywide data, and using their findings to weigh the inequalities and benefits of the system. The curriculum, which helps students develop data literacy as a means to become engaged members of their communities, was piloted at a Brooklyn high school in 2013. A curriculum based around informal banking was deployed in Fall 2014.

First create a pros and cons list for data literacy modalities of engagement. You will want to list as many benefits and challenges as you can think of. You might want to create a two column table and have your team actively brainstorm/contribute to the table during a set time limit. Here are some examples:

Pros: appealing to a wider audience through simplified information, increased shareability of data through outputs like infographics, investment in longer-term participation through supporting literacy growth.

Cons: reliance on technology for storing or retrieving data, determining ethical standards for handling sensitive data, possibly relying on experts to simplify complex ideas.

Compare the pros and cons of Data Literacy in relation to other engagement modalities.

• Apply universal usability standards to make your content accessible to people with disabilities.

• Consider presenting the same data set in multiple formats, such as videos, podcasts, infographics, etc. to accommodate different learning styles.

• Presenting data and interpreting it are two different but intertwined topics for investment. First, your data must be accessible and legible; second, people must know how to apply it. Sharing datasets is not enough.

Data Therapy
Researcher Rahul Bhargava supports community organizations in data visualization and presentation through workshops, webinars, and writing for creative data stories.

Making the numbers meaningful for quality improvement, Box Plot, Frequency Plots
The NHSScotland Quality Improvement Hub summarizes basic models for plotting statistical information

Open Data Policies
The National League of Cities’ official report on Open Data Policies offers a framework for implementing such policies, making data available through public portals, and making data “useful”.

NYC Open Data
via Socrata NYC’s Public data portal, containing datasets categorized by agency, social sector, data type, and more.

Data.Gov
The federal public portal for datasets includes available federal data, but also aggregates datasets from city, county, and state databases in the network.

Array of Things
The City of Chicago has launched an initiative of technologies and programs to provide real-time, location-based data about the city’s environment, infrastructure and activity to researchers and the public. It encourages collaborations between experts, researchers, and laypeople to take specific actions to address urban issues like transportation and climate change.

CDC Database of Interventions
The CDC Community Health Improvement Navigator (CHI Navigator) Database of Interventions is a tool that helps you identify interventions that work in four action areas—socioeconomic factors, physical environment, health behaviors, and clinical care. It provides leaders and stakeholders with options to consider when making decisions about how to invest in their community and address its health needs.

Engagement is not linear. It does not move from informing to empowering in a straightforward fashion. Each stage of the spectrum is important and each should be designed thoughtfully. Public engagement outcomes are also typically long-term. It’s important to spell out achievable goals in the short-term. If someone was unfamiliar with your project, they should be able to pick up this document and feel acquainted to its scope and process.

Writing surface and marker or digitally shared notes.

Print out the public engagement roadmap and follow the directions. Otherwise draw a start and end point on a white board or large piece of paper.

In one sentence, write down where you are starting with your public engagement. In another one sentence line, write down your ultimate goal.

Place your sticky notes on the Public Engagement roadmap or on opposite sides of a drawn-out map.

Next, review your purpose and desired outcomes from the previous activities. Using the table below, name milestones that are culminating moments for your desired outcomes. For each milestone, describe the actions that encompass it.

Place your sticky notes on the Public Engagement roadmap or in between your start and end points on a drawn-out map.

• While some milestones can be qualitative, such as increased enthusiasm to participate in local politics, be sure to ground them in measurable outcomes.

• When you revisit your planning process, you might find unexpected milestones. Be sure to document them as well.

Project Initiation Document
In addition to explaining what a project initiation document is, this site provides several examples of what items to include in the document.

Scoping Your Project
Provides a table that helps define the scope of the project by letting stakeholders fill the blanks in the table.”

Sustaining Momentum
Simple tips on how to reignite enthusiasm.

Before Action Review
Provides questions that can be asked to assess what previous knowledge team members have.

Action Plan
Describes why an action plan is important and how to make one

Benefits Realization Plan
This tool helps track your intended project benefits and outcomes while strategizing for useful resources.

Resources from The NHSScotland Quality Improvement Hub

Feedback is important for those being listened to. Prioritizing good listening and responding builds trust, which is the foundation of public engagement.

Writing surface and marker or digitally shared notes.

Use the milestones identified in the previous exercise. Take five minutes, and individually write 3 feedback loops for each milestone.

Your feedback loops should include both indicators of listening and authentic listening opportunities. Some examples include:

• Demonstrating that input was taken in
• Taking notes
• “liking” or “retweeting” something on social media
• Engaging in meaningful conversations by thoughtfully referencing previous conversations
• Explaining how feedback was incorporated

Place your feedback loops on your Public Engagement Roadmap next to each milestone. Then, as a group, discuss your feedback loops and select a maximum of three for each milestone. You may use the table below to help organize your thoughts.

• Consider short-term and long-term formats of feedback loops. For instance, you might immediately share posts or media from an event online, but you also might want to analyze data collected for a more robust report.

• How might your participants help you with feedback loops? You can encourage participants to share their input and experiences online to amplify the public engagement messages to others.

From Cynicism to Trust
by Feedback Labs

Closing the loop to maintain an engaged community
by Bang the Table

To take stock of all the tools you need. It is important to understand what each technology and medium does and why you’re using it.

Writing surface and marker, sticky notes, or digitally shared notes.

As a group, list all the communication technologies you will employ in your process. One person should write them on a whiteboard or shared digital document. Include both analog and digital technologies, such as Twitter, Facebook, city website, as well as sticky notes, colored dots, Sharpies, etc.

Next, determine what technologies will be used to facilitate your stated feedback loops. Write the name of the technology on a different colored sticky note and place it on the Roadmap next to your feedback loop.

Repeat for each milestone.

• Try to verify your technology decisions based on data. In other words, don’t simply start using a technology because it appears to be popular. Meet people where they are with the tools they use.

• You don’t have to start from scratch. Plenty of resources make it easy to adapt templates for your own needs.

Piktochart
Offers templated infographics for presentations, graphics, and websites.

Slack
A messaging and project collaboration platform for teams.

Canva
Free templates for presentations, fliers, social media posts, etc.

Product Hunt
A simple way to discover innovative and useful applications

To create a strategy for collecting data and determining whether or not your process was effective.

Whiteboard and markers, or shared digital document

Refer to the Outcomes exercise and write down the top three outcomes on your shared writing surface.

As a group, discuss what kind of data you can collect to measure your progress towards each outcome. Write them down underneath the outcome. These can include things you can count, such as: Facebook likes, meeting attendance, questionnaires, etc. They also might include more qualitative measures, such as: interviews, recorded stories, observations of events, quality of participation in workshops, etc.

Discuss how you will systematically and realistically collect data. Who will be responsible for data collection? Who will be responsible for analyzing your data?

Discuss who needs to see the results of your analysis (i.e. community members, funders, policymakers). Based on this, determine what form your reporting should take. There may be multiple forms. Write each down and discuss how you will get it done.

Build a regular and consistent reflection time into your project planning process.

Building Reliable Processes
What reliable processes are and how to measure them in three steps.

Actionable Knowledge Products
Provides a list of examples of actionable knowledge products.

Driver Diagram
A driver diagram, broken into three parts - Outcome, Primary drivers and Secondary Drivers - organises information on proposed activities so the relationships between the aim of the improvement project and the changes to be tested and implemented are made clear.

Gathering Experience and Perception Data
Provides a table for survey design and tips on how to collect data accurately.

Value Stream Mapping
The Value Stream Map sets out the time series of all activities and steps in the current state. It allows the team to identify the value-added (VA), value-enabling (VE) and non-value added (NVA) steps.

Return on Investment
Formula for calculating the Return on Investment (ROI) and the implication of the ROI.

The 7 National Standards for Community Engagement
Seven clear principles that describe the main elements of effective community engagement. They provide detailed performance statements that everyone involved can use to achieve the highest quality results and the greatest impact.