Exciting Community Engagement Strategies for Plan-Making

You need a terrific community engagement process when your organization or government decides to do some city planning. You might need innovative community surveys and other ways to build public participation in the process.

Good developers also want to understand positive methods for community engagement in the town planning process, even when dealing with an individual property.

It took a long time for me to want to move from the older term, citizen participation, to citizen or community engagement. But I love the notion that people not only have their bodies present to participate, but also that their minds or hearts are engaged with the subject matter.

The move from the word citizen to the word community might be less fortunate, as sometimes institutional and corporate interests have more influence now than they should have.

If you're a community person and you've been invited to a sham community engagement process, certainly attend and do what you can. But if you have the privilege of being able to participate in an open-ended discussion or design process, consider yourself lucky and make the time.

Let's divide the different types of community engagement processes under broad headings below, with some tips for conducting or participating in each.

Open Houses

The primary event at an open house style event for the public is the ability of the public to look at displays and interact with designers and planners. Often the results already are cooked, and if you're a public participant, your job is to apply the rubber stamp or be able to articulate why not.

The concept that busy people can attend at several different dayparts is a definite advantage. I like the 4-8 p.m. range in my particular community. In that community, this translates to "before dark," "after work," and "after dinner" timeframes. In your location those may or may not be from 4-8 p.m., depending on lifestyles and time of year.

If your venue is such that you can leave an exhibit in place for several days, and you have a way to collect feedback through electronic or paper means, that's even better.

The fact that people may choose to spend a short or long time at the open house is its advantage, and try not to dull that by expecting people to sit through a lengthy presentation.

If you must feature a "sage on the stage," or else people won't be able to understand the options, make it brief and announce beforehand when the presentation will occur.

If you can make a self-explanatory exhibit, though, so much the better. If you need a presentation that repeats itself as an explanation, that will work fine. But my experience is people won't pay much attention unless the screen dominates.

If you can work in a little public participation game as a form of voting, that can be very useful. I particularly like "budgeting" exercises, whether or not the subject is money. These pertain to a situation where there is a finite amount of something that you force people to allocate.

If the subject is visual, plan a feature to switch off the left brain and engage the right brain. A little art or music off the topic can serve to stimulate community engagement in a design endeavor that's essentially an art project.

I like maximum maximum planner and community engagement with each other in dialogue, so the more individual conversations planners can hold, the better.

In the open house format, one of the advantages is that you can forestall discussion from the floor if you wish. You may choose to allow informational questions after a presentation, if any, but don't entertain discussions between audience members.

On the other hand, if you're a planner, letting citizens get into discussions with one another around the displays can be very useful.

Public Hearings and Less Formal Meetings

Many governments are required by law to hold public hearings as a method of public participation in particular types of legal actions, commonly including development approvals, zoning matters, and formal adoption of plans. If you wish to hold a public hearing about a plan, do it near the end of the process when you think most concepts are fully developed and you need to do a check to make sure community engagement is still positive.

Less formal meetings commonly are better for obtaining true feedback and building long-range community engagement. Many are intimidated by the mechanics of a public hearing, including being sworn in, having to sign in, having to state your name and address for the record, being tape recorded, being recorded for local cable television, and all kinds of things that may occur.

If you are able to hold a meeting within the affected neighborhood, and can conduct it without any reference to any procedures except perhaps Roberts Rules of Order if things get out of hand, that's best.

At the meeting, the person who will be doing the majority of the decision-making about what is written into the plan should be either in attendance or facilitating the meeting. If he or she is a poor facilitator, and gets stuck in filibustering for or defending his or her own ideas, choose someone else. Allow the plan-maker to sit on the podium, but let someone adept at working the audience make sure that everyone is recognized and awarded an appropriate amount of time.

If you have topics you definitely want to hear about, prepare and distribute an agenda and go down the list. Don't leave it to chance that an important topic will be mentioned.

These meetings will be different depending on whether you are just starting a planning effort or whether you are fairly far along. At the beginning you can afford to ask extremely open-ended questions, and you should.

Ask imagination-inspiring questions. Model possibility thinking and emphasis on community assets rather than problems. If your crowd is participatory, divide them into small groups of 6-8 people and let each group discussion. Have each group select a spokesperson and report back to the group. This is an excellent method of assuring that everyone who attends feels that the community engagement process was genuine.

If your neighborhood organization is participating in a planning process and you are invited to a meeting where the format is unknown to you, you should rehearse key community members so they will perform well in whatever open-ended and divide-and-conquer tactics the planners might use against you. If you're on the community member side of a community engagement process that seems skewed toward a pre-determined end, you will need to play smart.

If you're in charge of the planning process, only call a gimmick-less public meeting for discussion when (a) you really don't know what people think and would like to start a dialogue, (b) you're in a community where community engagement is something of a sport (you know who you are), and/or (c) you think people will definitely be opinionated about the topic.

Having to spend half an hour in a small group where no one really cares about the topic is almost as boring as having to sit through an hour-long public hearing.

If you're facilitating a meeting and have turned to small groups with questions to discuss, maps to mark up, play money to divide, or little people to assign to blocks, wander around animatedly seeing what people are doing. If you're in a little huddle, out in the hallway on your phone, or looking bored, why do you think the people will be excited about your community engagement task?

Finally, if you need a really intense planning process, especially one that is oriented toward visual decisions, consider the charrette methodology.

Community Surveys

Surveys run the gamut from phone to paper to Internet-based. If you can afford a professional or at least an experienced person to help you word the survey, that would be best. Anyone with a master's degree should have some notion of how to write a questionnaire. A good survey provides information about public opinion, but it doesn't necessarily inspire people for more community involvement. So consider carefully what you need--information or participation.

Let's take the survey administration methods one at a time.

1. Phone. This is becoming obsolete, as so many people give up their land-based lands or have unlisted numbers. If you have a community where neither is common, you can hire a company called a field service to conduct the survey. Or in a very small town, you could do it yourself. The more useful type of phone survey can be for a membership organization to randomly select from its own members, most of whom have given you their phone numbers.

2. Written. Mailing expenses are prohibitive for many organizations. One possibility is that if you mail a newsletter to your membership, you could include the survey inside and ask for its return. You also can conduct a written survey at a regular meeting.

Written surveys give a feeling of anonymity and therefore boldness that phone surveys can't offer. A more formal style of presenting the questions also is possible, and of course each question is presented uniformly to every respondent. On the phone a slight vocal inflection might influence the answer.

3. Internet. You can post your survey on Survey Monkey or a similar service. You then will receive the benefits of the paper survey with more versatility about when people can answer, and even greater anonymity. It looks snappy too, and younger folks especially will be likely to think it's less of a bother. The survey organization will tabulate results for you too, which definitely is a bonus.

Balance whether you need a forced choice of answers, in which you want to form multiple choice questions, or whether you're really fishing for attitudes or new ideas. Open-ended questions (such as "What would you change about the neighborhood?") are best when you don't want to artificially limit responses.

Truthfully, open-ended questions are a better community involvement and engagement process, but more work to tabulate.

Consider also whether the information you need is word-based, number-based, or picture-based. I can't recommend often enough allocating people a budget ($1,000 or some number a household can relate to) and asking them to divide it among the various types of programs you could offer. If you like, you can place constraints on this method of community engagement. For example, tell participants they must allocate at least $364 for office help, but they can allocate any amount over that if they wish.

For visual information, you may want to ask people to participate in a visual preference survey or other visualization exercise. This survey asks people to choose between at least two photos in desirability, and may ask open-ended why questions or closed-ended questions about the choices.

Visually-oriented learners and communicators will respond to illustrations that planning consultants can create with various software, or even to 3-D visualizations that appear to allow you to walk around or through a prospective development or streetscape.

If you've never used a visual preference survey as community involvement in your area, you can use this technique simply to perk up interest. We all like to look at pictures, and doing so appeals to the intellectually lazy.

Field Trips

Field trips are enormously useful community engagement processes, when teamed with other methods. If people are lukewarm about a plan or planning concept, you may need to bus them to the study area and have them get out and walk around to see things from a different perspective. Many people, particularly the kinesthetic learners, come alive when they can walk in an area.

Field trips also are helpful as a bonding experience for an advisory committee, an eye-opener for those who usually don't visit undesirable neighborhoods, or as a geography primer if you are covering a large scope.

Otherwise the experience will be valuable in either getting everyone on the same page or accentuating exactly what the differences of opinion are. Many folks and some ethnic groups really are quite bad at reading maps and understanding spatial relationships, so allow them another opportunity to master that information.

The field trip also is useful as a way of "ground truthing" a nearly complete plan. It's a way of checking whether people really believe what they have been saying. If dissent arises on an adventure trip, you need to return to broad community engagement.

The other field trip that I really advocate is a trip to a nearby but unfamiliar location where a technique under consideration can be demonstrated. Sometimes this may not be a short trip. If you are in a smaller city and can take a two-hour bus drive to a larger metro area to see three different examples of a streetscape you are contemplating in your smaller city, the trip will really solidify opinion and illustrate new concepts.

Sometimes a trip from one city to another is warranted. If you can find the budget and there's a compelling reason to visit another city, the trip will be well worth it. Another use of the out-of-town trip for those who have access to various examples right at home is that it can help break a deadlock. When you visit another city, any emotional baggage that may be attached to the various options back at home will tend to dissipate.

The drawback to field trips of all types as community engagement is that the degree of advanced planning required is quite high, and participation is limited, unless your field trip is appropriate for a procession of private autos.

Focus Groups

Focus groups are used extensively in marketing, but they can be very useful in planning. Of all the techniques, the focus group really does need professional administration if you can afford it. If not, have an educated leader in your own group read up on the technique and lead the group.

The idea is to find a representative group, or group of contrasting individuals representative of the whole community, and invite them on one occasion to one place for a discussion. Pre-determine what questions will be asked. Preferably ask questions you don't know the answers to. This technique is especially useful when you want to ask "why" in depth. Literally a facilitator can ask a person why they feel a particular way and then ask further follow-up why questions until there is deep knowledge of the "why" of a situation.

Another good use of the focus group technique is when you really have no idea how people analyze a particular situation, decision, or investment. After two hours of good probing, you'll know. And you might have a great story.

The advantage is that you do not need a large number of participants (8-12 will be fine) to obtain information in depth.

A focus group shouldn't substitute for more widespread community engagement on an important planning question, in my opinion, but when you want detailed information about why a particular attitude might be surfacing, it's hard to beat.

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