ℹ️ This activity is part of Stage 3: spatial coordination and localisation.

👩‍🏫 The project team is responsible for engaging with its local community.

Community engagement is a purposeful process which develops a working relationship between communities, community organisations, and public and private bodies to help them to identify and act on community needs and ambitions. It involves respectful dialogue between everyone involved, aimed at improving understanding between them and taking joint action to achieve positive change (Scottish Community Development Centre, 2016).

The Scottish National Standards for Community Engagement suggest seven standards to bear in mind when engaging with communities:

• Impact – Assess the impact of the engagement and use learnings to improve future community engagement.
• Communication – Communicate clearly and regularly with the people, organisations, and communities affected by the engagement.
• Methods – Use methods of engagement that are fit for purpose.
• Working together – Work effectively together to achieve the aims of the engagement.
• Planning – There is a clear purpose for the engagement, which is based on a shared understanding of community needs and ambitions.
• Support – Identify and overcome any barriers to participation.
• Inclusion – Identify and involve the people and organisations that are affected by the focus of the engagement.

Mapping of relevant stakeholders

Project stakeholders should have been mapped in Stage 0: strategic definition – define requirements and outcomes. This stage will capture the community and citizen stakeholders in more detail and find ways of engaging to understand their needs and opinions.

Stakeholder mapping and engagement

Stakeholders are people or organisations that are internal or external to the project who have a vested interest in its success. That interest can have a positive or negative impact on the project execution. Therefore, it’s crucial to know your stakeholders. More than just being able to identify who the stakeholders are in the project, you need to talk to them and manage what contribution they make. It’s an important task and the success of the project will depend on it.

There are a number of ways to map out the project stakeholders. The following is derived from guidance from the Project Managers Institute (Smith, 2000).

Stakeholders

It’s important to understand not only stakeholders’ interests but also the potential project impact if their needs were not met.

The first effort should be a brainstorming activity with appropriately selected members and an optional facilitator. All stakeholders should be initially considered with the option to exclude them from later stages of the analysis. It is often difficult to force classifications into groups and determine who is considered truly inside and outside the project context. To gain a more powerful understanding of needs and expectations, it is usually helpful to identify these stakeholders by name rather than by generic terms such as customer, owner or sponsor.

Identify stakeholders interests, impact level, and relative priority

In refining the previous stage, the stakeholders should be listed in a table or spreadsheet with their key interests, potential level of impact to the project, and priority in relation to other stakeholders. Multiple interests should be carefully captured, particularly those that are overt and hidden in relation to project objectives.

The key is to keep in mind that identifying interests is done with the stakeholders’ perspectives in mind. This is difficult since interests are usually hidden and contradict openly stated aims. Each interest should be related to the appropriate project phase; that is, interests change as the project moves through its lifecycle. With some stakeholders it may be crucial to extract interests by formally asking them questions such as:

• What are your expectations of this project?
• How does the successful completion of the project benefit you?
• Are there any stakeholders that may conflict with your interest?
• Which stakeholders do you believe are in conflict with your interests?

Once the major interests are identified, it is also useful to outline how the project will be impacted if these are met or not met. In most cases, a simple annotation of positive (+), negative (–), or unknown can be used as well as high (H), medium (M), low (L), or uncertain (?).

A powerful way of visualising this is to categorise stakeholders along two axes: influence and interest. There are other approaches that work, and local authorities should use the method or categorisation that their organisation is most familiar with.

Consult with community on options and undertake design reviews with users and project stakeholders

Use the stakeholder map to identify and talk to the most important community stakeholders through a range of engagement approaches. The objective of these engagements is to review the concept design to gather ideas that would make the project more impactful to local residents and businesses.

✅ Ensure your consultation is a true open consultation process. Make it easy for people to get involved, encourage input and ideas, and ensure there is flexibility to work these into the design.

❌ Don’t Decide – Announce – Defend by making a fixed plan behind closed doors, telling a few people about it and ignoring feedback to improve the solution.

There are many well-recognised approaches to community consultation and engagement. Some lend themselves to more than one purpose. Others will be more suitable for particular needs, including:

• Initial consultation with the community (giving people a say and getting people involved before you start planning a project).
• Ongoing engagement.
• Keeping people informed and up to date with activities and achievements.

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