Finding out what the community thinks

Finding out what the community thinks – or consultation – is one of the most common forms of community participation. Doing effective consultation can be very powerful. It can also be successfully combined with other approaches within one project or area of work. You might also have a legal duty to conduct a statutory consultation (potential link to intranet).

A few things are key to doing effective consultation work:

• Setting honest parameters: You will need to set clear objectives for any consultation process – what exactly can participants influence? Knowing this, you will be able to work out what to ask.
• Context & issue-appropriate: Some areas of work will require ongoing consultation, where it will be useful to think about your consultation approach in general rather than as single activity. This might allow you to build longer-term relationships and more meaningful engagement over time.
• Accessibility: To make a consultation successful, you need to make sure that the right people can contribute. That will usually mean adjusting the process to suit the various audiences involved. This should influence the overall methods that you use, particular accommodations that you might make to the process, and how you target your outreach for the consultation process. You can see more considerations in the Who to Involve section.
• Planning appropriate methods: There are a wide range of methods to find out what people think. Especially if you struggle to get responses from the key stakeholders using traditional methods, consider if an alternative method is worth experimenting with. You can read more about a highly creative method of consultation.
• Coordination across the council: You should consider how your activity links to other council consultations, communications and strategies. Sometimes residents will be approached repeatedly on similar topics, or on different topics at the same time. Sometimes there are good reasons for that. However consider if you can collaborate with colleagues to avoid duplication, or use existing consultation results. Be aware of the residents’ perspective on repeat consultations, and be ready to either adjust your plans in light of other council activities, or to acknowledge and explain to residents the different objectives at stake. Where there has been a lot of consultation already, you might be able to focus your energies on a different type of participation activity.
• Following up: Letting people know what happened after a consultation is really important to demonstrating that their time and views have been respected. When you are following up is also a key opportunity to think about whether you can now build in other types of participation activity.

We will now consider a few specific types of consultation activity:

• Statutory and written consultations
• Consultation events
  

Below is a prompt question to help you think about how you will use the findings from the community consultation?