Working out who to involve

Who is affected by this area of work? This question should be at the core of your participation plans, and it will affect the nature of your participation activities.

You might have statutory consultation responsibilities to plan for. However you should start asking yourself this wider question first to frame your approach to participation.

You should consider:

• Communities of place who are affected by your work because of where they live, work, study, travel etc.
• Communities of interest who share a common interest or concern

What will support their participation? Once you have an idea of the groups or communities to focus on, you can consider what factors are important to their participation. This might include:

• Physical accessibility (e.g. participants getting to a venue, disability access, room for carers)
• Financial (e.g. are there financial barriers to participation, can you support with costs)
• Timing (e.g. appropriate times of day, day of the week)
• Cultural factors (e.g. will you require a prayer room, dietary requirements)
• Language (e.g. translation, interpretation support, written materials in other languages)
• Online accessibility (e.g. accessibility of online tools, access to equipment, do people need support to access, etc.)

For your participation activities to be a success, you will need to plan around the communities involved, rather than expecting them to respond to your project plan. You can see more tips about inclusive community engagement. You can also read more about equality, diversity and inclusion.

You should also consider the impact of any factors which might undermine engagement. These might include negative historic experiences, or specific recent incidents (e.g. crime issue). You might need to make specific plans to address these issues, or think on a more basic level about how trust can be rebuilt.

Identifying and reaching participants: Whether or not you already have existing relationships with potential participants, it is highly likely that there remain individuals or groups who aren’t sufficiently represented in your participation activities. It is therefore really important to see outreach as an ongoing process of relationship-building, rather than a one-off activity.

With that context in mind, consider the following possibilities for reaching out to potential participants:

• Council communications channels such as Barnet First or our website. If you want to reach council staff consider our internal channels
• Ward councillors
• Informal community groups
• Charities, either via our infrastructure partners Barnet Together, or via the Community Participation team
• Street-level outreach e.g. pop-ups
• Resident or area-based groups
• Faith groups
• Service-user groups (incl. e.g. patient groups)
• Online communities
• Business forums
• Social enterprises

Often the obvious intermediary organisations (e.g. schools) are themselves swamped with participation requests or other priorities. Rather than considering which organisations might be most able to “supply participants”, consider which organisations have interest and capacity to build long-term relationships with you because they have an ongoing stake in this area of work.

You can read more in our case study about building up new relationships for participation activities.

Multiple groups: In many areas of work there will be several overlapping groups who should be participating. They often have different priorities and preferences about how they want to get involved, and different previous experiences of engaging with the council. Participation activities often have to be layered to suit differences in:

• Previous knowledge
• Confidence about engaging with the council
• Time availability
• Communication and engagement preferences

You can see a case study and guidelines about how to engage with multiple communities.

For further contacts who can support your communications to help you reach different communities, please see our communications contact tool.

Below are two prompt questions: the first to help you think about what relationships already exist between the council and affected communities, and the second to help consider how positive the previous experience any interaction between the affected communities and the council has been.