Getting back to basics

It’s always nice to receive positive feedback from the media and community about a project we’ve been working on. In our industry, it’s relatively rare for communication and engagement to be commended in this way. Arguably, communication and engagement are some of the most difficult parts of any project to get right. Stakeholders, especially community stakeholders, have incredibly high expectations for how they want to be communicated with and consulted and often we fall short through a general mismatch of expectations.

It got me thinking about what made this project any different to all the projects practitioners like ourselves work on every day. The tools we used have been around for a long time –interactive maps, surveys, discussion forums – they are not particularly innovative despite being online. Other projects are using far more high-tech tools such as gaming and augmented reality to engage with their stakeholders.

So, what made this project “good”, good enough at least to be acknowledged unprompted by stakeholders across our target audience? All I can come back to, again and again, is our communication. We were somewhat fortunate that this project functioned independently to government. While this meant we had to build our communication channels from scratch – meaning we couldn’t piggy back off any existing networks – it also meant that we had a huge influence over how, what and when we communicated.

We were able to be responsive, in close to real time, to stakeholder enquiries. We were able to respond as humans not robots. We had the flexibility to change our messages and push them out quickly. We admitted when we didn’t have the answers, we apologised for our errors and technology fails and we tried to explain, where required, the reasons behind our process.

Early in the project, many stakeholders asked on our Facebook page why we were consulting them if we were the “experts”. It was a great, if not tongue-in-cheek, question. In other organisations I have worked with, this might have been left to go to the keeper. We wouldn’t want to stir the pot or start a Facebook debate – something many organisations are rightly fearful of.

Instead we answered, as best we could. We acknowledged the question and why consultation was important. We acknowledged the long history of consultation on the issue but said it was important we undertake our own as were independent of those organisations. We finally said that we were engineers and scientists and that we didn’t appreciate the issue like the people who lived there. And we used direct, plain English language, avoiding the quagmire of bureaucratic talk.

This is just one example of a technique we employed time and again and it seems to have worked. We provided regular updates about how many people were participating, what we’d been hearing, how many people were visiting the website and completing the survey.

Our engagement program is probably similar to what has been done before and will likely be done again in the future but by exceeding community expectations with some pretty basic communication principles, we have managed to earn praise instead of criticism. Our stakeholders may still not like the outcome but there’s hope that they may at least understand how we arrived at it and trust our explanation for it.