How do you put a dollar value on engagement?
As engagement practitioners, we talk a lot about the benefits of engaging early but too often the focus can be on securing community buy-in. That much sought-after idea of social license when a project has the approval and broad social acceptance of the community and other stakeholders. What we don’t do well is espouse the quantitative benefits of engagement.
The dollar value that can be directly attributed to a conversation had with the community early in the project. And there are a few reasons why this doesn’t get raised as often as it should.
Firstly, we often engage too late in a project for community input to be meaningful. The detailed design is done and short of government or legal intervention, project managers are loathe to veer too far away from all the time and effort that has gone into it. Sure, they may acknowledge the design has flaws, but “it’s too late” to change anything beyond simple aesthetics.
Secondly, project managers, engineers, technical specialists with years of experience often, and sometimes rightly, know better than those without qualification. I’ve heard many planners, engineers and project managers dismiss the complaints and feedback of the community because they’re “armchair experts”. It’s a spoken belief that the layperson can’t understand the challenges and problem solving required to construct bridges, railways, roads, dams and the like. And that’s probably true. But when you have lived in an area long enough you don’t need an engineering background to know what roads go under after heavy rain.
Third, when we do engage we see it as a singular event, a step on the Gantt chart that we have crossed off. We rarely go back to consult again, to check we’re headed in the same direction we started in. And this leads me to my point.
Things change. Communities change. Behaviours change. Sometimes of their own volition but sometimes because of something we have done or will do as part of the project that is going to affect the long-term picture.
I read a traffic report recently that is being used to help inform the design of some level crossings. It noted a certain road was not used by pedestrians as none had been seen during the traffic count periods. The report concluded that the design of the level crossing would not need to include a pedestrian crossing.
What this report failed to account for, and which only came to the project team through engagement with nearby stakeholders, was that pedestrians did not use the road because they could take a short cut through a deactivated rail corridor. The problem is that deactivated rail corridor is about to be fenced, and that is going to force all those pedestrians to walk around the corridor to the road that this report said wasn’t used by pedestrians.
Now, we could get all the way down the path of detailed design and have a beautiful artist’s rendering of the level crossing without pedestrian access only to present it to the nearby stakeholders and find we’d got it wrong. And do you know what we’d probably say? “It’s too late, that’s going to cost a fortune to redesign.”
And here, right here, is where taking community input into consideration could save this project dollars. Because the fact is, that road will need a pedestrian crossing and a footpath. It will need to be factored into the design of the level crossing. It’s a safety issue that can’t be ignored.
They may be armchair experts, but stakeholders do add value to a project. Sometimes it is just social license, but sometimes, just sometimes, they will save you a lot of money and a red face.
Alysia Norris, Senior Communication and Engagement Consultant