Doing Stakeholder Consultation
Doing Stakeholder consultation
When conducting a consultation, it is as important to note who isn’t in the room as who is. If someone who has an interesting or different perspective isn’t present, then the person conducting that consultation will never get that perspective, unless they conduct a separate consultation. This is true for almost any complex social policy area in which you are seeking to hear diverse opinions about what the situation is from various perspectives
The Importance of Inclusion
If people are engaged in the process of designing their own future, then they are more likely to work to ensure that the intervention is successful. It may fail, but it won’t be because no-one is interested in seeing it work.
A challenge, though, is getting everyday community members to participate in the first place. People are busy and would prefer to do their own thing most of the time. The easiest way to engage people is to ask them what is angering or frustrating them in their everyday lives. However, while such anger will let the community become motivated to change an existing situation, it is often not so productive at having good consultations to see how these problems can be addressed. So it depends what stage of consultation you are at at present
Stages and Strategies of Participation
During different periods of consultation, you might use different strategies for interaction with community members.
e.g.
| Stage of Consultation | Strategy |
|---|---|
| Asking for issues | Public forum, Leaflet drop, Complaint number (e.g. Ask residents to call in for common annoying problems they face) |
| Informing participants | Leaflet drop, TV Announcement, Radio Announcement |
| Co-Creating solutions | Stakeholder forum, focus-group discussion |
You probably do not want to get people to only call in when you’re co-creating solutions, because even if you get ideas, you won’t be able to flesh them out much - at some point, you’ll need to include a range of residents or stakeholders to get a more collaborative approach.
Cost of Participation
There are three major barriers to deeper participation:
- Time
- Money
- Scalability of consultation
It’s a basic fact that having 300 people discuss things is a lot more unwieldy than 3 people discussing things. You can have 300 person fora, but they need to have very well respected discussion times. 300 people probably need to be divided up into groups working on different aspects of the problem or workshopping ideas, and there would need to be some kind of decision made at the end on how to select between the ideas.