Engaging hard-to-reach stakeholders and communities

Here are seven ways your partnership can seek to engage effectively with hard-to-reach stakeholders and communities:

 

1.   Tailor your engagement and communication approaches to the needs and preferences of those you most need to reach. Concentrate on accessibility and attractiveness. Would informal get-togethers arranged near where 'Hard-to-Reach' (HtR) people live be more effective and accessible than more formal meetings held in very official, perhaps more distant and off-putting surroundings? Would an attractive hard copy newsletter or partnership update, written and presented in a style suited to the target audience, raise interest in the work of the partnership more effectively than a jargon laden missive posted on an official website? Would some kind of stimulating, enjoyable activity focused upon the interests and/or needs of local communities generate greater enthusiasm for the goals and activities of the partnership than a more traditional public meeting?      

2.   Create and offer transparency of process and decision making. Show all those affected by the partnership’s work how the information and insights they provide are used to inform its actions and priorities. Weave the opinions and local knowledge of HtR stakeholders into the day-to-day conduct and work of the partnership. Do everything you can to put the decision-making of the partnership within sight of those that are most hard-to-reach.

Here are some things you can try:

·    Set up official ‘Stakeholder Forums’ and give them oversight of the partnership’s work, plus the ability to criticise and offer suggestions for improvement.

·    Create informal ‘Stakeholder Clubs’ where all stakeholders, including HtR groupings, are encouraged to attend, hear updates about the partnership’s work, give their comments and reactions, and offer local knowledge that could be helpful to the partnership’s work.

·    Hold ‘Open Strategy’ meetings where key stakeholders are encouraged to not only comment on proposed partnership goals and actions, but also contribute to their creation and agreement.

·    Hold ‘Honesty in Action’ meetings where partners and stakeholders discuss on-going issues and problems openly, without any sense of blame.

·    Embed the partnership’s key functions and personnel within the communities it is seeking to help and support.

3.   Embrace conflict and difference. Perceive conflict, difference and perhaps even anger as a positive sign that the partnership could be starting to engage with its stakeholders in a meaningful, productive way. Assume that a non-judgemental exploration of the issues surrounding conflicts and differences will help discover new insights and synergies of benefit to the partnership and its work. Make sure your own day-to-day behaviour, and also that of the partnership overall, models an enthusiasm for new and challenging opinions and ideas.   

4.   Seek out new paths towards engagement. Boldly go where no-one involved with the partnership has gone before. Seek out wider and more diverse paths towards those that are most difficult to reach. Discover how HtR stakeholders and communities communicate with each other and seek to become part of these networks. Find out how other agencies, charities and partnerships connect effectively with their HtR stakeholders. Seek to copy them or ‘piggyback’ on their success.

5.   Co-ordinate your consultation efforts. Make every effort to link up the consultation activities of individual partners. Make a point of identifying blind spots in the partnership’s areas of focus, especially where these could relate to HtR groups. Also, look out for any duplication of effort between partners, as too much consultation can cause confusion and lead to some groups disappearing almost entirely from view, because they feel overly targeted or even picked upon.    

6.   Build the capability of those you most need to engage with and identify volunteers. Encourage HtR communities to develop skills important to the partnership’s work. Identify, develop and support volunteers from HtR areas. Provide these volunteers with opportunities to visit other partnerships and communities with similar problems. Encourage them, upon their return, to share their learning and insights. Focus on transferring the key learning to those in need of it the most.     

7.   Win over hearts and minds with high profile actions that provide quick, positive results for HtR communities. Make sure these actions gain maximum visibility within the stakeholder communities of most importance to the partnership. Clearly relate these quick wins to the partnership’s key strategic goals, aspirations and overall vision.

Examine the problem! I repeat, examine the problem!

Problem solving can be split into two parts: the first being to examine and evaluate the problem; the second being to identify solutions.

Taking longer over the first part, examining a problem and evaluating its context and nature, will help you make accurate judgements and decisions about the best way to solve it. 

Obvious? Perhaps so, but the following actually happened:

Those running an employment programme in the USA were dismayed and disappointed when the jobs created for long-term unemployed people from ethnic minorities failed to deliver the expected improvement in employment levels. A little more examination of the root causes of the unemployment within the relevant ethnic minorities would have revealed a lack of skills rather than jobs as the key problem to be addressed. The jobs had been created within the building industry; if you cannot work with bricks or wood you are not likely to secure a job!

So, examine the problem!

For some tools to help you examine and define your problems go to:

http://www.mycoted.com/Category:Problem_Definition


For more about collaboration go to: Sleeping-with-the-Enemy-Achieving-Collaborative-Success-2nd-Edition

Focus upon newness

What new areas is your collaboration with competitors going to focus upon? What new services, products, audiences, innovations and ways of working is it going to seek out and exploit?

Competing oil companies regularly form alliances to explore and exploit new oil fields, create new technology or combine existing technology in new ways, or create new and improved processes for getting oil out of the ground and into people’s lives and work.

Fiercely competitive Biotechnology companies collaborated to explore and map the human genome. They are now doing the same thing for the Human Proteome.

Rival IT companies collaborate to find new ways of combining and integrating their various systems. Intel’s collaboration with its competitors to create the now taken for granted USB port is a prime example.

Focusing upon newness minimises the defensive mind-set created by focusing upon competitors well-established interests, activities and markets. It encourages competitors to band together and launch a combined offensive targeted at identifying and exploiting new and potentially lucrative opportunities, safe in the knowledge that their existing interests are unlikely to be threatened by those with which they are collaborating (at least for the duration of the current alliance).

By focusing upon newness and innovation a partnership increases the scope and richness of the activity going on within its area of interest and all those involved are likely to benefit from the abundance of opportunities this creates.

Partners will still be competing elsewhere, but those activities will be distant from the new focus of the collaboration and make instances of split loyalties the exception rather than the rule.

 

Make evaluation public

One of the bravest and most challenging things a partnership can do is open itself up to public scrutiny. Creating a panel of clients or users of the partnership’s services and giving them the opportunity to visit partnership activities and meetings and then submit comments about what they see and hear can be a great lever for change and increased effectiveness.

For example, Aberdeen City Council has set up a Citizens’ Panel that can comment on the activities of the City’s Community Partnership. Members of this panel can access any part of the partnership’s activities and they are encouraged to report their findings to the main Partnership Board. In addition, representatives from the Citizen’s Panel attend the Partnership Board meetings, adding even greater transparency and accountability to the partnership’s processes and decision making.

Partnerships also need to be innovative in how they promote their services and encourage the public to contribute their comments. Access to online comment boards and novelties such as online and touch screen voting will capture people’s interest and encourage them to give their opinions. Arranging fun events and activities that showcase a partnership’s work will also encourage people to engage with a partnership and share their views about it. 

In order to go truly public, however, a partnership needs to reach physically into the areas where their work is carried out. Mobile services, information points and outreach staff can act as the spokes radiating from a partnership’s hub, reaching towards and touching the areas where the partnership does its work and gaining people’s comments at first hand.                         

 
For example, an initiative in Fife, Scotland, that wanted to evaluate the effects of regeneration upon health and wellbeing created pairings of local experts and residents. These became the spokes that communicated local views about the effects of regeneration back to the hub of the initiative.



For more about collaboration go to: Sleeping-with-the-Enemy-Achieving-Collaborative-Success-2nd-Edition 

Bite-size pieces: avoid the carousel syndrome

Looking far and wide for potential partners can help you avoid one of the great enemies of creative partnership working: the 'Carousel Syndrome'.

 

This describes the situation where the same old faces turn up to every new partnership initiative set up to deal with a particular set of issues and/or the problems of a locality.

 

This can lead to the same old approaches and ideas being recycled into new contexts.

 

It is true that what has worked before might well work again but, without the energising and transforming contributions of new perspectives, second hand solutions are unlikely to provide completely effective and satisfactory answers to the new challenges faced by new partnerships.

Two ways to avoid the 'Carousel Syndrome' are to:

 

• Create a continually updated database of potential partners and contributors that is always consulted before contacting the usual organisations.

• Hold 'Scouting Meetings' regularly during the life of a partnership to identify and engage with new organisations that may need to become partners in the future.   

From Sleeping with the Enemy - Achieving Collaborative Success:
          
For more details click here.

Good practice in leading partnerships

Here is an interesting report from the Higher Education sector about good practice in leading partnerships:

Getting Smarter

One of the approaches mentioned is my "Nexus" or "Partnership Working Leadership Wheel" model. You can read all about it in my book "Achieving Collaborative Success", which you can download by clicking on my picture to your right. 

Collaboration and music come together - again!

Once again, my twin interests of music and collaboration come together. This time they have fused to create the 'Twtr Symphony'.

To find out about it, and the global collaboration it entails, click here:

http://twtrsymphony.instantencore.com/web/home.aspx