Improve public engagement by noticing what you do well

People involved in local government scrutiny want to improve their public engagement work but it’s a challenging aspect of their practice. It was no surprise, therefore, that this was chosen as a workshop topic at last year’s Centre for Public Scrutiny’s annual conference. It was also no surprise that the workshop was well attended by people who felt stuck on this issue and were keen to find out how to make progress.

However, by focussing on ‘what works for you already?’, we learnt about some great examples — even from the people who felt that they weren’t doing much — it turned out, in fact, that they were!

One example from a council was as follows. When asked to give a score about their experience of public engagement they gave it only one out of ten. When then asked if they had ever had a good experience, after some reflection they said yes, once we had a really good meeting about the proposed closure of a health centre. After some careful questions it became clear that this had happened because the issue had been spotted by the team in the local press. Noticing what had worked before led to the idea of scanning the local press for topics that would be of public interest.

Just to give you a flavour, below are ten of the good practices for better public engagement that participants noticed. But remember, the things that are likely to work best for you, in your particular context, might not be the same.

So, the ideas above might have given you some inspiration but why not try this little exercise yourself?

Ask yourself where you are on a scale of zero to ten, where zero is ‘our public engagement is a complete disaster’ and ten is ‘our public engagement is completely wonderful’.

Got a number?

Good.

Now write down ten things you have done to get you to that number, ten things that mean you are not at zero.

See, you do some good things already. Now get out there and do some more.

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