I bet your organisation has excellent examples of engagement you can point to. 

Every organisation does.

Maybe it was something small like a public mural designed with a group of school children. Something significant like a service redesigned from the ground up. Or excellent participation in your long term strategy and planning. 

But the real challenge is making those good examples the ‘everyday normal’.

How do you build the internal case for engagement so it’s simply ‘The Way We Do Things Around Here’? 

We’ve recently been working on this very challenge with a couple of public sector clients, and we’ve realised there are two main strategies to building the case for engagement in your organisation. 

• Strategy 1: Looking back at the negatives - Focus on the things that go wrong when your engagement is not up to scratch. We’ve written more about that here in our article on the ROI (the risk of ignoring) community participation.

• Strategy 2: Looking forward to a better future - The alternative is to focus on building a compelling story about the future if your organisation embraces community engagement.

In this article, we unpack this second strategy.

8 positive tactics for building the case for engagement

1. Paint a compelling vision that tells a story

Research from The Workshop shows that people are more compelled to change their behaviour for the sake of a positive future vision than they are to avoid a negative future vision.

This may surprise you.

The conventional wisdom in sales, marketing and communications says to focus on the problem. Ramp up the pain until people cannot ignore it any longer and feel compelled to act.

Andrew O’Keeffe, author of Hardwired Humans explains that people are emotionally-driven creatures. You have about 3 to 7 seconds to influence a person’s initial emotional response to any idea or proposal. If they don’t have a positive emotional response to what you share, then their default position is to try to avoid any loss.

This means we humans are excellent at maintaining the status quo.

But The Workshop’s research has found that for complex challenges like climate change, child poverty, the problems are often too vague and distant to compel somebody to act. Or the problems are so large and overwhelming that people feel hopeless; they think they cannot make a difference, so why do anything at all?

This is why we need a powerful positive vision to guide us.

Unfortunately, visionary work is often poorly put into practice.

Consider this example - taken directly from a leading New Zealand organisation.

Our vision is to… “Develop, deploy, and manage a diverse set of scalable and strategic knowledge management tools to serve our customers, improving the possibility of overall satisfaction among our diverse customer profiles.”

Ummmmm…

This vision is vanilla. Too broad. Focused on inputs, not outcomes. Packed with jargon. And it lacks a story or metaphor to hook people’s attention.

A good vision should:

• Speak to a big future change, so people are inspired by it

• Be in plain language, so people can understand it

• Be easy to remember, so people can repeat it.

Below we have a better example from some recent work we did with St John’s Future in Community Health. St John is currently known in New Zealand as the provider of the ambulance. In one sentence, this vision contains a powerful story and a measure for analysing success.

‘Our vision is that by 2031… community health will be how people first interact with St John.’

It doesn’t fully tick all three of the criteria above, but it’s close:

• It speaks to a big future change (for St John staff and volunteers, the intended audience)

• It partly meets the plain language test (elsewhere in their strategy we provided two metaphors for defining what ‘community health’ means)

• It’s easy to remember and repeat.

Developing a clear, aspirational and positive vision is difficult work. At times, you will get frustrated working on this when there are so many immediate problems clamouring for your attention.

But once everybody understands and is excited by your vision for engagement, irrespective of their job, this flows through to their everyday work.

2. Commitment from senior leadership

We believe the key role of senior leadership is to create the conditions for their staff to achieve their organisation’s purpose.

Part of that involves creating the expectation or permission for staff to behave in a certain way.

If you want your organisation to become more engaging, your senior leaders have an important enabling role to play.

What can you do to build the case for engagement with senior leadership?

• Invite them to discuss the current state of engagement in a safe forum (preferably outside their usual meeting room venue)

• Work individually with the CEO and Board Chair to understand their perspectives

• Support senior leaders to discuss the opportunity with their teams 

• Launch a process to develop some engagement principles or an engagement charter that sets out (at a high-level format) your organisation’s commitment to engagement.

3. Prioritise engagement over communications

Does your organisation invest more in communications or engagement?

Many public sector organisations in New Zealand have well-established communications teams. Their role is to promote your organisation’s good work - and reduce the negative impact from day-to-day crises.

But far fewer organisations have well established engagement teams.

If there’s a team of 10 people in the Communications and Engagement team, 9 will be communications advisors and 1 will be the engagement lead.

But we believe that trend will soon be reversing. It’s happening in Australia where teams are now called Engagement and Communications Teams. The change in name indicates a change in priority. Rather than telling your community about the work you’re doing, the priority is to involve them in that work in more accessible and diverse ways. 

4. Make engagement planning easy

One of the keys to building trust is consistency - as we’ve written about in our article ‘Is low trust hamstringing your organisation?’ 

Consistency with your engagement doesn’t mean that you choose one method over all others. Town-hall style events are great… except when they aren’t. And then they’re absolutely terrible. 

Consistency is much more important in how you show up, rather than the methods you choose. This is about the consistency of your principles.

One way to ensure that your people live the same principles is to provide engagement planning tools that encourage your staff to think in certain ways. Rather than hoping that they think about something, you can use a tool like our Engagement Canvas to ensure they do.

The Engagement Canvas is free to download and use, and easy to adapt to your own needs.

5. Create an Engagement Network

Engagement capability does not magically appear through ‘light bulb moments’ during a workshop. It does not instantly form when you write a new engagement strategy.

It is grown, gradually, over time. It’s like a plant that must be watered, fed and put out in the sunlight.

And like a plant, we need to provide the conditions for engagement capability to grow. What is the equivalent of sunlight, water and soil? 

It’s creating space for staff to share what’s working well and what’s been challenging. Then you can identify the underlying factors that are enabling and preventing your desired engagement outcomes.

One way to create space is through an internal engagement network. Every month or so, arrange a lunchtime session, with communication in between to build interest and add value. Somebody might share a project they’ve been working on; it could be a facilitated conversation about the challenges you’re facing; or it might be an inspirational speaker event to hear from an outside expert.

An engagement network doesn’t need to be anything flashy; it simply has to keep engagement front-of-mind for staff who might not typically think of themselves as engagement people.

6. Track engagement effort

One of the challenges for engagement as a practice and a profession is demonstrating value around the boardroom or senior leadership table. Established professions such as legal and accounting are ‘a given’ at the senior leadership level; engagement is still fighting for recognition.

One way to build the case for investment is to demonstrate the engagement effort across the organisation.

One of our clients recently did this and the analysis showed there were 18 live engagement projects across their 300-strong organisation, requiring approximately 6 FTE engagement team members. However, their team consisted of 3 FTE, with only 1.5 FTE actually employed at the time of writing.

Quantifying the effort required versus the staff capacity available can help to convince decision-makers about the need to strengthen their investment in engagement.

7. Introduce your own internal Engagement Awards

You might be wary of introducing awards that celebrate internal achievements when engagement is such a team sport. In that case, create award categories for teams or projects, rather than individuals.

One of our clients, Auckland Council, introduced their engagement awards to create a platform to share new tools, models and resources. After creating a new engagement framework, they changed the awards categories to reflect the new framework. This gives them an excuse to shine a light on the new framework every two years, while also recognising and celebrating staff input.

8. Embrace new digital technologies

Technology has the potential to strengthen engagement by staff across your organisation.

There are four key software types you may wish to implement:

• A community-facing engagement platform (something like Bang The Table or The Hive)

• An internal-facing engagement platform (what some people might call a Customer Relationship Management system or CRM, such as Salesforce, Simply Stakeholders, or Darzin) 

• A video meeting platform, such as Zoom or Teams

• A platform to collaborate on projects and tasks, such as Monday.com, Asana or Clickup.

Some organisations might combine several of these together. Here at Business Lab, for instance, we use Monday.com as our CRM and our collaboration hub, because we’re a small team working closely with our clients.

Is this too overwhelming?

You may feel exhausted just reading about those 8 tactics. There’s a lot to cover. But you don’t have to implement this all at once. In fact, you’d be setting yourself up for disappointment if you even tried.

We recommend listening to our podcast episode with Helen Grant to hear about the gradual journey over her seven years with Auckland Council. The story is one of taking small steps forward everyday - small steps that added up to significant change when she looked back in time with us.