You’re starting a new community outreach program. How can you ensure it’s successful?

Set clear goals and objectives for your outreach effort before you start. Are you looking to verify an existing position, or are you looking for genuine feedback? Are you really open to new ideas, or are you just checking a box for providing the opportunity to provide comment? Have a defined strategy on how to reach your target audience, and set a minimum expectation for participation to feel comfortable with the results. Be ready to adapt your efforts if you don’t get the desired participation or the response you expected.

Everything begins and ends with your purpose. Steven Convey, in his book the 7Habits of highly effective people helps us to begin with the end in mind. That's helps with your vision of what your doing, who you will serve, and program goals. Yes, you need to make sure you use the STAR method mentioned above but you need to have your mission and values outlined first. This will guide your ship as they say, then you can include specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound action items. Lastly, I would say to develop a way to evaluate progress as this is very important.

When the purpose of a thing is not known, success is far from it, because how do you measure your results. Know the purpose of the program, know your why! It will help you create a working guideline.

In my experience ensuring a sucessful community engagement strategy relies on a few things: Identify the purpose of your outreach strategy, who is your target audience, how will you identify who is involved in the community as a trusted and knowledgeable source, how will you engage with the community/key stakeholders, how will you build trust amongst the community participants, what will success look like, how will you support/reward the participants for their time, how will you disseminate the findings/results with the community participants, how will you give credit to those who contributed and acknowledge them, how did you gather the information collected, and how will you support the community after you've received what you need/want?

Be willing to adapt times, places and communication styles to your target audience. Make sure you have identified any stakeholders that may face communication challenges, and have ways to accommodate them to allow for their input. Be wary of relying solely on technology to provide access. If you are using standard questions and responses, make sure to include an open ended question at the end to allow for ideas or concerns that you might not have thought of. Always keep in mind the timing context of your outreach effort, as opinions can change over time—and may even be a goal of your efforts.

Directly ask stakeholder groups to solicit participation in your outreach effort. Assign outreach efforts to target audiences to individuals with direct connections to those groups. Build and maintain credibility with stakeholder groups by sticking to timelines and sharing information and results. Transparency is often the key. Follow up on any actionable feedback in a timely manner.

Build in diverse stakeholders at the beginning of your efforts. All team members should be consistent in their communication style, format, content and schedule across all media. Always be on the lookout for new or unanticipated stakeholders. Team members should have different communication skills and different preferred methods of communicating. Consensus is desirable, but the team should welcome and encourage different points of view.

Have your target audience repeat back your message, and have them confirm their understanding of your position. That doesn’t mean they have to agree with it. Do the same for their feedback to you. Use multiple means of communication to ensure the desired message is being received. Follow up communication may be desirable to ensure the message is still understood at a later time.