Community Engagement
Consultation, co-design and in-language facilitation with the communities a policy, service or campaign is meant to serve.
Get a quoteCommunities can tell the difference between being consulted and being informed. Most of them have been on the receiving end of both, and the second one, held in a hall with an English-language slide deck and a question time nobody uses, is what makes the next genuine attempt harder.
Community engagement done properly is slower, costs more and produces information you cannot get any other way. It also builds the relationships that make a future crisis response possible, which is not something you can start building during the crisis.
What we run
- Community consultations in-language, in venues communities already use, facilitated by people from those communities.
- Co-design workshops where community members shape the service or the message rather than react to a finished version of it.
- In-depth interviews with community leaders, elders, settlement workers and the people who hold informal authority.
- Reference and advisory groups convened and supported over the life of a program.
- Feedback loops back to participants, telling them what changed as a result. This is the step almost always skipped and the one that determines whether they come back.
Who facilitates, and why it decides the data
A participant who suspects the facilitator reports to the department gives the answer they think is expected. The same participant, sitting with someone from their own community, speaking their own language, in a venue they already visit, says the thing you actually needed to hear.
Our facilitators are recruited from the communities in scope and briefed on your objectives, not handed a script. Where gender-matched facilitation matters, we match. Where a topic touches trauma, particularly with refugee and asylum seeker participants, the protocols are set before anyone is in the room.
What comes back
A report structured for decisions: what each community said, where communities agreed and where they diverged, what it means for the design of the service or the message, and what specifically to change. Divergence matters as much as consensus, because a single "CALD community" position is almost always an artefact of the method rather than a finding.
Findings feed into multicultural research for testing, and into campaign strategy where engagement is the front end of a program rather than the whole of it.
Common questions
Speak to our teamHow do you reach communities that are hard to engage?
Through organisations that already have the relationship: settlement services, community and religious organisations, in-language media, ethnic community councils and individual leaders. It takes longer than a panel and produces a different room. The people standard recruitment misses, recent arrivals, older residents and those with limited English, are usually the people the engagement is about.
How many sessions do we need?
Enough to hear each community in scope separately, which means the number follows the language plan rather than a research convention. Two sessions per community is a workable minimum for most consultations. One session per community produces a report you should be cautious about quoting.
What do we owe participants afterwards?
A plain-language summary in their language of what you heard and what you did about it. Communities that have been consulted repeatedly without seeing an outcome disengage, and they are right to. Budgeting for the report-back at the start costs very little and is the difference between one engagement and an ongoing relationship.