Three Steps to Engage With Your Community

Community engagement is not easy and designing effective participation processes makes it more challenging. According to the four tips to improve public participation, now we generalize three simplified steps to engage with your community.

1 Problems

You start from here setting up goals for your engagement project.

Think about why you want to engage with your residents. Are you seeking the ideas and collective input for a new community plan or improving the current plan? Do you know what your residents are thinking about the current community design?  What is the public preference of the green area? A clear and meaningful purpose is a prerequisite for a better design of the engagement project.

2 Techniques

Knowing what you want, now you have stepped into the engagement process.

To know your citizens or community members better, you can communicate with them and ask their opinions. Your residents can share their ideas, fill in surveys or submit issues with map locations using different techniques to engage in your projects.

But if you have nothing, you have to rely on yourself. If you only have one available tool, you use the one. However, with WeSolve, we give you a toolkit that you can decide and choose the best-suited tools for collecting ideas and opinions. We make everything easy.

WeSolve provides the following tools that you can use for creating solutions:

Challenges

When you have a topic to discuss with the community members, you initiate a challenge based on your project purpose. You present the project description on the page with supporting graphs and photos. Remember to describe the problem clearly and ask your citizens’ ideas to have their say. They can also vote for the best ideas.

Surveys

If you want the public to provide feedback or vote for some choices, you can add surveys in your page. Selecting different types of questions to maximize the outcomes is of importance. WeSolve offers you choices like single- or multiple-choice questions and open-ended questions.

Issues

Citizens can report issues that they draw attention to and wish to be solved. The integrated map allows you to get the location of the issue and gather spatial data for analysis.

3 Solutions

In this last stage, you close the feedback loop and decide on the solutions and decisions. Make sure you incorporate their input to real plans and actions and keep participants updated so that they know they can contribute minor but make a great impact.

With WeSolve, every process is simple and you can realize all procedures in our management system. After collecting all the information you want, WeSolve allows you initiating conversations with participants by responding to their submitted ideas and issues, presenting the results from surveys, and updating the status of challenges.

Given the submitted ideas and results from surveys, you can easily select the most voted ideas and opinions to create solutions. As for the issues collected from your community members, it is up to you to solve or reject the issues. Besides, notifying participants with the progress and appreciating their contribution can make your work more sustainable and build deeper trust with them.