4C Community Engagement Techniques
4C’s community engagement approach is based on a belief in the capacity of communities to develop their own responses when given the support, tools and language required.
At 4C we use a range of international best practice facilitation tools and techniques to maximise community engagement in the design and end use of community facilities. Key facilitation techniques we propose to use include:
• Storytelling and Vignettes
• Appreciative Inquiry
• World Cafe
• Nominal Group Technique
Storytelling and Vignettes
Against a background of information overload, organisational storytelling brings out community aspirations and communicates key messages in a highly memorable and effective manner. Stories will be gathered during a project to better understand what is important and how this might be embodied in a physical outcome. Storytelling will help to identify the energy, issues, new ideas and strengths of the community. It will also assist with framing subsequent processes. For more information on the storytelling approach in community planning please refer to: www.creatingthe21stcentury.org
Appreciative Inquiry
It can be useful to frame the consultations and World Cafe workshops using the Appreciative Inquiry approach. Appreciative Inquiry focuses on identifying and building on both individual and organisational strengths and capacity. It is our experience that a listening design process that builds on strengths leads to genuine engagement. While maintaining a positive focus, Appreciative Inquiry allows participants to be heard and for key stories and issues to emerge. If people feel they are heard they are highly likely to want to contribute their design ideas. Our experience with the popularity of Appreciative Inquiry with participants makes us highly confident that once engaged, we will be able to maintain a very high participation rate in subsequent planning processes. For more information see: www.appreciativeinquiry.case.edu
World Café
The World Café is a facilitation tool for supporting people to engage by creating conversations that matter. World Café is a group based facilitation process that enables individual ideas to be quickly aggregated into high level design concepts and themes. It has been used with great success by many large and small organisations in the government, private and non profit sectors. It is an effective approach because it builds on community strengths and facilitates genuine dialogue at all levels. 4C has been using the World Café in the
Nominal Group Technique
Nominal Group Technique (NGT) is a technique that assists decision makers to explore community motivations and reasoning and it facilitates all participants to speak in their own time and contribute to the process. NGT is an outstanding process technique to facilitate groups to prioritise key issues. NGT uses a voting technique where participants individually rate their most important items without discussion with the group. After this process concludes, a vigorous group discussion is facilitated to explore the reasons why group members rated various items as they did. For more information: http://www.mycoted.com/Nominal_Group_Technique