Toolkit: Community engagement planning

Return to Toolkit homepage

Like any Heritage organisation, a good Local Studies service should be looking to widen and develop its audience, ensuring it remains relevant to the local community. But new audiences are not simply going to arrive at your door and a local studies service needs to plan for active community engagement, often within communities themselves.

Linking projects with your organisations priorities

All community engagement projects should dovetail with your organisation’s business plan and your team’s service plan. Outreach activities contribute to key areas priorities for your local authority, such as:

Well-being – reminiscence and oral history, heritage walks, creative activities inspired by your collections, volunteering, projects with vulnerable adults and young people.
Community identity and stronger communities – initiating community, Local and Family History projects and enabling local people to be involved in developing your projects; or supporting local community groups to apply for funding and manage their own projects.
Working in partnership – delivering projects with communities, organisations, other local authorities; participating in regional and national initiatives such as themed commemorations, digital crowd sourcing, training and CPD.
Educational attainment – projects with schools, youth groups, targeting disadvantaged young people and children in care.
Commercialisation – income generation from community engagement activity either directly in activity fees or as consultants or supportive activity for community projects, i.e. charging for your time. Can projects developing funding bids include budgets for your staff time and resources?
Digital – Apps, delivering e-learning and other activity via video, podcasts and live stream, social media and blogs; developing or supporting community archives. Good examples of community archives can be found on Community Archives and Heritage Group | Supporting and promoting community archives in the UK and Ireland .
Local economy – can you work with or support local industries including start-ups e.g. creative industries / practitioners?
More information about dovetailing local authority and local studies priorities can be found in the Linking with local authorities priorities section of the toolkit.

With limited resources it is not possible to cover all of the above. However, the key actions are:

Articulate a vision for the service. Think about where your service is now and where you want it to be – this will ensure that your community engagement activities help you achieve this.
Be prepared to engage with any opportunities that arise including potential partnerships and funding streams that may become available and fit with your service plan and vision.
Don’t chase the funding for the sake of it, first be sure that it fits with your service plan
Especially for larger authorities, you should create a community engagement plan as this will help you to follow 1, 2 and 3 above.

Nine big questions

There are fundamental questions that you need to answer in order to ensure that your community engagement is a success. If you decide to draft an engagement plan, the answers to these questions should be at its heart.

What is the objective? For example do you want to increase physical or digital footfall, widen participation, tackle social or digital isolation?
What audience are you targeting? Who do you need to consult?
What type of activities would help you engage with your target audience?
Where will it take place?
Who is doing it and who are the potential partners?
How much will it cost, and how will you fund it?
How will you market it? This can be a separate part of your plan.
What are the outcomes and what targets are you setting? Tie this in with your business plan, for example will you increase wellbeing by getting more people engaged in physical or cognitive and creative activity through learning?
How will you know you achieved your objectives and what evaluation will you undertake?

The National Heritage Lottery Fund have some good advice on developing projects and activities that can help you engage communities:

Understanding audiences

When undertaking any community engagement project it is important to know who your target audience is. This will have an impact on the type of activities you design and enable you to be prepared when opportunities present themselves.

Are you looking to enhance the experience of existing users? Though your current users may be a broad audience, it is likely you will have an understanding of their needs. By their very nature non-users are much harder to engage and at first might seem out of reach, but there are some ways to overcome this:

Identify the gaps, for example is it a specific age range or a disadvantaged group or community?
Make contact with local community organisations – these might include groups who are already booking meeting spaces in your library or other buildings. If they visit the building why have they not taken the extra step to use the Local Studies collection?
Be prepared to network within your wider organisation. Colleagues in other teams will have good community contacts and may be aware of and be able to identify different levels of need within a community. For example, during the Covid pandemic various local government services and voluntary organisations identified the issue of digital exclusion that made it harder for some to engage with their community and services during lockdown. Therefore, is it possible to design local studies activities that also provide soft IT skills and promote digital inclusion; and is there a known audience for this activity?

More information on the different audiences that a project can reach can be found in two sections of the toolkit: Who uses a local studies collection and Targeting Audiences.

How can communities engage with your collections?

Once you know who your target audience is and why they might use your service you can begin to design activities that will most likely engage them. Consider using a wide range of entry points and levels of engagement. For example some audiences may not initially feel attracted to an activity that seems too much like learning about local history, but they might be interested in a creative activity such as photography, drawing or creative writing that allows them to respond to historical themes or local studies materials; or perhaps tell their histories through different mediums.

If you are thinking about creating a sizeable community project think about how you might find out what the community may wish to engage with. Try creating a community forum that enables local people to feel they are involved in designing the process and are on a journey with you. This also ensures the community buys in to your activities. No-one wants to be simply presented their history, many local communities like to be involved in the research and creation of it.

There is some useful guidance from the National Archives about talking to your community.

Types of engagement you might consider include:

Talks and workshops – these are mainly aimed at audiences who already have an interest
One-off events – these can be in response to national initiatives e.g. anniversaries or crowd sourcing activity (collecting reminiscences, photographs etc.).
Walks – this might also include a workshop looking at the history of a village in the local studies collection for one session, followed by a walk highlighting what has been learnt the session before; it could be a guided walk or a self-guided walk using either paper or pdf trails or a location aware app.
Family activities – generally children centred and can include open days, creative activities, re-enactments etc.
Creativity – as noted elsewhere, audiences can respond to local studies materials through writing, poetry, photography and art, including drawing, painting and animation. This is especially useful for engaging younger audiences and schools as it will help broaden the curriculum appeal and may tie in with other initiatives such as Arts Award.
Virtual – social media and audience participation; regular series of Tweets on a theme such as local history week, on this day, A-Z etc. Apps are becoming a popular way to deliver activities notably location-aware guided walks. Developing Apps can be expensive, but costs can be reduced if you are able to work with local colleges and universities, or local creative industries.
Crowd sourcing – creating your own local activity such as collecting WW2 memories or memories of a specific notable local events; or participating in national activities for example anniversary celebrations. Good examples have been the Imperial War Museum Peoples War, the recent RAF Museum RAF centenary commemorations and the current People’s Collection run by the National Library of Wales A People’s Story of Wales (peoplescollection.wales)
Creating digital events – as noted above, crowd sourcing events often rely on digital participation, but there are other activities such as virtual tours or exhibitions, podcasts and live streaming. An excellent guide has been created by Charity Digital and the Heritage Alliance: https://charitydigital.org.uk/articles/free-online-guide-introduces-heritage-organisations-to-developing-digital-events
Reminiscence – direct delivery to groups using local studies materials; creation of reminiscence packs for others to use; or work with care providers to provide training and resources to deliver activities.
Creating collections – filling the gaps in your collections is a good way to initiate community engagement. Is there a community or local social or economic activity that is underrepresented in your collections; perhaps it is a period of time e.g. post war; or a particular hard to reach community e.g. BAME audiences. If so, working with the local community will help fill those gaps and it will also ensure wider audiences for your service. There might also be strategic gaps identified within your collection policy. The NLHF created a funding stream (there has been two rounds to date) called Collecting Cultures that assisted archives, museums and libraries to fill such gaps. Look out for future funding opportunities. Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre created a project working with local museums to collect material relating to the creative industries: Creative Wiltshire – An NLHF Collecting Cultures Project to collect and celebrate the best of Wiltshire’s creative talent
Oral history – see separate chapter of toolkit
Volunteers – encouraging volunteering directly enables local people to participate in your service. Volunteering takes several forms, it might be specific tasks carried out by individuals who either have or wish to develop a skill you need; it could be members of a local community helping to organise and deliver specific events or activities; it might be part of a much larger project where the aim is to achieve the widest community engagement and this could include participating, managing and designing activities. It is now widely understood that volunteering also aids well-being. When creating volunteer projects ensure that you have a volunteer policy and agreement forms, which might include recruitment procedures, the obligations of the organisation and volunteers; how you reward and retain volunteers. It is also useful to have a means of evaluation and recording outcomes for volunteers.

Evaluation

Evaluation is worth including in any project as it will help inform and improve future activities. Ideally you will have continuous evaluation of project activities with participant feedback through forms, questionnaires and anecdotal evidence. Think also how participants may more creatively feed into the process, such as holding a workshop or perhaps creating a video. Here is an example of a video created by Creative Wiltshire Collecting Culture – YouTube and also by Melksham Remembers on their work with schools Melksham Remembers – bringing WW1 to life – Bing video