Improving diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is more than just a box-ticking exercise. It’s essential to the success of engaging communities and improving democratic decision-making. However, getting it right means being aware of a wide range of potential barriers, and having a comprehensive engagement strategy in place for overcoming those barriers.
The importance of DEI in community engagement
Effective community engagement can be the difference between citizens who feel they have a say and a stake in the democratic process, and citizens that feel disenfranchised and disaffected. Community engagement is therefore crucial for governments and public bodies to get right.
Community engagement asks citizens, local groups and community organisations to take an active role in decision-making for their area. This involvement may take place through informal gatherings like group meetings, or through more formal channels like consultations with official bodies.
Community engagement has the power to make a big difference to the plans, projects and policy-making process in a given area. It gives local people a voice on the issues that affect them most. When making potentially impactful decisions for a given area – like a Local Plan, for example – it is essential to have local voices at the forefront. Often, communities can raise issues or flag opportunities that would not have otherwise been picked up by decision-makers.
The issue of ensuring diversity, equity and inclusion in consultations
Traditional consultation methods have too often gathered only the views of specific segments of the population. These consultations have found that relatively few respondents are young people, people of colour, or people with disabilities. It is also true that consultations in more disadvantaged areas tend to receive far fewer responses than those run in more affluent areas.
This is a particular issue for facilitators. Often, it is the very populations that are underrepresented that are likely to be most affected by the decisions made as a result of them. It is therefore crucial to the success of a project for those voices to be empowered to contribute during the consultation process.
Understanding and addressing barriers to participation
The first step in creating an inclusive community engagement activity is to understand what the barriers to inclusion are. Only by fully understanding the issues is it possible to design an engagement strategy that addresses them. Some issues are highly specific to the community in question. It is therefore essential that facilitators do their research thoroughly and personalise an engagement strategy to their specific circumstances.
Some common examples of barriers include:
Language barriers and literacy
The most common barrier encountered when engaging communities who don’t commonly participate in consultation processes is language. This could mean:
- They don’t speak or read the language usually used by public bodies. This may be because they have recently moved into the country, or it may be that they are part of an indigenous minority.
- They struggle to understand overly technical language, due to a lack of familiarity with the topic, limited literacy skills or learning difficulties like dyslexia.
- They have a disability that means they can only access information in certain forms. For example, if they have limited vision or hearing.
In each of these cases, it is important to present information in a way that is accessible. This means providing translated versions of documents, ensuring that those documents are written in plain language, and ensuring that any platform used for an engagement activity meets the latest accessibility standards.
Bridging the digital divide
Another issue commonly encountered by facilitators are those who struggle to access digital services. This is particularly common for older adults, who are less likely to have access to a computer or smartphone or may struggle to use one unaided.
Facilitators must always take into account that there are still many people who lack the basic skills to use the internet or technology. They must therefore provide alternative formats for anything that would otherwise take place online, such as paper copies of surveys. Facilitators may also run sessions at local libraries and community centres, where they can offer assistance at accessing these digital services.
Building trust
Many communities do not trust their government or public bodies as a whole. This is particularly true of communities that have suffered discrimination or abuse at the hands of authority figures, such as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community in Australia.
In cases where there are “trust gaps”, it is essential that governments invest time and energy into rebuilding that trust. Otherwise, these communities are likely to avoid engaging entirely, which can lead to citizens missing out on vital services.
Building trust may require facilitators to reach out to specific individuals within the community, like faith leaders, stakeholders or local representatives. It may mean visiting local community groups and personally inviting members of the community to take part in a given activity. Any activity that members of the community do take part in, it is essential to show how their participation made a difference. Transparency builds trust. Most of all, building trust takes time and dedication.
Finding the time
Remember that for many people, time is not an infinite resource. People may work long or unsociable hours or have caring commitments. When planning a community engagement activity, when can be as important as where or how. Make sure to plan around the participants and when they are more likely to be available. If there is a consultation component, it may be more effective to ask one or two questions and get many answers, rather than lots of questions that may lead to less people having the time to fill it out.
Designing inclusive digital community engagement activities
So much of engagement is now done online, particularly public consultations. As discussed above, it is important to accommodate those who may find it difficult to access digital services. However, it is undeniable that for many, the increasing ubiquity of digital engagement platforms for public engagement has made it much easier to get involved.
GovTech has allowed citizens to take part in engagement activities from their own home, with many of them able to be completed in their own time. So how can these platforms be used in a way that is inclusive and accessible?
How digital platforms improve inclusive public participation
Firstly, it is a basic requirement to use a platform that is WCAG 2.2 compliant. This means that it meets the minimum standards to enable people with specific disabilities to access and navigate the platform. Purpose-built engagement platforms like Citizen Space will have this as a standard.
Other accessible features built-in by Citizen Space include:
- Logical and intuitive consultation structures. E.g one question per page, and the ability to use skip logic to remove unnecessary lines of questioning.
- Data validation, which reduces the need for participants to fill out the same information twice.
- Clonable templates, which allows different engagement activities to follow a predictable pattern. This also makes it much easier for facilitators to run repeat consultation activities.
- User-testing, which flags potential accessibility issues early on.
Using geospatial mapping to improve accessibility and inclusion
Geospatial mapping is another useful tool to help citizens participate in engagement activities and share their views. Geospatial data can be used to demonstrate how communities connect with their surroundings, highlight where certain services are located, how people use those services and where barriers to access might exist.
One of the real strengths of geospatial mapping is its ability to bring new voices into engagement activities. The interactive and easily visualised information makes complex data easier to explore and respond to, encouraging participation from people who might not usually get involved. Through participatory mapping tools like Citizen Space Geospatial, residents can add their own insights by pinpointing local issues, sharing experiences and suggesting improvements.
By improving understanding and broadening participation, geospatial mapping helps to promote diversity, and create more inclusive engagement.
Measuring success in DEI engagement
In the past, measuring diversity, equity and inclusion was often largely subjective guesswork. It was therefore difficult to create targets associated with DEI for engagement activities, and could there be deprioritised by facilitators. Now, the existence of digital engagement platforms is changing this for the better.
Digital engagement platforms like Citizen Space allow facilitators to track participants according to any demographic information facilitators choose to gather. Examples include:
- Age.
- Sex and/or gender.
- Location.
- Race and/or ethnicity.
- Immigration status.
- Household income.
The ability to track demographic information in real time has been transformative to engagement. It means that it becomes apparent early in the process if facilitators have been unsuccessful at reaching certain groups and communities. If for example, there is a survey about youth services provision in the area, it is essential facilitators know that young people (or their parents) are taking part.
Demographic tracking means engagement strategies can be adjusted while a consultation or activity is ongoing, showing where more resources need to be used to engage specific communities. This creates consultations that are more diverse and more inclusive, and results that better reflect the wider community.
Citizen Space is the go-to platform for connecting governments, developers, and citizens. If you’d like to learn more about how our software encourages diverse, equitable and inclusive engagement, book a free demo and we’ll walk you through it.
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