Play 2

Align with your Budget and Leadership Support

It is tempting to scope out engagement projects with all of the great new, innovative, and publicly recognizable activities. However, these activities take time and money to be done properly. In the age of technology in transportation and data analysis, we often forget about the amount of time it takes to conduct engagement activities, including travel time to and from events, set up, clean up, staff time on top of the costs of chip clips, table cloths, pens, and posters. 

After reviewing the list of potential available outreach and engagement activities, scope down the list to the activities that fit your available budget. Recommendations in talking with clients and project decision makers is to be as candidate and blunt as possible about what you can do for your budget. Take the principles we often bring to projects to you internal meetings and clients – transparently outline the available options, the restrictions, and clearly identify where the trade-offs are in budget decisions.

During scoping conversations also ask decision makers how important engagement is to the project. If its a roadway project that needs to be rehabilitated and the community is generally in support of updating the roadway, you may not need to do a full scope of engagement activities, or you may need to pivot toward providing more educational material on what are the updated standards and opportunities during the rehabilitation. Gauging leadership support will also help further push any budget conversations, if needed. 

Play 3

Identify Success Metrics

Metrics for success are key to tracking performance and understanding what worked and what didn’t. However, the engagement metrics we regularly use track outreach not necessarily engagement itself, such as tracking views of websites, social media, number of brochures mailed, number of people at a meeting. 

Coming in Summer 2024!

S.T.E.P’s metrics for success. This document will outline a list of metrics, how to set up tracking, and how to track metrics during projects. Initial metrics being further explored are: number of two-way interactions (e.g., phone calls, voicemails, emails), number of changes made to a project due to engagement activities, and the number of new interactions with the project. 

Play 4

Identify Allies and Ambassadors

Getting in the community your project is in as soon as possible is critical to how much engagement you will see on your project. Much of engagement is building trust with community members so that you are not just providing outreach but facilitating meaningful connections. Building trust is hard and will take time; however, there are some key factors that can help, such as having members of the team visit local businesses in the community, not just to talk with business owners, but to experience and use the services the community. This can be grocery shopping, using local print shops, eating at various restaurants, getting a hair cut etc. any thing the team can do to demonstrate that they know the area and have similar experiences. 

Adding allies and project ambassadors to your team already trusted in the community will help you gather feedback much more than you could on your own. Not only will these team members help identify immediate concerns and provide insight into various community member perspectives and experiences, but they will also more easily facilitate meaningful engagement with community members. 

Play 5

Develop Project Stories

Before conducting any engagement or outreach activities, you need to develop a variety of stories about your project. What is the storytelling that makes sense for your project and will connect directly with any community concerns or impacts. These stories will range based on your project and the communities you are in, but will support the identification of how you can bring value to those you wish to engage and which activities may be best suited to support meaningful engagement activities. 

During the story development process, finding ways to connect with the community experience can be foundational in engaging with the community. For example, if you are doing an ADA compliance project in a community but have not walked the sidewalks and experienced the overgrown brush making it hard for those who would use the ADA infrastructure to comfortably get around, you may spend a lot of time during engagement activities hearing about cracked sidewalks and overgrown brush instead of communicating that clearly upfront and ensuring that there are no additional concerns and linking the potential solutions/opportunities to mitigating concerns. 

Stories can and should also be negative, if there are real negative impacts to a community, they should be shared openly and mitigation opportunities or trade-offs should be discussed. The goal of engagement should be to ensure that even if there are those impacted that do not support the project, they understand the need and process.

Coming in Summer 2024!

S.T.E.P use cases outlining how project stories have been used and supported engagement activities. 

Play 6

Identify your Value to Participants

Transportation terminology has a variety of ways to convey that impacted communities have been part of a project. However, outreach and engagement are not interchangeable terms. Understanding and identifying how a project will provide value to both the project and participants outlines whether an activity is outreach or engagement. 

Outreach is one way communication or the project either 1) provides promotional or educational materials or 2) is looking for very specific feedback, such as surveys. Outreach is important to any project and will ensure that public involvement requirements are met. Value to participants can include general knowledge or awareness on the project, raffles for gift cards, and stipends for time. 

Engagement is two way or meaningful communications with communities. Engagement can look like a variety of activities; however, the crux to engagement is both parties providing value. Value during engagement can look like education on technical topics connecting back to community insights and candid conversations during focus groups. 

Additional ways to provide value to community members can include a wide range of activities, such as a project team member taking time out on a Weekend to talk with community members about other projects in their community, agencies supporting community events with pop-up tables, connecting communities with resources (e.g., linking communities with grant opportunities and if possible providing grant writing support, facilitating meetings between agencies and community members, and providing funding for community initiatives among others). 

Play 7

Be Iterative

The most critical piece to engagement is to be iterative, if something doesn’t work don’t keep pushing it. The community clearly needs something else to either build trust with the project team or learn about the project. It will take time and money to pivot, however, it will be worth it if more community members provide meaningful feedback on the project. Not everything will work for each community and until more projects and information are shared among practitioners there will be trail and error in each new community. 

Play 8

Consult the Experts

Experts are anyone who has done an engagement activity before. This can be an intern, a consultant, a planner, an engineer, a community advocate, community member, anyone. As practitioners we often go to conferences and read papers to find new things to bring back to our own work. In engagement, we don’t always go back to those resources to hear lessons learned, failures, and best practices. Before embarking on any new engagement or outreach activity, find someone who has done something similar and ask them about their experiences. 

Play 9

Provide Tables not Seats

We are engrained to provide a seat at the table for everyone. However, in engagement, one seat or a few seats may not provide an environment that is comfortable for everyone to share feedback at the table. A goal to engagement should be to provide comfortable, open environments to hear real feedback from community members and provide them with value. Targeted focus groups or “tables” on specific topics with the right people in the room can provide the most impactful feedback for any project. More tables means more meetings, which can mean more time and money, but also more focused feedback directly impacting the final product. 

Coming in Summer 2024!

S.T.E.P use case from the Cook County Bike Plan, providing candid, targeted focus groups for feedback. 

Play 10

Document your Successes and Failures

When projects end, we tend to just pack up the materials and feedback and move on to the next project. Take the time to close out your project and review how it went. What worked, what didn’t, which community focused on which topics more or less, what community concerns were discussed throughout the project and in which communities, etc. 

More importantly, review what may seem like failures. This Playbook was developed after a failure, the same engagement methodology for two near identical projects in two slightly different communities garnered two very different experiences in engaging with communities on projects. Failures are how we learn and how to iterate to make processes and approaches better. 

Finally, use this Playbook and share your projects! So many transportation, communications, and engagement practitioners are all doing similar activities and trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t, but what is done in Chicago is not too dissimilar to what can be done in Baltimore, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Dallas, or Kansas City. Let’s help each other not recreate the wheel each time and learn from our wins and lessons learned. 

Coming in Summer 2024!

S.T.E.P Project Reflection Template