Designing Public Engagements/Mighty team of one

Setting up

Each activity includes instructions and guiding questions, as well as a completed examples based on the following fictional scenario. You may want to write down your own scenario that describes the public engagement issue you or your team are examining.

At this point you'll want to print out the activity pages here so that you can fill in your own information as you move through the workshop activities.

If you are working on a team you could print the activity pages as posters and work together, or you can project these activity pages or the deck onto a wall or dry erase board and use markers and sticky notes to work as a larger group.

Hacks: If you laminate the paper it becomes re-useable with dry erase markers. You could also get a graphically inclined colleague to sketch the activities on a large whiteboard.

Fictional Scenario:

You are an employee of the Fictitious Engagement Department (FED). In the last five years, health studies have revealed potential damaging effects of sugary drinks on human development. This has led lobbying groups to put pressure on the federal government to place a ban on sugary drinks. Based on your minister’s mandate, your team has been asked to propose government intervention on sugary soft drinks to address these health concerns. This may include legislative options.

Public Opinion Research suggests that Canadians hold strong opinions on both the benefits and disadvantages of continuing to sell sugary soft drinks. Media analysis reveals strong interest in Central Ontario, Quebec, and Alberta, with 14 related editorials written this year. Recommendations for any new legislation must be tabled within eighteen months.

Activity 1 - People

Activity 1 helps to identify the People who have a stake in the issue at hand. Consider who has influence and who is affected by the issue. Another term for this activity is stakeholder mapping, although we encourage you to think beyond stakeholders to potential partners, influencers, and people who may not have been engaged in the past.

Instructions

First, make a list of all the people (partners, influencers, affected) who are involved in the issue. Next, use the activity page you printed earlier – sticky notes help you make change if needed - to map all those people onto two axis: influence and affectedness. See the example based on the fictional scenario for help, keeping in mind that you may have many more people involved in your issue than those we have shown in the example.

Completed example of Activity 1, where individual people or groups have been placed into quadrants based on their position along the horizontal axis of affecteness and the vertical axis of influence.

Consider the following questions as you complete Activity 1.

• Who will you have to engage on this issue (e.g. high influencers such as lobbying groups)?
• Who could you empower? (e.g. those who may be highly affected but of low influence)
• With whom might you partner to expand your network?

Image Description: Completed example of Activity 1. People or groups have been written on sticky notes and placed into quadrants based on their position along the horizontal axis of affectedness and the vertical axis of influence. In the top left low-affected high-influence quadrant are Heath Canada and the Grocery Trade Association. In the top right high-affectedness high-influence quadrant are sticky notes for Provincial Governments and Soft Drink Manufacturers. In the bottom right high-affectedness low-influence quadrant are citizens, and the final quadrant of low-affectedness low-influence is empty.