Start designing your Public Engagements

Do you need to design or plan a public engagement? The content below and found throughout these links is intended to help anyone designing a public engagement, whether you're a mighty team of one, leading a enthusiastic team through their first public engagement or teaching a workshop to colleagues, we know this planning process and documentation will be useful.

This workshop is aimed at helping you design a public engagement strategy regardless of where you may be in the policy life cycle.

Might team of one

Team learning together

Teaching a community, group or colleagues

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.

How do we know this is useful?

This material was designed for a workshop the 2018 Policy Community Conference in Ottawa, Ontario.

(MB: edit - add general positive feedback information here.)

What am I getting myself into?

This wiki content can serve as an outline for your work, a workshop you can complete with your team or a workshop you can teach a whole community. There is a facilitator's guide, a scenario, methodology definitions (in both table and card formats) and four activities to help you practice and prepare your specific engagement.

How much time will this take?

When we ran this workshop with colleagues at the Policy Conference it took X hours. When we partnered with a department for a branch retreat it took X hours. You can customize the activities, depth of planning, focus and scope for your context. So maybe you only have 3 hours on a busy Wednesday, or two short meetings. There's no harm in trying one or two of the activities, seeing where the process takes you and then evaluating with your team or colleagues if you need more or less time and practice.

If you're planning a meeting, it might be useful to know that Activities 1 through 3 explore the underlying aspects you need to consider before doing public engagement and Activity 4 helps you design your strategy for public engagement.

Activity 1 – People
Activity 2 – Context
Activity 3 – Goals
Activity 4 – Methods

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.

Designing Public Engagements