Community Engagement
This section of the toolkit is focused on activities that will help you with planning how to establish, stabilize, and evolve sustainable community engagement for your program. It is designed to help you structure discussions and gain consensus about next steps for sustainable community engagement for your OSS program. It is not a toolkit for day to day community engagement.
Definition: The Community Engagement facet reflects efforts to facilitate and foster involvement within a community. It is focused on encouraging users to become stakeholders. Those who have a sense of investment and ownership become champions who want the program to grow and succeed. A component of this facet also includes communication and outreach efforts to the community itself as well as the wider world of decision makers, potential users, funding agencies, and others.
Instructions
Brand new to It Takes a Village in Practice? Check out our Getting Started Resources before jumping in!
Review the activities and goals below to select ones you want to use for sustainability planning. These activities are designed to help you move from one phase to the next and can be used in any order. You can use any or all of them. Suggested persona pathways (link to anchor) are outlined at bottom of page, but it is not expected that programs would do all activities.
These activities are currently available for beta testing. As you use them, the ITAViP Co Directors are eager for feedback via ITAV@lyrasis.org
Some beta testers have kindly provided samples of their work with activities. They are included below as available.
Pre-Work (change color) | |||
| These are activities that may be helpful if you haven’t already done strategic planning. | |||
A. Mission / Vision | Goal: To enable program governance to consider and create a Mission and Vision Statement if you do not already have one. Having a Mission and Vision Statement are helpful for many of the ITAV activities. | DOC | |
Phase 1: Getting Beyond Initial Stakeholders | |||
Phase 1 Objectives include: Involving a Wider Group of Stakeholders; Creating an Outreach Committee; and Formulating and Implementing a Communication and Engagement Strategy | |||
1. Who is Your Community? | Goals: Identify community stakeholders; Consider goals for each stakeholder group; Prioritize community stakeholders Examples: stakeholders (list); stakeholders (visual) | DOC | |
2. Creating Personas | Goals: Create explicit personas for community stakeholders; Enable checking future plans against persona goals | DOC | |
3. Planning an Outreach Committee | Goals: Create goals, identify gaps, determine timeline, and create mission/vision for Committee | DOC | |
4. Create Outreach Committee Charter | Goal: Create charter to clarify roles and purpose | DOC | |
5. Stakeholder and Engagement Matching Tool | Goals: Understand the communication needs and preferences of stakeholders; Match stakeholders to engagement tools Example: brainstorming | DOC | |
6. Create Communication and Engagement Plan | Goals: Understand plan components; Fill out and share plan | DOC | |
7. Evaluate Communication Campaign Feedback | Goal: Evaluate implementation; Determine gaps and identify how to improve | DOC | |
Phase 2: Establishing Community Engagement Infrastructure | |||
Phase 2 Objectives include: Setting Up Processes and Infrastructure to Facilitate Engagement; Clear Communication Practices and Policies; Increased Non-Directed Community Activities; Increased Transparency; Dedicated Staffing; Engaging a More Diverse Set of Engaged Participants; and Engaging with New Communities | |||
8. Determine New Forms of Community Engagement | Goals: Determine what kind of engagement is right for your community; Map stakeholder groups to activities you want to support | DOC | |
9. Assessing Non Technical Documentation | Goals: Assess the non-technical documentation for clarity and usefulness | DOC | |
10. Consider Branding and Consistency Issues | Goals: Ensuring your community finds accurate and consistent information across platforms | DOC | |
11. Increased Transparency Checklist | Goals: Understand the current level of transparency; Determine transparency goals | DOC | |
12. Value Proposition for Position Descriptions | Goals: Create value propositions for new program positions
| DOC | |
13. Empowering Community Activities | Goals: Increasing active representatives; Encouraging non-directed community activities | DOC | |
14. We Can, IF... | Goals: Help identify barriers and spark creative solutions Example: Activity snippet | DOC | |
15. Identify Skills Gaps - Speedboat | Goals: Identify skill gaps; Better understand barriers for participation | DOC | |
| 16. Increasing Cultural Sensitivity | Goals: Consider the context and cultural norms; Consider how to adjust engagement to better fit other needs | DOC | |
| 17. Identify Stakeholder Gaps | Goals: Identify gaps in community stakeholders; Improve understanding of barriers | DOC | |
| 18. Expanding Stakeholders; Ansoff's Matrix | Goals: Prioritize potential new audiences and their engagement with program | DOC | |
| 19. Reassessing Engagement Activities | Goal: Identifying activities that need to evolve or be retired; Developing a plan and communicate changes. | DOC | |
Phase 3: Evolving Community Engagement | |||
Phase 3 Objectives include Working Across Communities; Empower the Community Supporting Each Other; and Establish Ways to Continually Evaluate Community Engagement | |||
20. Engaging with New Communities - Nodes | Goal: Identify key influencers in new communities | DOC | |
21. Context Mapping for future Community Engagement | Goals: Consider landscape for community engagement; Anticipate future needs | DOC | |
22. Review and Expand Infrastructure | Goal: Revisit infrastructure to evaluate how it can support non directed community activities | DOC | |
Suggested Pathways
You can use any of the activities in any order but we have designed some suggested pathways based on a few personas:
- Opportunity for change: The community has been building community for a while but you are looking to re-evaluate current styles and forms of engagement and what is necessary to engage new community participants. 8, 13, 16, 17, 18
- Starter Kit: You want to dip your toe into community engagement. Start with 1 and 14
- Structured and Specific: You want to focus on activities with very focused results:
- Unstructured: You want to find a few quick ways to have less structured activities that can lead to practical next steps: 14