Boots on the ground: the persisting importance of engagement delivered in the community

I may be a director and founder of a digitally-focused engagement consultancy, but you will never convince me (or Rachel) that digital only engagement is the way forward. I am a huge advocate for getting boots on the ground.

By boots on the ground I mean people out in the community delivering face-to-face engagement. Whether at a local shopping centre, library, community group, town hall or anywhere else where there are people you can meet and engage with face-to-face. In my experience, the more time you can spend out in the community listening, the richer and more full your feedback and insight becomes.

However, I also mean out in the digital community delivering engagement too. More on that later…

The survey trap

It is too easy for the success of engagement to measured almost entirely on the number of survey respondents you get. It is a legitimate and important metric. But it is not the only one.

This is rarely the fault of the engagement team. I absolutely know that these teams are out there recommending an audience-led approach to engagement, that focus groups, workshops, participatory budgeting, and co-design are all considered as part of the delivery.

However, it is the survey that is easiest for project leads to understand and quantify. X number of people agreed/disagreed. It is simple: simple to define, simple to quote, simple to talk about.

There is value in a survey, but it should be the background tool, rather than the focus of all communications. It should be there for people for whom it is easy and convenient.

Because the survey really struggles to catch richness. It struggles to capture connectivity, causal and non-causal relationships between actions and outcomes. It almost completely fails to capture emotion, vulnerability, and context.

When your engagement becomes about survey completion rates, the rest of the work is entirely focused on promoting it and very little actual engagement gets done. Great for resources and cost-effectiveness; terrible for outcomes.

Conversations = data

The real value of engagement (as any engagement person will tell you, but some communication professionals and service leaders will take more time to understand) is in the conversation. It is in the absence of serving information, and in the fullness of receiving it. This is not just listening, but witnessing too – seeing the facial expressions, the body language.

Recording all of this is difficult and time-consuming. It is often lost in the notes that are taken, forgotten in the chaos of the sheer number. But down the line it is remembered by the staff member who experienced it. When those same staff members come later to reflect on the engagement and contribute to or write reports, it is those things that they are keen to make sure are included.

The evidence for it is often patchy for the reasons set out above, which makes including it in reports difficult, but it is essential, and therefore when planning your engagement it is worth making sure you have good mechanisms for collecting it so you can defend its use in reports. Because it is this inclusion of the depth and emotion that turns engagement and consultation reports from dry statements of fact, into a true reflection of not only what people said, but what it means to them and how it made them feel.

When real people – as opposed to corporate people and board members – read the report, this is what helps them see themselves included. And everyone who contributed should not only be able to read the report, but also see themselves somewhere in it.

Boots on the digital ground

Can we take the learning and skills from the traditional face-to-face and apply it to the digital spaces? Yes, I absolutely think we can.

All too often, we see digital engagement limited to using social media to advertise a survey or an event. But the whole point of social media is that it creates social spaces for people to interact.

Why aren’t we making more use of that opportunity and maximising our skills as engagement professionals?

This is likely to include many of the same techniques that we use offline: finding relevant communities, groups, pages, or accounts; reaching out to the admins or account holder and trying to build a relationship, or at least permission to join; making sure your assets (your posts in this case) are meaningful and designed to work for that space and group; being available, willing, and equipped to respond to comments and questions.

The latter – the responding, or lack thereof, is one of the most common own goals we see on socials.

If you stopped someone in a shopping centre or hospital lobby to talk to them about the project, you wouldn’t then simply walk away once they had starting talking to you; you wouldn’t ignore any questions or feedback. You would converse with them, listen to what they are saying, reflect that back to them, probe a little, answer questions.

Take all these skills, all this humanity, and add it to your digital engagement approach.

Suddenly, you don’t merely have a shop window on socials, but you have a network, trusted relationships, advisors, communities, and boots on the metaphorical online ground. And the evidence of the conversations are much easier to collect!

This approach can never and should never completely remove the need for the physical boots on the ground: there will for at least a generation to come be people who can’t, won’t, or don’t engage that way, and some of the depth is lost due to the lack of visual and audio cues. But the more you can do online, the more you can focus your face-to-face on the groups that really need it and the more targeted your really resource intensive work can become.

Boots are expensive

Yes, boots on the ground is an expensive use of staff time. It is much cheaper to have staff behind a computer looking a survey responses than it is having them out in the community collecting stories. It is easier to quantify, measure and demonstrate impact too.

However, if you are doing engagement, failing to do conversational work will hugely reduce the actual impact of the work as opposed to the impact you can measure.

The narrative becomes more real, more powerful; the feedback report comes to life. The stories move the commissioners and make them and board members think extra carefully about decisions. All in a way that numbers can’t (except very large or very red numbers).

The people that engaged feel more listened to, they can see their experiences in the documents that are produced, they start to believe more in the process and the outcomes.

Reputations improve, engagement rates improve, services get better.

So whilst boots are expensive, you get what you pay for.

The trick is in doing a proper review before the engagement starts on who you can reach digitally, who will choose the survey, and which groups you need to hear from most and which will need specific outreach. Doing this means that resource is targeted and used effectively.

Open Voice Lab recommendation

OVL is about helping you to make the most out of the digital assets and tools you have, so you can reach as many people as possible that way. This leaves your boots on the ground time free for the audiences you can’t – or are less likely - to reach digitally. It is about time and cost savings. We can help you plan, review your audiences, and maximise your resources. We even have a tool to help you identify which audiences need more targeted intervention and where to put your resources: OVL Targeted Equality Engagement Planner.

Reach out to have a conversation with us about how we can help level up your digital and face-to-face engagement.