Are you looking to engage with more white, middle-aged and elderly Australians?
Probably not.
Why? Because they’re heavily over-represented in most community feedback data.
And yet, most engagement projects ignore this problem.
Instead, they put their demographically skewed feedback into a pie chart under the heading What the community told us, knowing full well it’s not representative of the community but rather of the views of a narrow, highly motivated cross-section of the community.
As a community engagement consultant, I was as guilty as anyone of ignoring this problem.
We can do better with the right methodology and tools
And it doesn’t have to involve an expensive market research company.
I created Scopomap to empower engagement professionals so they could add some science to their projects at a fraction of the cost of a social research sub-consultant.
Here’s how Scopomap can help you answer 3 fundamental methodological questions:
1. Who lives in your community?
By getting a demographic snapshot of your community, you can create a benchmark to guide and assess your whole project—from developing your engagement plan to evaluating the success of your engagement program.
2. How will I make sure feedback is representative of the community?
Use Scopomap’s heat maps and the slider function to isolate addresses of the demographic groups you need to hear from, particularly those ‘unheard voices’ (e.g. young people, non-English speakers etc.). Once armed with this information, you can, for example:
- focus your mailouts, doorknocks, or social media on specific street addresses
- recruit people from key demographics to your focus group
- translate information into the right languages.
3. Were you successful in reaching your community?
Once you’ve gathered your feedback, you can assess how representative it is of your community’s demographics or your target demographic. From here, you might decide that further engagement is needed or make recommendations for future engagement.
If you’re looking to add more rigor to your engagement, you can try out Scopomap today with our 7-day trial.
