Gatekeepers! - Worth their weight in gold? ……. Or a barrier to progress?

Those who work with community involvement or consultation are familiar with Gatekeepers. They are often worthy, salt-of-the earth types whose hearts are always in the right place, and who are invariably committed to their cause.

It is their names and addresses that are on your databases. They receive the invitation to attend meetings; the envelope containing the Consultation document goes to them. They read the words - Please will your ensure that interested people in your organisation consider the issues raised in this paper and let us know your views …. etc.

For every such request made in 1997, this year there will be three. What was an occasional and interesting diversion is becoming a regular agenda item for thousands of representative or umbrella bodies. Indeed we have passed the point where a response is guaranteed. These days, the first discussion is, Do we bother to participate in this? Only then do consultees start to consider; What do we say? He or she who places this on that agenda, and who administers that debate becomes the gatekeeper. Gatekeepers can be very irritating for consultors. They ask some tricky questions. Why do you want this response? What will you do with it? What is likely to change as a result? and What happened last time? They will promise to try their best to put it on the next agenda, but, given the pressure of other business, can’t promise. If you try to by-pass this stage, and, for example suggest you write to all their members directly, be prepared for an uncompromising refusal. After all, they have no desire to undermine their own position. In exasperation, you conclude that these are power-crazed bureaucrats full of their own importance, and slow to recognise the value of their members’ voices being heard.

Fortunately, there is a more positive angle. People who have to manage umbrella groups and representative bodies almost always have a delicate balancing act to perform. Few groups are uniform in membership, and even fewer are unanimous in their views. Pressure groups may contain aggressive front-runners as well as conservative fellow-travellers. Trade Associations may be a mix of forward-thinking market-leaders and commercial laggards. Reaching consensus without alienating one section or another takes great skill. To rush into ad hoc responses without careful consideration is a great short-cut to internal strife in such groups.

Good gatekeepers recognise the need to handle sensitive consultations with care, but they are also helpful to consultors because they can often informally provide an excellent account of the differing views on a particular debate. If a consultor invests the necessary time to cultivate effective relationships with gatekeepers, then the consulting organisation will be building a corps of trusted contacts who are useful at the pre-consultation stage, where the plans for a forthcoming exercise can be discussed and the best forms of participation considered.

There will be occasions when it is right and necessary to circumvent gatekeepers, but in the same way as it is useful for umbrella groups to understand the way in which consulting organisations think, it will be useful for them, in turn, to recognise the pressures that impinge upon so many of the representative groups with whom we have to work. The by-pass might then be better judged

Trigger points

• Identify key gatekeepers who play a significant role in your stakeholder base.
• Consider the relationships you have with these gatekeepers. Is there a satisfactory understanding of each other’s difficulties?
• Be particularly conscious of their roles with hard-to-reach or seldom-heard groups? Watch out for a forthcoming TCI course on Inclusive Consultation where this issue will be considered in depth.

This is the 76th Tuesday Topic; a full list of subjects covered is available for Institute members and is a valuable resource covering so many aspects of consultation and engagement