Best practice advice over the past few weeks has been around continuous engagement, why you might consider implementing such a strategy and what it might look like. This week, we will round up this particular series on continuous engagement to by helping you to understand whether you are suited to this strategy.

• Objectives: It is important that your objectives are not just the immediate ones. They need to be continuous, covering the present, the medium and the longer term. So, you must be looking strategically at review and improvement for the foreseeable future.
• Values: You should establish your ‘values’. You might call them ‘value drivers’, values that you are going to embrace and work to for the foreseeable future. They need to be agreed with your public and stakeholders and might change along the way in agreement with them.
• Measuring success: You need to decide how success will be measured. Ideally, in agreement with your public and stakeholders, but at the very least, you need them to buy into those measurements. Evaluating the success of your strategy will enable you to assess what has been achieved so far and what you can do to improve future practice.
• Transparency: You must be prepared to be transparent about the success of the strategy. Being honest and clear about what is and is not working within the strategy will allow the public to understand the challenges and search for solutions to improve.
• Open mind: Continuous engagement is embedded in an open approach to policymaking. You should have an open mind, both in what you will listen to but also realise that you and those within your organisation, including your ‘experts’, do not always know best. Policymakers often struggle to differentiate their own experiences from those of the public they serve.

1:400 of the population has the capability to meet the Mensa definition of ‘genius’. Many people think in different ways, conducive to problem-solving or think in ways that generate original ideas. By listening to these diverse views and innovative ideas, policymakers are able to understand future needs and find solutions to complex public issues.

Remember: your strategy is unlikely to work if you are the sole decision-maker. The Public will lose interest if they have no real influence.

• Capabilities: It is also important to consider your capabilities for engaging numbers of people. There is no point opening lots of channels for discussion and exploration, promoting the opportunity, then find you cannot handle the response level. That will only disillusion participants and lead to accusations of not listening.

So careful consideration of who you need to engage, the channels you use and how you promote the opportunity is important. But you also need to be sure that you cannot be accused of excluding people. So, your mediums for inclusion are also important, as is how contact is managed.

The Institute has been working with partners since 2015, helping them develop their thinking in moving to a continuous engagement model that suits them. Why not get in touch to talk to us about what your ambitions are for a more continuous approach.