Ku-ring-gai Council – Stakeholder Engagement for the Community Strategic Plan

Overview:

This project focused on seeking updated community input to inform Ku-ring-gai Council’s new Community Strategic Plan (CSP). The CSP is the Council’s long-term strategic plan, setting the community vision for the area for the next 10 years. 

 A range of community engagement techniques were deployed to help Council better understand community sentiment. These activities included a range of stakeholder forums, interactive and engaging pop-ups across the area and online engagement. 

Objective: 

The project’s main goal was to capture the evolving needs, visions, and priorities of the Ku-ring-gai community to ensure they were accurately reflected in the CSP.  

 

Council understood through other engagement that key issues were likely to be balancing urban growth with the preservation of the region’s natural assets, maintaining Ku-ring-gai’s unique character while elevating the existing strong sense of ownership and pride among residents. Engagement was designed to test this and identify other key themes.

Our Role:

  • Identifying and implementing effective engagement tools, such as community forums, pop-ups and online engagement to gather input from people across the local government area. 
  • Creating communication materials to effectively promote the engagement program to ensure maximum reach. 
  • Facilitating five community forum sessions, one business forum and one online Councillor workshop. These sessions provided a platform for stakeholders to share their community aspirations, key issues and challenges.  
  • Conducting telephone interviews to community stakeholders who were unable to attend forums, creating flexible and accessible opportunities for engagement 
  • Developing online engagement channels to effectively communicate materials, encourage accessibility and active participation to community stakeholders. This was achieved through media releases, Council’s online Community engagement portal, social media and business bulletins. 
  • Organising pop-up engagement sessions to encourage active participation from all community members in the planning process. 
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08. Pop-up stalls
05. Community Forums (1)
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Challenges:

  • Accessibility and timing: Some forum attendees expressed scheduling conflicts and availability concerns when wanting to participate in the community forum series.  To combat this, Captivate offered telephone interviews to those who could not attend the forums, ensuring active participation avenues were still available to contribute their insights. 
  • Tailored engagement initiatives: Throughout this engagement process, engagement was tailored to suit all demographics and opinions across the region. This meant tailoring individual and collective activities throughout the forum series, as well as online community stakeholder resources. 

Outcome:

The engagement program successfully collected extensive community feedback through multiple engagement channels. Key outcomes included: 

  •  Informed community: Ku-ring-gai stakeholders were informed and educated about the CSP purpose and process, effectively leading to actionable feedback for the development and implementation of the new CSP. 
  • Confirmation and identification of prevalent community issues and aspirations: Our team tailored engagement activities in an open way to provide community members with opportunities to share their future vision for the area. In many instances this confirmed Council’s existing understanding of community sentiment, however new issues and priorities were also identified through the engagement process. 

 This project fostered a sense of community ownership and pride, enhancing the connection between the Council and the community. It encouraged a collective commitment to preserving local natural assets while carefully balancing urban development, setting the stage for successful future engagement initiatives. 

 

Why Captivate Consulting:

Well-structured strategies and the utilisation of effective communication methods characterise our approach. We take pride in our unwavering commitment to comprehensive outreach and transparent communication, which was vital for this project, making us a trusted partner for projects that demand successful and impactful stakeholder engagement.

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