How do you attract participation at in-person dialogue and deliberation events? What works?

See NCDD blog for list of answers: http://ncdd.org/7785

Let's try to come up with a good summary below. You have permission to change things around as you see fit.

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• Diverse planning team
  • We work with a planning team made up of people from each sector relevant to the issue. With this team, we clarify the task, identify who needs to be at the event, work with them to come up with a process design that fits the task and culture, and implement with them an outreach plan based on the networks they are connected to. One element of this always involves direct outreach where people are invited and asked to make commitments to attend. We track commitments to make sure we have all the necessary voices in the room and can fit individuals appropriately into the meeting design. (Oleari)
  • When I facilitate events like this, I usually work with a steering committee. I have them identify not only stakeholder groups they want represented but also individuals they want at the event. They then make personal phone calls. It’s a lot of work, but well worth it. I just did a community forum for a school and city strategic planning project. They often would only get about 10 people showing up at best. We did this on a Saturday morning and got about 40-50 people to show up. (Jacobs)
• Comprehensive stakeholders analysis
  • Hold a brainstorming workshop with the client group or Steering Committee to get a thorough, diverse list of potential stakeholders. We have an interactive workshop exercise for doing this that works well to get people thinking beyond the groups they normally think of. (Hurley)
  • We work with a planning team made up of people from each sector relevant to the issue. With this team, we clarify the task, identify who needs to be at the event, work with them to come up with a process design that fits the task and culture, and implement with them an outreach plan based on the networks they are connected to. One element of this always involves direct outreach where people are invited and asked to make commitments to attend. We track commitments to make sure we have all the necessary voices in the room and can fit individuals appropriately into the meeting design. (Oleari)
  • Have you reached out to leaders in the community, regardless of whether they have “positional legitimacy”? (Penn)
• Appropriate process design
  • We work with a planning team made up of people from each sector relevant to the issue. With this team, we clarify the task, identify who needs to be at the event, work with them to come up with a process design that fits the task and culture, and implement with them an outreach plan based on the networks they are connected to. One element of this always involves direct outreach where people are invited and asked to make commitments to attend. We track commitments to make sure we have all the necessary voices in the room and can fit individuals appropriately into the meeting design. (Oleari)
  • Let people actively participate fairly early in the event; don’t talk at them for too long without giving them time to talk to one another or they will get bored and not want to come back next time (Keidan)
• Strong reason to participate & clear expectation setting
  • The single most important requirement to ensure good turnout is to give people a reason to participate. People have a limited amount of time each day to divy up among family, job, personal time, and other community volunteer efforts. [...] If the subject is less electrifying, organizers need to present a compelling reason for people to attend when using the methods described by earlier posters. People need to be told how what will happen at the meeting will affect their lives, how their voices will be heard, whether or not they will get responses to their comments and questions, and very imortantly, whether or not the plan is to develop an action plan for those who want to go to the next level. (Nelson)
  • ”[G]ive people a reason to participate”! Absolutely correct and it reflects a key to quality dialogue and deliberation: RESPECT. (Kendall)
  • Make participation matter. Give people real power over real decisions. If people feel that their participation won’t have any real impact, why should they bother participating? (Lerner)
  • WIFFIM: What’s in it for me? Is the topic one that’s “live” for the audience you want to attract? Have you engaged potential participants in crafting the questions? (Penn)
  • Tell people clearly and succinctly, in language they can relate to, why attending this event will make a positive difference in their lives (Keidan)
• Powerful framing
  • It did not hurt that the event was a jazz concert that everyone attending could value. In terms of any meeting, I think it underscores the need to phrase the topic as a powerful question that can engage the broadest possible community. Just after Katrina, we were trying to attract a suburban white population to a café with inner city youth at the City School. We got good attendance with the question “Now that we have seen the raw poverty and racism exposed by Katrina, how can we continue to ignore it in our own communities?”. A year later we got the same result with “Why can’t we visit each other’s neighborhoods?” (Simonetti)
• Pre-work and the art of invitation
  • There is so very much to invitation and outreach for a dialogue event. Much may depend on the origin of this event. Is this an event that you / the core planning team thinks should happen – are you the outside catalyst hoping for this to happen – or did the idea of this event naturally arise from the organization / community and their needs and interests? is it your sense of urgency (or need or etc.) or theirs? If so (either way) – is this the time for this event? Do you have time to do thoughtful careful invitation, outreach and relationship-building – even more so if the situation includes people who feel they are in conflict? Can you (as Kenoli says) include a microcosm of the diversity of folks you wish to include – in an invitation team? Have you and they looked at the full system of who this issue touches, affects, impacts? Who can block, support, inform the issue? Who else matters? Is there capacity for this passionate invitation team to work together not once but ongoing to keep meeting, seeing who is coming, who is not coming and how to outreach to the different thinkers that will fuel the diversity and richness of thinking at this event? Does the team have capacity for doing whatever it takes to find out about, outreach to and support people of minority culture or opinion so that they, too, feel as welcome and able to get to this event as the others do? This year I will be hosting another “The Power of Pre-Work” workshop – exploring all the interconnected elements of pre-work (logistics, food and beverage, site use, invitation, registration, documentation design and so on) that can support or lessen the productivity of a face-to-face dialogue event. In part of that workshop we explore invitation. However, as I say – all of the elements, in my opinion – are interconnected. Even your doing what is within your capacity to do regarding the timing of the event, the food and beverage, the form of documentation design, the selection of site, access to and within that site, and so on. And not just saying ‘everyone welcome’ but consciously creating and exploring the text, strategy and true nature of invitation. So perhaps some of you can join me for that workshop – August 8-10 in San Francisco. It is a way for us to come together in person to see and imagine those interconnecting / interrelated parts. More information on that below my signature, if you wish. Here is what I have found: Invitation is about relationship. It is about access and inclusion. It is about different-thinking / differently experienced people coming together to create a stronger (product, strategy, knowledge-sharing conference, shared vision, whatever the dialogue event is about). It is about reaching out to different potential participants in the different ways they can hear about the event. It is about working your ‘butt’ off to do whatever it takes. To me, it is not about posting a website where people can self-register and then they just all show up. It makes such a difference when everyone walking into the room has already interacted with a human who welcomes them, finds out what they need in order to attend, does what it takes to deliver whatever is within that registrar/team’s capacity to do so that that individual has more than words of welcome and invitation, but actions. It makes a difference when the team is not limited by a ‘one size fits all’ method of outreach, but tailors it to ‘who else?’ and ‘how would they best be reached?’ It is not marketing. It is building community. And when they walk in the door – hey, that is only part of the job. So much of the job started long before that.
• Outreach via ambassadors (community leaders)
  • Reach people through existing organizations that they’re connected to. (Hurley)
  • For both in-person and on-line events the new CommunityForumsNetwork.org provides grants to community partners to help improve turnout and participation. Here is a link to the description of their partners grant program (http://www.communityforumsnetwork.org/partners/grants/). This technique to increase participation levels brought us the largest number of participants ever during our last event on the topic of county budget issues. Community partnerships help to increase participation levels… no single organization seems able to simply do it alone… we need each other to help increase outreach and participation for everyone. (Spady)
  • I concur with what others are saying here. The ask is important (why people should attend the event), but who does the ask, is more important. It is most effective when the ask comes from people that are trusted members of the community. This means partnering with the individuals and organizations that are recognized and trusted in the community, and working with them closely enough to ensure that the event does in fact support their own priorities well enough. And often times paying them for their time and effort. (Clark)
  • Establish strong mutually beneficial relationships with community leaders, including faith leaders, and enlist their help in recruiting participants- let them know you want to make sure the entire community, including their part of the community, has a voice in this important process. Ask them to help you determine the best time and place to hold your dialogue, and how best to frame the issue to make it relevant to the people in their community. (Keidan)
• Outreach via personal networks
  • I hear the question as “how to attract participants to anything”. I have run many large group events from meetings to concerts and my experience is that using personal networks is the most effective. You have to personally ask people if they will ask their friends to attend. It seems to be the most effective way to get through the noise. It also means you have to reach out and personally connect to key players who are not usually in your networks if you want to include people from outside your usual suspects and create real diversity in the conversation. I am not sure why this works but I think it has to do with what Kelley calls “vouching” in a network. I think that knowing someone who will be there makes it easier for people to put a value on attending. One example of this I can site is an event at a usually all white church. We used mutual friends to reach out to traditionally black churches and wound up with a very integrated audience. (Simonetti)
  • A series of public forums sponsored by a regional library system proves once again that several personal invitations in different formats (face-to-face, email, postcard, phone conversation) what makes the difference in participation rate. All the usual media announcements and invitations may generate a blip on a person’s radar but few really pay attention. Most of us need the personal invitations that tell us why we ought to pay attention and convince us to take the time to participate. (Alexander)
• Partnering with local libraries
  • I would suggest asking the local public library to co-sponsor. Libraries normally host events and usually have an email list of people who are engaged in the community. We have worked with the Johnson County (KS) Library and the Kansas City (MO) Public Library many times over the years to host deliberative forums, sometimes using original discussion guides produced for the library. We consistently have 25-60 participants for deliberative forums, and more than 120 for some panel discussions on hot topics. You can and should also do outreach to other organizations, but the library’s list usually pulls the greatest number of participants. (Wilding)
• Piggy-backing
  • One strategy we’ve used is to piggy-back on regularly-scheduled meetings of other community organizations and networks. For instance, our company has done community needs assessments for cable system refranchising – a topic that doesn’t generate a lot of interest or participation but one in which there can be a lot at stake for a local community. So we work through other community groups in the area, getting onto the meeting agendas for neighborhood associations, K-12 parent associations, churches, etc. Then we publicize broadly so that others in the community who might not normally go to those meetings are invited to attend. It’s win-win, because it gives us access to the broader community and also serves to inform a broader population about these community organizations. (Diciple)
  • Hold the event at their [meaning community organization] regularly scheduled meeting or event, or at least at some inviting community space and not in a govt building (Keidan)
• Apply full spectrum of traditional and social media
  • One of the most effective and least expensive methods of outreach that I made extensive use of while working for the city of Los Angeles was to hire firms that deliver printed notices door-to-door. I think the cost was about 5 cents per piece, exclusive of the printing expense. (Nelson)
  • Adding on to what has already been said. Depending on the meeting we would also lay the ground work with the media – both traditional and bloggers. All the reasons to attend (as identified in earlier posts) would be up on our website and the media articles would direct them there. If this was one of many meetings or a series of meetings over time we would also use marketing media i.e. existing resources (I worked for a transportation authority – so bus boards, shelter posters, newsletter and more), newspaper ads and inserts, etc. Yes, this does cost money but depending on the decision being made it is our responsibility to ensure that people know what is being decided or worked on, how they can participate and why they should care/or not. (Shaw)
  • Promote the event through many different channels, including Facebook (Keidan)
• Monetary incentives
  • Pay them a small stipend, if possible. This has been shown to reduce no-shows from 50% to nearly 0% at AmericaSpeaks events, and makes it really easy to recruit via Craigslist. (Keidan)
• Provide food
  • Provide food (Keidan)
• Provide child care
  • Provide child care (Keidan)
• Provide entertainment
  • Have some kind of entertainment (e.g. local children’s dance class, local band seeking exposure) that is culturally relevant to the target audience (Keidan)
• Follow-up
  • Collect people’s contact info (email if they have it) (but don’t insist if they are not comfortable sharing) and FOLLOW UP to let them know that their input was heard and had an important influence on the final decision/plan. Otherwise they won’t want to participate the next time because they will feel it was a waste of time. Then keep inviting them to participate in dialogues- don’t make it just a one-off event; sustained dialog efforts work best. Before long people will expect to have a voice in important decisions. (Keidan)
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