How to create your
engagement brief

About the decision

• – What policy areas/ topics does your decision cover?
• – Why are you looking at these topics now?
• – How is the decision going to be made (i.e. what are your relevant decision making processes / structures)?
• – Is there any significant internal politics around the decision or the topic(s) it covers to be aware of?

About the public engagement

• – Are there any people or teams internally who have strong skills around public engagement or strong relationships with sections of your local communities that it is useful to be aware of?

• – What level of awareness and buy-in, from whom, do you have as of now for doing public engagement to inform this decision? Whose idea was it?

• – Have you recently  asked members of the public or other interested parties what they think about any of the topics covered by this decision? If yes, who did you ask, when and what did they say? What has(n’t) changed as a result?

Are there any key issues that might affect how you want to broach the topic with members of the public or stakeholders? Is there anything that might affect people’s willingness to take part?

Are there any current or recent related initiatives that it’s particularly important to be aware of?  

Is there anyone who may already have asked (some) members of the public about what they think of (some of) the issues you want to look at?

What is it?

On ‘what’ – what decision do you want them to feed in to?

Hard parameters and red lines

• – Is (all of) your decision genuinely open to public input? Are there any parts of it that definitely won’t change regardless of what the public says?
• – If there anything you can’t do, even if members of the public want them? For example, anything around your powers, level of funding available or contracts already signed.
• – What level of influence are you offering the public? For example, are they informing your decision, or making the decision themselves?

What scope would add most value?

• – What level of detail do you want to be able to go into? A broader area in less detail, or a narrower area in more detail?
• – Are there topics, policy areas or aspects of your decision on which public input would be more useful to you?
• For example:
  • Where you feel particularly unsighted on what members of the public think? 
  • That will have a greater impact on members of the public / which already are or could be of particular public concern?
  • Which are more important to your public heath efforts, or where more could be achieved right now? 
• – Are there any particularly thorny issues where you will need to make key trade-offs and would like to understand people’s views? 
• – Can you identify existing public engagement on some of the topics or areas covered by your decision? Has someone else run public engagement that you could draw on?

What is it?

Why do you want to engage members of the public? What do you want to achieve?

Why is it important?

It’s important to be clear on purpose because: 

• – If you know what you want your public engagement to achieve, then you can make sure you achieve it (and if you don’t, you can’t)
• – It informs every other decision you make about how to plan and deliver the engagement

Types of input

Aspirations	what they’d like their area to be like
Ideas	for solutions or projects
Priorities	amongst their ideas, or amongst actions you could take
Preferences	between strategic options, policy options, implementation models
Principles or criteria	that people think should be used to inform a decision
View on a key trade off(s)	around a difficult choice you need to make because of budget constraints
Knowledge, experience, understanding	their views on what is/isn’t working well or a critique of the current situation and/or your plans from their perspective to help identify gaps, potential issues and needs

Members of the public and who you want to reach. For more information, see our recruitment page.

Four broad approaches	Why	Considerations
A representative sample of people	You want to hear from a set of people who together closely reflect the local population	In what way representative?  Demographic, geography and/or attitudes.
A diverse range of people	You want to hear from a diversity of people	In what way diverse?  Demographic, geography, attitudes, and/or experience-based.
Specific groups of people	You want to hear from a specific group(s) of people	Which groups?  Demographic, geography, attitudes, behaviours and/or experience-based.
A self-selecting group	You want the opportunity to take part to be open to everyone	Do you want to make sure any groups in particular take part?

Other ‘interested parties’ you want to reach. These could be decision makers, power holds, partners or experts.

Action	Detail	Who
Buy-in	To help implement or get behind what the participants say; or providing funding or in-kind support.	Partners, advisory group members.
Advice	To provide advice and support on specific elements of the design or subject matter.	Advisory group members.
Reach	To reach your target audience/participants e.g. by hosting events, recruiting participants, co-designing materials or process.	Host, recruiter, partner or collaborator.
Learning	To upskill people in participation and deliberation e.g. through training.	Trainees, facilitators, designers.
Legitimacy	To ensure materials are balanced, accurate and fair.	To ensure materials are balanced, accurate and fair Advisory group members.
Knowledge / skills gaps	To fill knowledge or skills gaps in your design and delivery team e.g. expert speaker.	Advisory group, wider contacts.

Costs

Methods don’t come with fixed costs. The cost is affected by how many people, how many times, for how long (given complexity of topic and inputs you want) and how much are you doing in-house.

The costs of doing the engagement versus costs of not doing the engagement:  not doing the engagement is not a cost-neutral option. 

Direct costs

• – Recruitment costs 
• – Participant incentives and expenses 
• – Participant accessibility costs 
• – Venue (that’s good for who you want to reach) and refreshments 
• – External support or buying internal support
• – Any payment or costs for stakeholders (for example, advisory panel members, speakers, hosts)
• – Photography, video, social media ads and other outreach

Indirect costs

Staff time – even if getting engagement run externally.

Time considerations

Methods don’t come with fixed timescales, but they do take different amounts of time to plan. Usually we advise taking the amount of time you would expect to plan engagement, doubling it and adding a month. 

The fewer of these are applicable, the quicker it is:

• – Developing your engagement brief – getting clear internally on what you want
• – Procurement process
• – Stakeholder liaison or relationship development – this is time-consuming
• – Giving participants and others enough notice – including advisory panel members, people you want to reach out to prospective participants, host of events 
• – Venue availability 
• – Developing materials and/or event plans 
• – Writing up the results
  

Be mindful of staff capacity and when you need the results for them to have genuine influence.