There were a lot of challenges along the journey to develop this engagement, they included:
Creating the conditions for engagement
Significant work with community was needed prior to delivering this engagement. The pre-engagement work took 11 months to deliver including resetting key relationships with partners, Te Pae Whakahou Hapori, key stakeholders and community groups.
Telling a complex engagement story – engaging on multiple plans
The engagement was unique in that we worked to bring all the engagement together, engaging on multiple plans and work programmes through a cohesive journey. This required external support to deliver and significant work to refine key messaging in a way that shared information clearly while ensuring the community voice was highlighted.
Timeframe
We had a short timeframe to develop the engagement (we had roughly 3 months from when the Spatial Plan was approved for release by partners and the community reset was complete to design the engagement). This was due to an upcoming election, which has a period where significant engagement is not allowed to be undertaken.
Data collection, management and analysis
The volume of data was significant, with over 20,000 comments from community being required to be coded. Four team members were used to code the data including two from the community to ensure we got the coding right. This took roughly 3 months to achieve, using Microsoft excel and having participants co-review to get consensus on how items should be coded.
Once this was completed, we worked to use findings to identify themes for each of the plans and initiatives we engaged on so we can further embed them into our work programme.
We also shared these findings across agencies through various cross-agency meetings, data sharing and individual sessions to ensure aspirations were heard.