Planning engagement

Effective and robust engagement starts with a clear plan. Engagement planning matters because it helps ensure that the right people are involved in the right way, at the right time, to make decisions that truly reflect their needs and experiences.

Here you will find practical tools and guidance to involve people meaningfully and make your planning clearer and more effective

Stages of engagement planning

Engagement planning helps ensure your approach is clear, inclusive, and grounded in trauma-informed, ethical, and safe practice. Key stages include: 

• Define the purpose and scope of engagement and clarify: 
  • why you’re engaging
  • what decisions are being influenced
  • who should be involved
• Assess risks and barriers to participation 
  Identify potential challenges and plan to address them. This might include things like trauma, accessibility, or exclusion. This short animation looks at some common barriers to engagement and ways to deal with them Potential barriers to engagement.
• Align engagement activities with your project goals  
  Have a purpose for engaging and make sure it contributes to your intended outcomes. 
• Choose appropriate engagement methods  
  Select tools and approaches that suit the audience, context, and level of influence needed. Our Participation toolkit provides tools and methods to help you plan engagement.
• Identify who needs to be involved
  Map stakeholders, communities, and individuals whose voices are essential to the process Stakeholder map.
• Ensure inclusivity, equity and diversity
  Design engagement that is: 
  • accessible
  • culturally appropriate
  • inclusive of those who are not often heard or involved
  • our Participation toolkit has an ethical and accessibility checklist
  • find out more about equality and diversity.
• Set realistic timelines
  Allow enough time for meaningful participation, preparation, and follow-up. 
• Clarify roles and responsibilities
  Decide the right level of authority for the engagement and to progress any changes. Determine who is leading the engagement, who is supporting and who is participating.  This ensures coordination and accountability.  
• Build in evaluation from the start
  Plan how you’ll measure the quality, reach, and impact of engagement. This will support learning and improvement. Our participation toolkit has a guide and toolkit to support the evaluation of public involvement and participation in health and care services.
• Secure resources and support
  Ensure you have the time, budget, skills, and organisational backing to deliver effective engagement. 

Engaging with care

When you engage with people, it’s important to do so with care and respect. Make sure your engagement is ethical, trauma-informed, and based on human rights. This means creating safe spaces, being mindful of people’s experiences, and treating everyone fairly. By taking these steps, you help to: 

• Respect and honour the value of lived and living experiences 
• Create trust and build relationships 
• Ensure everyone feels valued and heard  
• Reduce the risk of further harm, trauma or exploitation

Steps for safe and ethical engagement 

To embed safety and respect in your engagement practice, consider the following: 

• National Standards for Community Engagement
  Good practice principles for improvement in community engagement, they describe what high quality and impactful engagement looks like
• Understand trauma and its impact
  Plan processes that are trauma-informed sensitive and empowering.
• Use a human rights-based approach
  People have a right to the highest standard of physical and mental health. Using a human-rights approach to engagement helps protect and promote that right. The PANEL principles (Participation, Accountability, Non-discrimination, Empowerment, and Legality) offer a useful guide for planning ethical inclusive engagement.  
• Create psychologically safe spaces
  Ensure environments are welcoming, accessible, and free from judgment or pressure. 
• Be transparent about purpose and influence
  Explain why engagement is happening. Be clear about the decisions being made, and how people’s input will be used. 
• Offer choice and control  
  Offer choice around how and when people take part. Respect their boundaries.
• Provide support and follow-up
  Offer emotional or practical support where needed. Keep people informed about outcomes and next steps. 
• Reflect and learn  
  Evaluate your approach and seek feedback. This will help improve your practice. 

Tools and resources supporting engagement planning 

• VOiCE: Community Engagement Planning Tool is a free resource developed by the Scottish Community Development Centre. Provides a common approach to planning, monitoring and evaluation that helps design and deliver effective engagement. VOiCE also embeds the National Standards for Community Engagement. 
• Ethical Engagement Cards are a simple tool to plan engagement in a fair and open way. They can help you identify and address ethical issues early on, ensuring inclusive engagement. They are a useful way to make engagement activities inclusive and respectful for everyone involved. 
• Service change resources have been produced to help NHS boards and integration authorities effectively engage with patients, carers and the public in planning and developing services, including the Scottish Government and COSLA national guidance Planning with People which sets out the process that NHS boards and Integrated Joint Boards should follow when they are involving people in decisions about local services.
• The Scottish Approach to Change supports the health and care system to do change well. The Scottish Approach to Change brings together different evidence-based methods and tools for managing quality and change. It can be used as:
  • a framework for managing quality and change at an organisational level
  • a practical approach to delivering discrete change projects at any level
  • the five enablers of quality and change create the conditions that support successful and sustainable improvement. This includes the People-led enabler which takes a people-led approach by inviting people to design and deliver change together.   

Getting started with engagement

Once you have planned your approach, it’s time to put engagement into action. Consider which engagement methods will work best for your audience and goals.  

• Our Participation toolkit provides a range of tools and methods to help you plan, deliver, and evaluate engagement activities. Includes well-established approaches and adaptable techniques for digital and face to face engagement. 
• The Designing person-centred services for housing, social care and health toolkit brings together practical advice, tools, and real-world examples to help design services that meet people’s needs. It show cases approaches for involving people at every stage of engagement, from planning and design to delivery and improvement. 

Other helpful tools and resources