Community consultation is now an integral part of any successful project; it has rightly become important to consult communities, but also to ensure that consultation is rigorous, meaningful and inclusive.

We have an extensive toolkit of consultation methodologies, including traditional, tried and tested approaches, and innovative adaptations of these methods to secure participation from groups that don’t normally respond to the standard tactics.

Our toolkit for quantitative research, designed to produce numbers and enable comparison between different groups of people, includes postal surveys, online surveys and self-completion forms. Unlike many other consultancies, we have a specialist associate who is a long-standing expert in survey design and analysis, who can develop a suitable approach for any consultation requirement, design an interesting and rigorous questionnaire, and produce robust analysis and interpretation of the results. We get good response rates to our surveys and response levels of 35% or more on a 12-page postal survey are not exceptional.

On the qualitative side, our toolkit includes focus groups and workshops, with members of the public, or stakeholder interests, or even with elected members. Our skilled facilitators will lead the group through a programme that ensures inclusion of all group members, including the less articulate. We have developed some entertaining – but strongly relevant - group tasks to identify (for example) what people’s priorities are, or what they want to see built into a vision for the future.

We have soundly based approaches to groups that are harder to reach. Young people are a prominent group; usually, they can be engaged but not with traditional approaches. Online surveys through schools have been very successful here, and on the qualitative side we’ve asked young people to give us photograph feedback, have used “peer sessions” where we invite a young person to bring a couple of friends with them, and have also engaged with young people on their own turf.

Usually, our consultation is an integral part of a wider project – such as the projects listed on the parks and green spaces page, most of which involved an extensive consultation process.

Other consultation projects we’ve completed include:

Erewash Borough Council -
Young People’s consultation for the Play Strategy, and stakeholder visioning workshop

South Gloucestershire Council -
Consultation on the future of Kingswood Leisure Centre

Nene Park Trust –
Children’s consultation about new play provision at Ferry Meadows Country Park, Peterborough

London Borough of Harrow –
Under One Sky Festival 2011, Greenspace Survey with members of the public attending festival.