Towns Fund: Top tips to engage through delivery

Laura Cunliffe-Hall

Charlotte Jordan

Following on from a TFDP webinar & Q&A session on ‘engagement through delivery’, communications and engagement specialists Laura Cunliffe-Hall and Charlotte Jordan outline their top tips on keeping up momentum during delivery.

Through the Towns Fund programme, 101 Towns are carrying out major regeneration work to transform their communities, and the TFDP is here to help Towns to turn their visions into reality. This is an extremely exciting part of the Towns Fund journey, and maintaining relationships with stakeholders and keeping them informed and engaged will be important as ​you move into construction and delivery of your projects. Find out more on ‘Engagement through Delivery’ by listening back to our webinar.

During the Q&A on ‘Engagement through delivery’, we discussed how Towns can continue to generate excitement and buzz through the future lifecycle of the Towns Fund programme. The following re-occurring themes were identified:

1)    Hosting events in a ‘post-Covid’ world

Every Town is at a different stage in the Towns Fund programme, some are already delivering change and regeneration on the ground. Towns are using blended (online and offline) engagement methods to keep their communities informed and involved.  

• As you move into delivery and directly engage your communities, holding ‘pop up’ events, such as stalls in Town Centres with leaflets and information summarising progress updates, ‘fast facts’, or local interest stories relating to your Town and Towns Fund projects are a fantastic way to stay in touch with your community.

• This shows a visible presence – face time is a powerful indication of your commitment to these projects.

• By holding events outside, or ensuring inside events are ventilated, offer sanitiser and capacity is monitored to avoid overcrowding, demonstrates that engagement and consultation can continue in a ‘post-Covid world’.

Stay tuned for our upcoming guidance on blended engagement coming soon!

2)    Keeping councillors and political representatives updated

• It’s key that internal stakeholders are regularly updated around the progress of your projects.

• Holding council member briefings regularly, getting Town Deal Board members to attend panel and cabinet meetings to discuss projects and answer questions, and providing regular updates through major projects boards are examples of how you can make this happen.

• It’s also important not to ‘over communicate’ and ensure updates are succinct, timely and relevant.

3)    Making the most of social media

•  Social media is an extremely useful tool to communicate progress, provide updates and engage your communities. It helps you to connect with your audiences directly.

• Some Towns use dedicated websites and social media channels for Town Deal projects to spread the word and increase engagement around projects. Social media can thus drive traffic to websites; it helps encourage the viewer to read more on the website.

• Other Towns use central channels to promote projects or utilise relationships with external partners to continue to drive advocacy and generate buzz around project updates.

• We discuss this in more detail in our blog on ‘Making the most of social media’.

4)    Working closely with external partners

• It’s useful to encourage project leads from external organisations to proactively share updates and information surrounding projects with central communications teams working on the Towns Fund.

• However, to ensure this relationship is productive and doesn’t feel overly onerous for partners, it’s important to think about how you can make this time efficient for your external partners.

• This is possible through:

  • Establishing a weekly check-in.

  • Using established project leads meetings with standing agenda items around project updates and communications during delivery.

  • Making partners more visible with project sponsors.

  • Creating toolkits and simple message for social media for partners to share.

By continuing to engage throughout the delivery of your projects and applying these tips, Towns can build and maintain stronger relationships with stakeholders, partners and the wider community. This can also improve people’s active participation ​in projects, building and reflecting upon previous engagement and insights learned from earlier on in the Towns Fund programme.

If you require further assistance, please submit an expert drop-in hour form or speak to your Town coordinator.

You can also check out our Comms and Engagement playbook with links to resources focused on all things engagement, here.