A community engagement plan sets out how a planning project will involve the community, from the first invitation to the final results.
None of the guides we found were tailored for consultant-led community engagement in a planning project. They give little thought to deliverables, project-specific goals and timelines, and offer no guidance on planning the step between engagement activities and reporting the results. When analysis is an afterthought, results get lost, cherry-picked or oversimplified.
Of the guides we reviewed, we drew most on the Effective Community Engagement Workbook. Its methods from 2004 are a bit dated, but the thought process is evergreen — and incredibly thorough at 180+ pages.
In this guide:
- Four steps from project brief to finished plan: know the project, set engagement goals, match methods, and put it all together
- A worked example in boxes labeled “Community engagement plan example”: the fictional Pin Peak Neighborhood Park shows what you write at each step
- Real examples in boxes labeled “In practice”: planning projects that faced the same step, and what the team did
- A free template that follows the four steps and lays out your engagement, analysis, and communication activities on one project timeline
What is a community engagement plan?
Community engagement is the process of involving a community in decision-making, including planning decisions. For more on this, see three types of community engagement in urban planning.
The community engagement plan sets out how you'll do that on a specific project. It lists the outreach, participation, and analysis steps you'll take; the activities and methods you'll use; and the logistics of timing, staffing and costs. It covers the whole planning process, not a single event. The plan may begin as part of a project proposal, but it lives on as a working document that adapts as the project moves forward.
How to prepare a community engagement plan
Four steps take you from the project brief to a finished plan. Steps 1 and 2 set the foundation: the project and your engagement goals. Step 3 matches methods to those goals. Step 4 fits everything into the budget and timeline. A fictional example, the Pin Peak Neighborhood Park plan, illustrates how each step plays out.
Step 1. Know the project
Start with the planning project itself. Answer these questions to ground your engagement plan:
- What are the project's goals? What does the project need to deliver, for the community and for decision-makers?
- What's the scope for engagement? Consider the project scope (geographic or otherwise), which decisions have already been made, and which decisions are open for community input.
- Who's the community? Consider everyone who lives, works, visits or owns property in the area, even if they're only indirectly affected.
- What's the engagement budget? It may be a given budget or something you'll propose.
- What's the project timeline? List any deadlines, milestones and deliverables.
Step 2. Set project-specific engagement goals
What are project-specific engagement goals?
Engagement goals define success for your engagement work. They differ from the broad, long-term goals a client may hold, such as the engagement metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) a public agency tracks across many projects. Project-specific goals are narrower. They spell out what engagement must deliver for this plan, and give you something to report against at the end. The two should still connect: each project is a chance to move the agency's long-term goals forward.
Do engagement goals need to be countable metrics?
Goals should be measurable, but they don't all need to be countable. In fact, a common mistake is counting only the number of participants. Granted, participant count is valuable for measuring statistical significance in random sampling, if that applies to your project. It can also tell a public agency whether it's nurturing a culture of engagement over time. But that long-term culture of engagement requires that your here-and-now project puts the community's knowledge to meaningful use. Not exactly a countable metric, but certainly measurable.
One measure of success is whether community input has filled your knowledge gaps or tested your assumptions. Another is who you heard from. If the agency wants to hear from more diverse voices over time, translate that into this project. Name the groups you most need to hear from, especially those under-engaged in the past, and set a goal for reaching them. Each project that does this well builds the longer-term culture of participation.
Most likely, not every topic will be for the entire community. If something in a project affects certain groups more, plan to give those community members more influence and deeper engagement on that topic.
| What questions or topics? | What level of engagement? | Who in the community? |
|---|---|---|
| Community perspectives, concerns, preferences, feedback | Invite input | Anyone potentially affected by the project, even indirectly (broadest) |
| Choices, trade-offs | Explore together | ↓ |
| Solutions, alternatives, planning or design criteria | Shape together | ↓ |
| Decisions on some or all of the final plan | Decide together | Anyone deeply and directly affected (narrowest) |
Write each goal in this form: [level of engagement] on [topic] with [who]. And as you list these out, keep them grounded in what you established in Step 1:
- Project goals: Will you understand the community's needs, concerns, ideas, preferences, feedback, and level of support well enough to achieve the project's goals?
- Project scope: Do you respect the community's time and effort by engaging only in ways that can influence the project?
- The community: Does your plan engage everyone you listed earlier? Does it offer greater influence to community members who are more affected by the project?
- Timeline: If you have a multi-phase project, break your goals down by phase or deliverable.
And leave some wiggle room. You never know when a highly affected group wasn't on your radar at first, or a topic turns out to be surprisingly contentious and needs extra attention.
- Invite input on current and desired park uses with the whole neighborhood, aiming for responses from every block around the park.
- Shape playground design alternatives together with families with children and elementary school stakeholders.
The free template follows these four steps.
Step 3. Match methods to your needs and goals
A holistic engagement plan describes how you'll engage the community, analyze the results, and communicate with the public before, during, and after. On a first pass through these steps, your top picks might exceed the budget or timeline in step 4, so iterate until you find the right balance.
3.1 Engagement methods and tools
Plan engagement activities that support your goals. Activities must get you the knowledge and insight you need, and reach your target community members.
Plan methods that match your goals. Look at the questions you're asking and the conversations you're facilitating. Check your list from Step 2 and match each goal to a method or activity, such as those listed in the below table:
| What level of engagement? | What questions or topics? | Example methods or activities |
|---|---|---|
| Invite input | Community perspectives, concerns, preferences, feedback | Open comments, community mapping, selecting or ranking options |
| Explore together | Choices, trade-offs | Budgeting games, resource allocation activities, and solution-oriented activities framed within the project’s planning constraints |
| Shape together | Solutions, alternatives, planning or design criteria | Idea boards, crowdsourcing, co-design activities, design charrettes |
| Decide together | Decisions on some or all of the final plan | Participatory budgeting |
With a sprinkle of creativity, most engagement methods can get in-depth knowledge with analog or digital tools; in person, hybrid, or remote; in groups or independently. It will however affect who you'll reach, so keep that in mind when you choose.
Plan touchpoints in formats that suit each community group. Go through the list of community groups from Step 2. Brainstorm where you'd find each group, and what's motivating and low-threshold for them. This varies widely from one group to the next. List your criteria, such as language options, degree of privacy or anonymity, or how long the activity should take. And remember that accessibility should be part of any engagement.
Map-based methods work best when the question is about where. Our guide to community mapping for planning covers how to run them.
3.2 Analyzing and using results
Analysis is where results are often cherry-picked, fragmented, lost, or oversimplified. But well-planned analysis turns results into shareable knowledge that shows community impact.
Large or in-depth engagement calls for digital input
Engaging a large population, or running in-depth activities with many data points, produces larger, richer, and more complex results to analyze. If this aligns with your engagement goals, plan for it. Review how your chosen methods, including face-to-face methods, could collect input digitally or be digitized afterward.
There's no need to shy away from broad, complex results these days. You can even analyze thousands of open-ended comments with methodical AI analysis.
Analyze place-based results spatially
Planning projects usually engage the community on several place-based topics. Spatial analysis of those results lets you show maps, plans or diagrams of community members' contributions. It ties community input closely into your spatial planning work.
Plan which formats work for your process. Place-based knowledge can come in nonspatial formats (names of parks, streets or buildings) or spatial formats (points, lines or areas on a map). It can also be digital (coordinates) or analog (pushpins).
If your workflow centers on digital spatial data, for example in GIS, use engagement tools that collect input in that format, or plan how you'll transcribe it.
Keep your results (who, what and where) together
When your engagement targets certain community members, plan to report on how they engaged. Counting target-group participants is only a first step. Analyze what insights came from target groups, how they differed from the average, and how they could affect the plan.
This requires integrated results: participant data, comments, concerns and locations, all tied together in one place. That's trickier with “free-range” events like open houses, or when you split your activities across different tools. Consider how you'll integrate your data afterward, or whether one platform suits all your activities.
Use a table like this one (it's also in the template):
| Who in the community? | What questions or topics? | Engagement method or activity | Tools, process for analyzing and using results |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pin Peak Neighborhood Park families with children, school | Playground preferences and locations | Park pop-ups with tablets, online survey | One map-based engagement platform; compare by group, map by location |
For what this looks like with thousands of map comments using Maptionnaire, see how to turn map pins into defensible findings.
Planning to analyze thousands of map comments? Book a demo to see how filtering and AI tagging work on them.
3.3 Communicating, reaching out and closing the loop
Communication alone isn't engagement, but it's the lifeblood of the engagement process. It includes actively inviting people to engage, following up with initial or final results, and offering an ongoing source of information, usually a project webpage.
- What to share. Project basics (goals, schedule, process, scope), engagement opportunities, engagement results at each step (what we heard, what changed), contacts and resources.
- When to share it. Share project basics, resources and contact information throughout the process. Share results at each milestone as they come in. Announce new opportunities to engage well before each activity.
- Who's responsible. If you don't have an in-house communications or marketing team, specify how project partners, community champions or a subconsultant can help spread the word.
- How to share. Choose channels that reach each group, such as a project webpage, newsletters, social media, mailers, and signs and flyers at local libraries, community centers, and businesses. Share results through short reports, dashboards, or maps.
| What to share? | When to share? | Who's responsible? | How to share? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pin Peak Neighborhood Park: pop-up dates | Two weeks before each pop-up | School office, city parks team | School newsletter, park signs, project page |
Step 4. Put it all together
Now bring your engagement, analysis, and communication activities within the limits of the project budget and timeline. This may take a couple of iterations and mean revisiting earlier ideas.
- Note each activity's cost and staff time, and compare the total with your budget. Consider that multiple engagement activities can happen within the same event or survey.
- Does it fit the timeline and its fixed milestones? Some activities can run in parallel.
- Does it reach the groups from Step 2 at the levels you chose?
- Does every activity have someone responsible?
How detailed should your plan be?
At proposal stage, the plan shows the client you've thought engagement through. Cover your understanding of the project, your engagement goals, the main methods for each phase, and how you'll analyze and report results. For more on preparing proposals, see our Planner's Guide to Winning Community-Driven Proposals.
After notice to proceed, use your plan as a working document. Add the specifics: dates, locations, owners, detailed costs, and the exact questions you'll ask.
FAQ
What is a public participation plan? Usually another name for a community engagement plan. The term is common in transportation planning and among public agencies. The contents are largely the same: who you'll involve, how, when, and how you'll use what you hear.
Who writes a community engagement plan? The public agency, its planning consultant, or often both. Consultants frequently draft the plan in a proposal or scope of work, then refine it with the client once the project starts. Planners who help write the plan are better placed to use the results.
How long should a community engagement plan be? Long enough to guide the work. A proposal-stage plan can fit on a page or two. A full plan for a large, multi-phase project can run much longer.
What's the difference between a stakeholder engagement plan and a community engagement plan? A stakeholder engagement plan is narrower. Stakeholders are usually select groups, such as decision-makers, interest groups, and community leaders. A community engagement plan includes them, but also reaches anyone with a legitimate interest in the area being planned.
Download the community engagement plan template
Put this guide into practice. Our free, fillable template follows the four steps above and lays out your engagement, analysis, and communication activities on one project timeline.
- Know the project: its goals, engagement scope, community, budget and timeline
- Set project-specific engagement goals you can report against at the end
- Match methods to your goals, and plan how you'll analyze results and communicate with the public
- Put it all together within the project budget and timeline
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