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Creating Accessible Community Engagement Strategies
By Olivia Litver
Published On February 20, 2025
One of the most important things when developing community engagement strategies and methodologies is to ensure that they are accessible to all. In fact, we have found that one of the main ingredients in successful engagement is ensuring every voice is heard and valued by the project or business. This will help you mitigate risk while also receiving valuable feedback and building critical community enthusiasm.
By using tools that promote accessibility, you can be confident that you’re engaging with and receiving feedback from the entire community. This also delivers diverse opinions, which will aid in informing your project.
You can tailor your stakeholder engagement to be more accessible through:
Conducting research into your target audiences. By identifying the demographics in your audiences, such as their ages, languages, abilities, genders, etc., you can assess what accessibility issues may arise. The more you know about your community the easier it will be to tailor your engagement strategies to appeal to the entire community.
Investing in universal design principles to ensure that the project and its services and products are accessible to all. This decreases the chance of having to make time-consuming and costly edits and adjustments later down the line.
Addressing the barriers people may face when trying to participate. This can involve working to remove obstacles in the way of engagement by providing services such as ramps, sign-language interpreters, or transport aid.
Providing digital accessibility by ensuring that all digital platforms conform to accessibility standards, such as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). This includes providing alt-text for visual content, such as images and videos, including a text-to-speech function to your website or socials, if not already provided by the browser/platform, ensuring that all content uses accessible colours for visually-impaired/colour-blind audiences, guaranteeing that your website and socials are easily navigable by keyboard.
Accommodating language and other communication barriers. You can achieve this by offering content in multiple languages and access to translations. In these times of easily accessible digital translation tools, there is no excuse to not communicate in languages used by your audiences. Alternatively, this can be achieved through the translation feature on the individual’s web browser, or through your project’s social media platforms/digital community engagement tools and apps.
Representing the diversity of your stakeholders through the use of images, testimonials, and case studies. By highlighting the diverse voices within your community, you can make everyone feel seen and included, which creates a sense of belonging and is likely to increase and broaden participation.
Train and support your team by equipping them with the knowledge and skills needed to ensure accessibility throughout your engagement. Supply training on cultural competency, digital accessibility, and effective methods of communication.
Develop inclusive methods of participation. This can be achieved through offering various ways to engage with your project. Digital platforms may not be accessible to all groups, particularly those you are very young or very old. Alternatives can include in-person drop-in sessions and meetings, phone calls, paper surveys, or hybrid approaches that bring together online and offline engagement. More information on hybrid approaches can be found here: https://www.district.au/article/hybrid-consultations).
By applying these practices to your engagement strategies, you can create meaningful engagement plans that resonate with the entirety of your focus community.
