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Section A:

Planning your consultation

This section aims to give you assistance in effectively planning your consultation, as there are many things to consider before deciding on an appropriate technique. First you need to consider what you are doing and why you are doing it. Once you have established the objectives for your consultation, the remaining sections of this guide will give you assistance in choosing the appropriate level, mechanism, and method for your consultation.

Planning Your Consultation /Involvement

There are a number of issues that need to be considered before you undertake a consultation exercise, these are outlined below. By thinking about these issues before you start you are likely to save yourself a lot of time and effort.

A good idea before you start is to write out a plan of the consultation. Producing a written plan to identify what needs to happen when and who will do it, will make your consultation run more smoothly. Typically a plan will include the following information.

These issues are now considered in more detail

Background

It is important to understand why the consultation is required. This may
help you gain commitment for your activity and may also influence the approach
you take. Some influences may be:

• A local community
• Legislation
• Elected Members
• Service Needs
• Council Policy
• Partner Agencies

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Objectives

If you understand why the consultation is necessary then you should be able to
construct clear aims and objectives for it. This in turn will help you to select the
appropriate method for your exercise.

There are a number of key points that you should consider in clarifying
your objectives.

• Clarify which step on the Bradford Participation Tool you wish to pursue (See Section B of this guide). This will direct you towards the more appropriate methods.
  
• Clarify why you want the information you are planning to collect and what you are trying to achieve.
  
• Consider how the results of your consultation exercise will be linked to the decision making process.
  
• Contact the Community Involvement Advisory Group, your purpose may be influenced by other planned consultation exercises? You may need to consider slightly adapting your purpose to fit in with other planned consultations, rather than two similar exercises taking place at the same time. Constantly consulting the same people causes confusion and leads to poor response rates and a lack of confidence in those carrying out consultation.
  

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Who To Consult

It is important that you are clear about whom you wish to consult, as this will ensure that your exercise is well focused. Who you wish to consult with will also affect the method you eventually choose to use. There are a number of groups that you may potentially wish to consult with. Examples of these are set out below.

Users of your service
One group of people you are likely to want to consult with, particularly as part of the Best Value process, are the users of your service. For some services this will be fairly small groups of people for others it will be virtually the whole population of the District.

Non-users of your service
There are many non-users of your service who you may wish to consult with, eg those who have stopped using your service, those that you have denied a service to, those who have not heard about your service, those who you regulate or enforce against (for example those whose kitchens you may have inspected or whose child you may have taken into care), those who may benefit from a service without directly using it (for example, local businesses benefit from the education system). As part of determining Best Value, you need to consider all of those who are affected by your service, rather than just those who directly use or receive it.

Local People
You may want to consult with a sample of all residents either District wide or within a smaller community.

Communities of Interest
This term usually refers to people who share particular identity or interest e.g. ethnic groups living in an area. This is an important term because many socially excluded or marginalised people are part of a community of interest. They may not actually be involved in a group or network, but can be called – or call themselves – a community of interest because of a common identity, for example people with disabilities. Some communities of interest are not organised or visible at a local neighbourhood level, eg deaf people may be small in numbers in a particular area, but have very specific experiences and views. It should not be assumed that communities of interest, such as disabled people or Muslim women, only have something to contribute on issues relating specifically to their disability or race. Detailed advice is given in Section E of this manual about contacting socially excluded and harder to reach groups of people.

Both the Bradford District Community Strategy and the Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy make a commitment to engaging with Communities of Interest. Work is going on to develop a process which means that people with a disability, African and African Caribbean people and lesbian and gay people can develop for themselves plans which set out the key issues affecting their community and the kind of services and action they need in respect of all of the main strategic planning areas - housing, environment, community safety, leisure and culture, health and social care etc. The process is in the early stages of development, but the plans from individual communities and managers and service planners can use the summary plans that will be produced around the 7 Key themes. They will flag up priority issues and areas, which may require further consultation. For more information, contact Pat Fairfax, CDPU Ext. 4994

Community Groups
This term usually refers to small-scale locally based groups that are primarily run by their own members. A tenants association is a good example. These can include activity, sports, interest and leisure groups, self-help and campaign groups, as well as locally run groups that provide local services e.g. a management committee of a community centre.

Voluntary Organisations
They are organisations whose activities are carried out not for profit but which are not public or local authorities and which are not led by local residents. They may or may not use volunteer help. At neighbourhood level they may take the form of locally based projects.

Schools
Schools are a special category in their own right, although with local management are increasing similar to voluntary sector organisations. They are obviously key hubs of activity and involvement in any area.

Agencies
You may want to consult with other Agencies such as the Health Authority, Primary Care Trust, Police, Probation, Skills and Learning Council, further education colleges, etc. Many of these will be involved in service provision to a community. Don’t forget to include other Council departments.

Partnerships
These may be area based regeneration partners or partnerships between agencies working in a geographical area or a particular theme e.g. the Early Years Partnership.

Businesses
Businesses and business organisations have an important role to play in the local community and should not be overlooked.

Front-line staff
Don’t forget to involve your own staff as part of a consultation. They probably know more about the service and its problems than anyone, so listen to what they have to say.

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Your Target Population

For many of the more formal research techniques you need to know the characteristics of your community to design a sampling method that will give you reliable results. Even if you are not using research methods it is often worth knowing as much about your target population as possible so that you can ensure that your consultation is relevant to them. The Research & Consultation Service will be able to give you some assistance in identifying the characteristics of small geographical areas.

Once you have got information about the characteristics of the population you will need to consider how best to reach the people you want to target

Language      Do you need to provide information in community languages or in different formats? Do you have access to people who can speak community languages or sign language? Do questionnaires need providing in different languages, in large print, in Braille, on tape? The Council’s Access to Print Unit will be able to help with producing large print, Braille, or tape versions of any consultation materials.

Access      If you are using a building to hold a consultation event, does it have access for disabled people? Do signs need to be in a number of different languages? Is the building “neutral” or may it put off certain sections of the community? Would it be helpful or even essential to hold women only meetings?

Availability      Will people be available at the time of day that you want to hold your consultation? Working people may find it difficult to attend meetings during the day. Older people or women may be reluctant to go to an event after dark. Make sure your event does not conflict with other major events such as religious festivals, home football/rugby matches. If you are wanting to engage the Muslim community you should avoid holding consultation events just before Eid, and would be best advised to avoid the Ramadan period altogether.

Payment      or some consultation methods you will need to consider paying people a small incentive to take part, this is particularly important to encourage non-activists to participate.

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Time scales

If you have a deadline to meet, you need to work backwards from that. Is it feasible to carry out a meaningful consultation in the time you have available? If not, don’t do it. If you are thinking about using one of the existing consultation mechanisms, you need to make sure that your timescale fit in. Details of how to find this out are given in Section C of this manual.

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Resources

You need to establish what resources are available for your consultation exercise. Do you have any money for it? If not your ability to carry out a meaningful consultation is fairly limited. How much staff time do you have available to carry out your consultation, and what skills do they have? If you need skills that you don’t have then there are a number of people with expertise in different aspects of consultation and participation who are listed in Sections C and D of this manual.

You need to make sure that before undertaking consultation exercises you have access to the necessary skills. There is little point in carrying out a consultation exercise unless it is designed in such a way that the results are valid. Indeed, poorly designed or executed consultation exercises can be harmful if decisions are then made on the basis of misleading results. The precise nature of the skills you require will be dependent on the method you need to use, but it is particularly important to have skilled staff available if you are intending to carry out consultation using quantitative research methods such as surveys.

If staff undertaking this sort of consultation lack appropriate knowledge and skills, they may inadvertently make the kind of mistakes that will undermine the credibility of the results. Common problems include:

• using a method that is not appropriate to the topic for consultation;
  
• designing surveys in ways that do not address all the relevant questions;
  
• phrasing questions in ways that are likely to skew the answers given;
  
• using a sample that is too small to give reliable results; and
  
• using samples for surveys that do not accurately reflect the make up of the population (or of service users).
  

It is equally important to analyse the results properly. If you are carrying out surveys you need to have appropriate computer software to analyse the data. You also need to involve staff who have a good understanding of the margins of error relating to survey results, and should be able to explain their significance to non-specialists. When results are presented to Members or senior managers it is important that they are given sound advice about how to interpret them.

There are a number of people within the Council who have the expertise to assist with designing and analysing these sorts of consultation exercises. They are listed in Section D of this guide. Alternatively you may wish to consider using external consultants to carry out some aspects of the work for you. Details of how to do go about commissioning research are set out later in this section.

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Choosing a Method

Once you have clarified the above issues you can begin to consider the way you are going to carry it out. A range of existing consultation mechanisms are set out in Section C and a number of other methods are outlined in Section D.

When choosing your method you may want to talk about appropriate methods to those with expertise listed in Section C and to the Council’s Community Involvement Advisory Group. If you plan to use one of the Council’s existing consultation mechanisms you MUST talk to the responsible person. For example, if you want to have your issue discussed at a Neighbourhood Forum, you must speak to the appropriate Area Coordinator to plan your consultation and to ensure that the timetable of meetings fits in with the timescale of your consultation.

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Results and Feedback

Consultation is not something that should be done for the sake of it. You need to make sure that there is a clear mechanism for feeding the results of your consultation into the decision making process.

It is equally important that you think about, how you will let those who participated in the consultation exercise know about the results. If you carry out consultation and participants never find out any further information, they are likely to assume that their input had no effect and so are less likely to participate in future. When you are identifying resources for the project, those needed to feedback information should be included. Participants are likely to be interested not only in the results, but more importantly what changes have been made in policy and / or service delivery as a result of the consultation.

Consultation is a dialogue between local people and the Council, and the quality of that dialogue will have an impact on how the council is perceived. It is important to remember that there are many factors that influence policy in addition to the results of consultation, and this needs to be built into the dialogue so that there is shared knowledge and understanding of this context.

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Evaluation

Evaluating the effectiveness of your consultation is vital, and should not be left to the end of the process. It will be much easier to do if you have included it in your initial planning. An evaluation does not need to be complex, if you have planned properly, identified what your success and failure criteria are and how you are going to measure them, then the evaluation process should be reasonably straightforward.

Effective evaluation tells you what worked and what did not (and why). It helps to make sure that you get the best value for money from your time and effort. If one particular method doers’t work, try to work out why. Problems are always much clearer with hindsight, and help you avoid pitfalls next time. Equally, if something works well, try to assess why it was successful, so that you and others can build on it.

If you are able to answer the question “what would I do differently or the same next time? Your evaluation will have been valuable.

Some of the issues you will need to consider as part of your evaluation are set out below.

Objectives      Were clear objectives for the consultation set e.g. why are you doing it? What do you want to find out? who are you going to ask? How are you going to do it? What are you going to do with the results?
Were the objectives explained to, and understood by, all relevant staff and those consulted.

Who you consulted      You need to be able to assess whether:
You got the views from those you wanted;
You were successful in consulting with minority, disadvantaged and hard to reach groups;
Different groups responded to different methods;
You gave feedback to those consulted;
The people consulted felt that the consultation was worthwhile.

Timescale      You need to be able to assess whether:
The timetable was clear and kept to, if not why not;
Enough time was left for people to participate.

Resources      You need to be able to examine value for money. Some methods are much cheaper than others, but the information you get may not be of any use to you. You will need to assess whether:
You budgeted adequately;
You made savings in particular areas or overspent in others, and why;
There were unforeseen costs, and what they were;
You had all the necessary skills available.

Methods      You need to be able to assess whether:
The methods used were right for your objectives;
If you used more than one method, which worked better than others and why;
You got the required information.

Information provided      If any information was provided as part of the consultation process you need to be able to measure whether the information was:
Easy to access;
Relevant to the consultation;
Produced in plain language and easy to understand;
Available in other languages and formats if appropriate.

Effect of the consultation      The key question with any consultation is “has anything changed as a result?” You need to be able to assess whether:
You got views that you could use;
You have made use of those views;
The consultation has made some identifiable change in service or policy;
The consultation has changed the relationship between you and those consulted.

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Consultation Calendar

The Council’s Consultation Calendar is on Bradweb and aims to help all employees know about consultation with local people that has already happened on specific issues and also future consultation that is planned. The intended outcome is that we don't re-invent the wheel or ask the public the same questions the following week from a different department. If you have already conducted a consultation exercise, you will already know from your own experience that people are much more likely to respond if they have not recently been asked the same or similar questions. In addition, contact details for specific pieces of work will provide opportunities for learning about different consultation methods and exchange of information across the Council. Hopefully, the Calendar will help things become more coordinated.

Clearly, this will be most useful if everyone helps to keep the document up-to-date. If you are planning a consultation event, or have already completed one that is not shown here, please contact Louisa on 433879 with details.

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Summary Of Points To Consider

1. Ideally consultation activities should be part of your service planning process so that the results can feed directly into your service provision. Don’t wait until it is too late to change your plans before you consult, otherwise you are not taking consultation seriously.

2. Don’t ask for views if you can’t or won’t do anything with them. Be clear about what can and can’t be changed.

3. Can you learn from others? Consult experts if you need to (names of those with expertise in different elements of consultation are mentioned throughout this guide). However, work out what is right in your situation, don’t just consult in a certain way because its what everyone else is doing.

4. Is there some consultation work that has already been done that you can use instead of doing your own consultation? It is much better to use existing information that has been collected about community priorities where possible rather than re-invent the wheel. For example, in response to the Neighbourhood Renewal agenda many neighbourhood and interest-based communities are producing Action Plans.

5. Think about a package of consultation measures rather than just using the same technique each time.

6. Think about how to reach all the people you need to (e.g. people with disabilities, people from ethnic minority groups, people who have stopped using your service or who may have been refused your service). Consult Section E of this guide for more information about consulting with harder to reach groups.

7. Should you consult your front line staff as well as your service users?

8. Be sensitive to those you want to consult, encourage them to give honest views (e.g. by assuring confidentiality).

9. Publicise your consultation, so that people realise that you are committed to listening to them.

10. Report back on what views you have received and, most importantly, what you have done as a result.

11. Evaluate your consultation carefully, and learn lessons for next time.

12. Make sure your consultation events or activities are up on the Consultation Calendar.

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