Community Engagement · Stakeholder Strategy · Change
Community Engagement Strategy
A strategy to raise the standard of engagement practice across the civil service — and rebuild public trust in the process.
The Challenge
Public trust in the jurisdiction's institutions needed strengthening. Colleagues across the civil service were engaging with communities and each other inconsistently, and change initiatives struggled to land without genuine cross-organisational buy-in.
The brief was broad and political: improve how the organisation engages, in a way that would show up in national wellbeing data, not just internal satisfaction surveys.
My Role
As Policy Officer for Governance & Communities, I was responsible for developing a strategy to improve engagement practices across the civil service, working with senior leaders to translate that strategy into practical, everyday behaviours, and designing the training that would build engagement capability at scale.
I leveraged communication, storytelling and coaching skills to craft compelling campaigns, drive behavioural shifts and address the barriers that were getting in the way of change.
My Approach
From listening to lasting behaviour change.
Listen & Diagnose
Spoke directly with teams and community partners to understand where engagement was breaking down and why trust was being eroded.
Build the Strategy
Translated those insights into a practical engagement strategy senior leaders could get behind and act on.
Co-Produce with the Network
Built a network of over 1,000 stakeholders across teams and organisations to champion the change and help co-produce training materials.
Deliver Training at Scale
Delivered the resulting engagement training to more than 7,000 civil servants.
Measure & Report
Tracked progress against national wellbeing data and reported impact back to sponsors and stakeholders.
The Impact
The strategy contributed to a 40% increase in the jurisdiction's trust metric in the OECD Better Life Index — a national, independently measured indicator, not an internal survey score.
What I Learned
Trust isn't rebuilt with a single campaign. The strategies that stuck were the ones co-produced with the people who would live with them — not handed down from the top.
This project reinforced how much patience genuine engagement work demands, and how much easier that patience is to sustain when you've built real relationships across a wide stakeholder network from the start.
Skills Demonstrated