Community Engagement

Identify Your Target Audience
This may seem like a no-brainer, but this first step is overlooked all to often. Your target audience may be based on geography, demographics, stakeholders, or a combination of various criteria. You may also want to consider engaging people outside of your criteria to account for future growth or program expansion. Whatever the case may be, Kasih Initiative will help you focus your outreach on the specific audiences you wish to reach through your engagement efforts.

Partner With Community Leaders
The best way to engage a community is by building trust. This process takes time, which is usually a project resource that is in short supply. In order to truly engage with a community, particularly if you are time-limited, you must engage a community leader or leaders who already have relationships within the community. This can be difficult if your organization does not have any prior experience or relationships. Kasih Initiative leverages our client network to identify community leaders that can help you collect important data and opinions from communities that may be impacted by your project.

Develop an Engagement Program
Every community is different, and thus how you engage the community should be unique. This is particularly true when the reason for community engagement may be controversial. Using “tried and true methods” can backfire, especially in under-represented communities, because those methods have been used to cause harm in the past.

Developing an approach that fits the community takes an intentional effort to understand the community’s history, demographics, needs, and opportunities. This also applies to stakeholders. In many cases, the community itself will give you input on the best way to proceed with any comprehensive engagement.

Kasih Initiative can help create custom engagement plans that will run the course of your project so that the community you seek to engage understands the process, their role, and when engagement opportunities will occur.