
Year
2023 – 2024
Putting people at the heart of the Corporate Plan
The Backdrop
Norwich City Council has an ambitious change agenda, planning to make the most of Norwich’s potential for growth and innovation and address inequalities in the city. To support this they wanted to develop a truly community-led Corporate Plan for 2024-2029
“Developing a new corporate plan isn’t just about how the council delivers services. It’s also about the important and privileged role we have as leaders of the city to influence all we can to help us tackle some of the biggest challenges we’ve seen for many years.”
Mike Stonard, Leader, Norwich City Council
Norwich City Council needed to understand what residents truly want and expect from their council, and to do so in a meaningful and participatory way. Collaborate was commissioned to design and implement an inclusive and creative engagement process as part of wider work underpinning the development of the council’s new corporate plan. Our brief was to gather comprehensive feedback, and suggestions from residents and stakeholders that could shape policies, services and projects, and build trust.
What we did
Our approach was to listen to a diverse array of voices across the city, including those least often heard. Through this we hoped to reflect different experiences, foster new connections, and generate enthusiasm for the city’s future, creating a foundation upon which the community could be truly valued throughout decision-making processes. We used a variety of methods to gather a wide range of views within a short timescale, including:
- Member engagement: We hosted three workshops with the Cabinet, with Opposition members and council staff to discuss specific issues and explore ideas in a collaborative setting.
- Stakeholder interviews: We conducted 26 structured interviews with representatives from business, civil society, and the public, creative and cultural sectors. These interviews provided in-depth insights into the perspectives of key community leaders and influencers.
- Panel discussions and focus groups: We organised sessions with the voluntary and community sector, creative and cultural organisations, Community Connectors and Conversation Officers and council tenants.
- Street outreach: We spoke to 138 residents through on-the-ground interviews in diverse city locations from cafes and libraries to bus stops and school gates, ensuring we heard from a broad range of people, many of whom had no prior engagement with the council.
- Online surveys: We ran public surveys via Get Talking Norwich, reaching 690 respondents. An easy-read version of the survey was also created and could be selected as an option online to enhance accessibility.
In total, over 900 people and organisations contributed their views.
We wanted to hear people’s aspirations for the future to help generate new ideas, rather than get stuck in complaints about current problems. We used Appreciative Enquiry to explore what people viewed as the best of Norwich and imagine what it could be. Instead of focusing on deficiencies and asking “What’s the problem?”, appreciative inquiry refocuses attention on what works, the positive core of a place, and on what people really care about.
The insights we gathered in this way were regularly synthesised and analysed to identify key themes. This iterative process ensured the council received timely and relevant input to enable the emerging plan to be shaped in parallel.
Ultimately, we produced:
- A Full Insights Report: This detailed document was created for internal use, providing comprehensive analysis and recommendations based on what we heard.
- Executive Summary: A concise version of the full report, designed to support decision-making by the council’s Cabinet and Scrutiny Committee.
- Public Summary Report: This report was made available to the public, increasing transparency and demonstrating how community input shaped the plan.
Comprehensive Data Pack: This included all captured comments, ensuring that all feedback was available to the council.
Impact and Learning
Developing the Corporate Plan based on listening to residents and stakeholders was a totally new way of working for the city council, and signalled an intent for the kind of council they want to be.
Hundreds of conversations have helped to mould the plan. This allowed us to take all the incredible feedback and distil it into something that I hope speaks to everyone who reads it.
Lou Rawsthorne, Chief Executive of Norwich City Council
Our all-embracing approach to pulling this plan together is something I’m very proud of and is what we need to do more of at the city council.
I want us to inspire our residents to talk with us and have open conversations about the role of the council so we can clearly hear, and respond to, all of the voices across our communities.
We’re proud to see how our work enabled the formation of a truly community-led plan which reflects our belief in the power of collaborating with communities to enable places to flourish.
In the course of the work some fundamentals for successful engagement really stood out:
- Building trusting relationships can’t be rushed. Allowing sufficient time for recruitment and planning, particularly for focus groups, enables broader participation and reduces the risk of alienation.
- Candour is at odds with data collection. We were keen that people we spoke to felt able to be candid in their contributions, and we prioritised this over capturing data. This made reporting harder and was in tension with those who wanted a more quantitative, statistically valid approach.
- Designing for diversity needs to be end-to-end. For example, although survey platforms enable translations of questions into languages other than English, the responses we received required manual translation. Similarly promotional tools like text blasts also need to be delivered in multiple languages to generate responses from different communities.
- People already trusted by communities can help broker new relationships. Respecting and utilising existing community connections can help facilitate successful street engagement.
- Engagement has to be linked to action. People become jaded if they are consulted but see no change as a result. Consultation fatigue is a real risk, especially among those groups who feel least well served by the system.
Our work with Norwich City Council highlights that to authentically work with communities, councils must first deeply understand the diversity of experience across a place and what different communities and stakeholders need and want. This requires a commitment to thorough, inclusive and, most importantly, an ongoing process of public participation. Councils must also then be able to ‘close the loop’, having the culture and structures in place that enable them to translate what they’ve learned through public participation to reshape their policies and practices. In this way they will be able to truly meet the changing needs of residents, communities, civil society and businesses and create the conditions for people and place to flourish.