There are two different types of groups your court may want to consider for recruitment:
- Partners and stakeholders from the community who can join you in the planning processes for your engagements
- Participants from the broader community who were not part of the planning but do participate in the engagements
Look for the brainstorming resource at the bottom of this page – a worksheet that can walk you through many of the questions presented here – to help you consider partners and participants you may wish to reach.
Should we involve partners/stakeholders in planning our engagement?
Involving project partners and community stakeholders in the planning of your engagement has several benefits but also has drawbacks relating to the time and effort involved. Weighing these costs and benefits can help you to decide how to proceed.
Benefits of involving stakeholders/partners in planning activities:
- Involving stakeholders/partners provides additional ideas and connections for potentially important voices and partners.
- Stakeholder involvement also provides an opportunity to generate support and legitimacy for your project. This may be especially important if you are seeking to engage people with low initial trust in the courts or legal system.
- These additional stakeholders/partners may be able to directly recruit people whose voices are needed for a successful engagement.
Drawbacks of involving stakeholders/partners in planning activities:
- Involving stakeholders/partners takes additional time and effort.
- Larger groups can be more difficult to coordinate.
- Conflicts can arise between diverse members.
- If you allow new members to join after starting the planning, they may contest the goals developed in earlier steps of the process, which may take time to resolve.
Whom should we involve as partners/stakeholders in planning our engagement?
If you determine that you will recruit community partners to assist in the planning of your engagements, you will need to identify what partners to involve. When identifying whom to involve in your planning coalition, it
may be useful to consider the following:
- Interests: What court officials or potential coalition partners (communities and agencies) would benefit from or might have an interest in the issues to be addressed by the public engagement?
- Information: What court officials or potential coalition partners (communities and agencies) have knowledge, information, expertise, or experiences that could benefit the goals of the engagement process?
- Influence: What court officials or potential coalition partners (communities and agencies) have the capacity to potentially influence court policies or practices or help find ways to implement solutions to the issues identified?
- Sustainability: What court officials or potential coalition partners (communities and agencies) have the interest and capacity to support community engagement into the future?
Whom should we involve as engagement participants?
Once again, identifying community members to invite to your engagement should be linked to your desired goals and results. Thus, some of communities and agencies identified when considering coalition partners may also include potential engagement participants.
When brainstorming whom to involve as engagement participants, consider various types of groups such as relevant institutions and organizations; civic and religious groups; cultural, racial, ethnic, age, socioeconomic groups; special interest groups; oppositional or advocate groups; groups with special expertise; and other stakeholders.
To help you think of these groups, consider the following issues:
Depending on what your issue of interest is, one useful way to consider and identify important representative voices to include in your engagement is to brainstorm around the following questions:
- What community members are affected or potentially affected by the issue of interest to the engagement?
- Are there members of the community that are disproportionately harmed or burdened by the issue of interest?
- Should participants be representative of your court’s geographical jurisdiction? Or should participants come from a more specific community of interest?
Proper representativeness can capture the views and knowledge of all members of the targeted community. Use of scientifically valid methods to ensure representativeness can also confer a degree of legitimacy on your engagement project.
Diversity is closely related to representativeness. Depending on your goals and results, having demographic and viewpoint diversity may be critical to your engagement.
- Viewpoint diversity: What are the broad range of interests and perspectives that are implicated by your issue of interest? Depending on your target community, a representative population sample may or may not have that diversity. It may be important to target specific populations or interest groups to obtain diverse backgrounds and viewpoints. What are the spectrum of interests and viewpoints that people may have towards the issue, and whom can you invite to be sure all perspectives are represented? Involving people who are both supportive and skeptical of your efforts, and both advocate and oppositional groups, can ensure that any found solutions are more widely acceptable.
- Demographic diversity: Research suggests that many public engagement forums tend to attract individuals who have higher levels of education and wealth than the general public.[1] It is critical to keep in mind that many segments of society have been historically excluded from public engagement opportunities. This may include racial, ethnic or religious minorities; low-income individuals; persons with disabilities or significant health issues; people who are homeless or transient; immigrants or refugees; lesbian, gay or transgender individuals; and younger people or older people. Your court should be mindful of these historical disparities and make efforts to be as inclusive as possible. If an engagement opportunity is perceived as being not inclusive, it is very possible that people will view the engagement project poorly.
Obtaining knowledge and perspectives from community members about an issue is perhaps the most valuable product of a community engagement activity.
- Affected ordinary people: Again, depending on your intended goals and results, targeting ordinary members of the community may be a priority for your engagement if they can bring new or unheard insight or creative solutions to the table.
- Stakeholders: On the other hand, you may wish to target stakeholders rather than ordinary community members. Stakeholders typically have some degree of commitment or relationship to the issue of interest. Stakeholders may often have more informed opinions and knowledge about an issue, as well as some degree of organized influence that ordinary community members may not have. However, stakeholders may also bring specific interests and viewpoints to an engagement. Stakeholders might dominate a discussion if they know a lot about the issue. Given these issues, whom you involve in the engagement should influence how you structure your engagement activities .
Keeping the broader public in mind
The process of brainstorming to identify the participants and stakeholders you want to target should result in a comprehensive list of perspectives that can be included in your engagement. As you prioritize which key voices are most important to your goals, you also will want to keep the broader public in mind. After your engagement activities are completed, your court may wish to publicize and disseminate findings from your engagement or engage in follow-up activities in a more long-term fashion.
As a public institution, courts should be considerate of how the wider public is implicated by the issue of interest or can potentially benefit from your engagement project.
As you consider the wider community, keep the following issues in mind:
Members of the wider community may have questions about the engagement process, who attended and why, and any results or recommendations generated from the engagement. A community-court engagement that is/was transparent and suitably representative will ideally be well-received by the public. In contrast, an engagement activity that is perceived as closed off, or not having the “right” people at the table, may be viewed with suspicion. Whom you engage at your actual activity and how you engage them will matter to the wider public.
A long-term goal of your engagement process may be to broadly educate the public about some aspect of your court and its functions, or to seek public backing or support for a program or policy change. Again, consider how your recruitment efforts can help further these strategic goals. Can your targeted community participants help sustain such efforts? Are there ways in which they can further extend the impact of your engagement project?
[1] Ryfe, D. M., & Stalsburg, B. (2012). The participation and recruitment challenge. In T. Nabatchi, J. Gastil, G. M. Weiksner, & M. Leighninger (Eds.), Democracy in motion: Evaluating the practice and impact of deliberative civic engagement (pp. 43-58). Oxford University Press.