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2.5 hours

Community Engagement 101

Community Engagement 101
$69USD

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About this course

A practical, self-paced introduction to community engagement for government communicators: how to ask the public for input honestly, hear from the people who matter, run events people can actually attend, keep hard meetings fair, and show what changed as a result.

Most engagement goes wrong before the first flyer goes out. A project team invites residents to "help shape" a decision that was made months ago. A meeting is scheduled at a time and place that suit staff, and eleven people come. A difficult room gets handled in a way that ends up on the local news, or in federal court. And the people who did take part never hear what happened to their input, so they don't come back.

This course is built around one idea: engagement works when the promise you make to the public matches what you can actually deliver, and when you keep it. It gives you a clear vocabulary for how much influence you are really offering, drawn from the IAP2 Spectrum and Sherry Arnstein's ladder of participation, and grounds it in real cases, from the Flint water crisis to Amazon's withdrawal from Long Island City and a 2024 federal appeals court ruling on public comment rules.

Across five lessons you'll write goals tied to real decisions, map who you need to hear from (including the people who never come), plan accessible events that meet current ADA obligations, de-escalate difficult meetings without overstepping First Amendment limits, and evaluate outcomes rather than counting chairs. Each lesson ends with a practical exercise you can apply to a live project, and the course includes five working tools for your own planning.

Who This Course Is For:

  • Government communicators who are new to community engagement or have just been handed it
  • Communications staff who support public meetings, workshops and consultations for other teams
  • Solo communicators who need a practical, defensible approach they can use straight away
  • Teams that want a shared, honest standard for how their organization asks the public for input

Read a sample from this course

The meeting after the decision

Picture a school gym on a Tuesday evening. There are sixty folding chairs, a projector, three foam boards on easels showing a redesigned intersection, and a sign-in table with a stack of comment cards. The flyer said "Help shape the future of Main Street." About forty people come. Within ten minutes, someone asks whether the design on the easels is final. The project manager hesitates, then admits the council approved it in March and construction bids go out next month. The room goes quiet in a particular way, and then it gets loud.

Nobody in that gym set out to deceive anyone. The project team genuinely wanted to hear what residents thought about landscaping and construction hours. The communications team genuinely wanted a good turnout. But the flyer promised influence over "the future of Main Street," and the people who came believed it. What they found was a decision that had already been made, dressed up as a conversation.

That gap between what an organization promises and what it can actually deliver is where most engagement goes wrong, and it is the thread running through this whole course. The skills matter: mapping who needs to be involved, planning an event people can actually attend, keeping a hard meeting on track, and showing what changed as a result. But every one of those skills rests on something simpler, which is being honest with the public about what is on the table.

This lesson sets up that foundation. It separates public information from engagement, gives you a vocabulary for how much influence you are really offering, looks at what happens when residents are asked to trust a process that isn't listening, and then gets practical about writing goals and objectives that tie every engagement effort to a real decision.

Keep reading — this course continues with 4 more lessons and 39 more sections.

What you'll learn

Distinguish public information from engagement and name honestly how much influence a process offers the public, using the IAP2 Spectrum.
Write engagement goals and SMART objectives that tie public input to a specific decision, decision-maker and deadline.
Map stakeholders by interest and influence, then correct for impact and representation so the most affected residents aren't overlooked.
Choose engagement formats, venues and times that match your goal and give hard-to-reach residents a realistic way to take part.
Plan events that meet ADA effective communication duties and the current Title II web accessibility deadlines.
De-escalate angry participants and respond to disruption in proportionate steps.
5 lessons
Self-paced
Certificate of completion
Lifetime access

Course Curriculum

Full access upon enrollment
  1. 1.The meeting after the decision
  2. 2.Informing and engaging are different jobs
  3. 3.What Flint teaches about listening
  4. 4.Be honest about how much power is on the table
  5. 5.Goals that connect to a decision
  6. 6.Try this: a one-page engagement brief
  7. 7.Trust is built in the quiet years
  8. 8.Sources & further reading
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