Community focus groups or consultations are small group discussions with professional facilitation. They are used to determine issues of concern for a group and to find preferred options for addressing them. Community consultations help engage multicultural and multifaith groups and help service providers to make better decisions about their processes, policies and programs.
Want to know what your audience thinks?
Engaging diverse communities can be challenging but understanding barriers to access underpins inclusive policy. Community consultations and focus groups are effective ways of learning about the community you’re working with and gaining insights into their needs and interests. They can also empower, inform and engage people and create lasting relationships between service providers and community members.
Community engagement ranges from simple information sharing to consultation and active participation. It can occur at various points of your project, program or your organisation’s journey into making your services, plans and information more engaging, inclusive and effective. They can also serve as a great way of evaluating your efforts using a range of different techniques to build up a picture of the profile, needs and experiences of audience.
What is the aim of community consultations?
Apart from soliciting feedback, community consultations can help create links with stakeholders and improve relationships with diverse groups. They are a great way of understanding and addressing community needs through listening, building positive relationships and collaboration.
What are some of the benefits of community consultations ?
Community consultations and focus groups are a place for open communication and discussion. They can help develop community engagement strategies, clarify communication needs and be an opportunity to learn about communication styles, literacy levels and needs of the community.
How can Polaron help?
- We can organise community engagement activities, including workshops, focus groups, surveys and polls, public forums, social media campaign design and monitoring, designed to elicit engagement and feedback.
- Tapping into our Multicultural Advisory Panel and diverse staff, networks and stakeholder groups, we can contribute valuable insights to help you develop your strategies and plans. By engaging people with lived experience of migration, disability or social disadvantage, we can ensure that you are asking the right questions of the right people.
- Polaron also offers user testing your campaigns, multilingual assets and resources to ensure they resonate with your target audiences, ensuring accessibility and inclusivity.
- We can conduct workshops with your organisation’s senior management on new and emerging strategies to manage stakeholder engagement.
- We also offer in-language sessions or can provide interpreters for groups that require language support with our trained bi-lingual facilitators. These are available face-to-face or on-line.
For more information about community consultations and focus groups, and how it can help you better connect with your audience, contact our team of specialists by emailing us at translations@polaron.com.au or by calling us at 1300 88 55 61.