Community Engagement

Intro

Engaging with communities is an essential activity and a shared responsibility. Every employee and every contractor needs to make the effort to make a good job of it.

Good community engagement is as important to the bottom line as good design, the right attitude to health and safety and a disciplined approach to managing costs.

Meeting and talking with local people is the only way to hear, to learn and to share ideas and concerns and to find solutions. Done well, it is the best way to stay on top of community-related issues and to respond effectively and efficiently to inevitably changing circumstances.

Guide

Guide to Community Engagement

WHY COMMUNITY CONSULTATION MATTERS:

Engaging constructively with local communities is critical to every part of your business which means that it needs to be done well by everyone who works for you or with you. Good community engagement is as important to your bottom line as good design, attitude to health and safety and how you manage costs. How you engage sets the tone for your relationship with local communities and works best when it is a shared responsibility and an explicit part of every person’s job. The way your employees and contractors engage with local communities is important because it is the only opportunity your company has to listen, to learn and to share ideas, concerns and solutions with local people. Most importantly if engagement is done well you will be able to stay on top of issues and respond more effectively to changing circumstances. This is turn will help you use available resources – people, time and money - more efficiently and effectively by doing what needs to be done when it needs to be done in the best way possible.

WHAT TO DO:	HOW TO DO IT:
Share information	Use language that people understand: A good rule of thumb is that if you can’t explain your policies, processes and practices to your wife or partner or son or daughter they are too complicated; Use your local staff (see “what else” for some ideas); Always be prepared so you can make the most of opportunities if and when they arise; Avoid the trap of only speaking with a narrow range of people –listen widely, triangulate what you are hearing and make well informed decisions; Time project updates for local stakeholders to immediately follow any disclosure to the market or regulators (see “what else”) for some ideas.
Aim for consistency	Ensure good internal information sharing and coordination between employees, consultants and contractors; Provide clear guidance to staff and contractors – what can and cannot be said, and what can and cannot be promised – and explain your processes to the community; Develop a fact sheet(s). Topics could include a description of the company and its activities in the country, uses of the product you are hoping to make, an outline of your company culture - vision and values and how you work, key points from your engagement activities with local people – who you have been speaking to, the issues raised and your responses, an explanation of recent activities (drilling, sampling, baseline studies) and how people can contact the project team. You can decide how often you update the information – monthly or quarterly are common practices but it is important the information is kept up to date.
Be responsive to community inquiries and questions	Provide easy to use contact points – drop boxes in town or at the office, a free call telephone number, contact email address take very little effort; Allocate someone to coordinate responses; Keep track of promises and commitments and provide feedback.

WHAT ELSE YOU CAN DO:

Good Engagement has 3 parts: The first - Preparation - is equally valuable whether it is for an informal discussion, a single meeting, a serious negotiation, a campaign or to develop a broader strategy. It can be as simple as 3 people around a whiteboard or on a conference call for 10 minutes and as complex as an all-day retreat for a large group with an external facilitator. It all depends on the complexity of the issue, the level of risk or the size of the opportunity. Being prepared means knowing why; what; how; who; where and when. How the company and your employees Act is just as important as the issues. Maintaining a focus on interests; behaving in a respectful manner; dealing with people who are angry and upset, handling conflict; managing expectations and having the right people in the room all influence the outcome. How the company maintains the relationship in between physical meetings determines how successful the next time you touch base will be. Effective and timely Follow-up allows the company to be seen as reliable and interested in the relationship. It the last impression the company will leave. It also ensures that the valuable knowledge gained is captured, shared and acted upon and the investment of time and effort is fully rewarded.

Use your local staff: The community does not start outside the gate. You engage with it every day through your local staff. You have a captive, easily accessible and influential stakeholder group. Many community members base their perceptions of the company on the stories of friends or relatives who work with the company so make the most of the opportunity. Use the fact sheets described above to ensure your staff know the what, why and how of the project. Think about how to use your staff to test out your messages and delivery before going out into the community . Learn from their insights. Use the daily toolbox talks to discuss issues and kill off rumors. Chat over lunch. Get to understand their connections – yours wouldn’t be the first place where the most junior person on site is a respected opinion leader in the community. And don’t forget to include your contractor’s staff – drillers, caterers, drivers – you’ll be surprised how many internal stakeholders you have and the depth and breadth of their interests and knowledge.

Community Committees: Community consultation / advisory / development committees can provide a safe and easily accessible venue for community members to raise and resolve issues. The success of these committees depends heavily on how they are structured and whether their mandate is clearly defined and understood. Defining roles and responsibilities up front; using a third party / independent facilitator; ensuring the process used for selecting representatives is endorsed and enforced by the community(s); active sharing of information and ensuring members communicate with their constituencies all play an important part in successful committees. Holding committee meetings in the communities not only makes it easier for people to attend but also demonstrates that the company is willingness to actively participate in community life. Using a local NGO skilled in building local governance capacity and community mobilisation can be helpful when putting these structures in place.

Using the right tools: The very nature of good engagement means appealing to, and communicating with, a diverse audience, so there can be no one-size-fits-all solution. Picture books, fact-sheets in the local language, story-telling sessions, traditional street theatre, community radio and sharing of video-taped community committee meetings are all techniques that have been used successfully at different times in different places.

More Resources
Smart Social Reporting (to external stakeholders)
Reporting the social aspects that matter up to management, back to the team or out to regulators and community stakeholders is often seen as a nuisance whereas taking a systematic approach and clearly identifying what information needs to be shared and for what reason makes reporting a useful tool for keeping everyone informed. The aim needs to be making reporting as easy as possible.

Smart Reporting reuses the same information as much as possible. The number of local jobs and contracts, dollars spent, community concerns raised and addressed, quantity and quality of engagement is what most people are interested in seeing. Smart Reporting is often simply a case of presenting differently for each audience.
- Read More ...
Smart Social Reporting (inside the company)
Reporting the social aspects that matter up to management, back to the team or out to regulators and community stakeholders is often seen as a nuisance whereas taking a systematic approach and clearly identifying what information needs to be shared and for what reason makes reporting a useful tool to keep everyone informed. The aim needs to be making reporting as easy as possible.

Smart Reporting reuses the same information as much as possible. The number of local jobs and contracts, dollars spent, community concerns raised and addressed, quantity and quality of engagement is what most people are interested in seeing. Smart Reporting is often simply a case of presenting differently for each audience.
- Read More ...
Feeling the pulse: Your relationships health check
We know that the level of social risk associated with a project is linked to the quality of relationships with local people, governments and critics but how can you know where you stand? There are two simple ways to do this. The first is to pay attention for changes in the tone of meetings with government agencies, partners and community members. The second is to note changes in behaviour and attitude you see happening in the community...
- Read More ...
Making the most of your first site visit
If you're working on an overseas project and have never visited the site you'll be well served to make some pre-departure arrangements ahead of your first visit so that you can tick off the actions on your "what do I need to get out of my first visit checklist". The more advice, views and ideas you can gather early on the better informed you’ll be and the less likely it is that you'll make costly mistakes. I've "been there done that" and believe me, it is not a good place to be.
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Leaving early
Living with uncertainty is part and parcel of exploration and project development but this doesn’t mean that you can’t plan. The uncertainty is with the outcome of each phase, it is not with the project management process, where one well defined step follows another. For the most part, when decisions are made they follow a pattern – a round of drilling is completed, results are assessed and are used to inform a go / no go decision for the next step. Likewise, there is a conscious decision to start a scoping study, to progress to a feasibility study or to put a project on the shelf...
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Tapping into local knowledge
This short piece highlights a few simple actions you can take that will reduce your community-related project risk.

My suggestion is that whether you are taking on an existing project or you’ve acquired it through a purchase or takeover, the simple act of talking to your in-country site team can save you a lot of grief. If they are on-the-ball they will be a good source of information to help you get up to speed…
- Read More ...
More actions for a stronger social licence
I've written before about ten must-do-actions for a stronger social licence. These come from personal experience working in company-community relations on mine sites in Africa. This new/different/alternative take on doing what matters comes from local communities, reflecting directly on their concerns for the well-being and development opportunities for individuals and the collective community...
- Read More ...
Actions for a stronger social licence
Check-out the one-minute video before looking deeper into the need-to-do-actions to demonstrate the behaviour needed to establish trust and build relationships. Without trust and good relationships the likelihood of success (for the business generally and for community-facing activities in particular) is greatly reduced...
- Read More ...
Mining and Social Licence
Social Licence to Operate is a mining industry concept. The expression was first used by Canadian Jim Cooney in 1997. This was a decade after the landmark 1987 Brundtland Report and a few years after the concept of the triple-bottom-line was first described by John Elkington. Its use has now spread well beyond the mining industry and as has happened with triple-bottom-line and sustainable development, the term "social licence" has been interpreted and used in many ways. Licence to Operate is currently seen by many as one of the biggest risks to the mining and metals industry, just as it was back in the 1990’s when Jim Cooney coined the term...
- Read More ...
In the beginning...
My social licence journey began in 2005 when I went to Ghana as part of a team planning to build a new mine. I had been working on the studies and design work for the company's Ghana projects for five years so I was very familiar with the project but not particularly familiar with Ghana which I had visited only three times, two of those being very short project kick-off trips. I was also a complete community novice, with Ghana being my first overseas assignment so, perhaps not surprisingly, I made plenty of mistakes and I learned a lot. What follows is a bit of a look back on some of the processes we put in place and the results we saw in three important areas...
- Read More ...
Australian Wind Industry Community Engagement Guidelines
These guidelines provide a blueprint for wind farm operators to engage effectively with local communities. The approach shares many similarities with the resource sector and looks pretty handy, particularly the stakeholder id and mapping approach.
IFC Stakeholder Engagement Good Practice Guide
A comprehensive, easy to read and easy to use resource. One of the early guides, it addresses the shift to a broader, more inclusive and continuous process of engagement between companies and stakeholders and reflects the increasing recognition of the business and reputation risks that come from poor stakeholder relations. Identified key attributes of good engagement include starting early, not waiting until there is a problem to engage, taking a long term view, tailoring the process to fit the project and managing engagement as you would any other part of the business.
IFC Strategic Community Engagement for Juniors
Early Strategic Stakeholder Engagement (ESSE): A good plan with a well thought-through implementation process can ensure that initial stakeholder engagement provides a solid foundation for gaining and sustaining support of stakeholders, and in particular directly affected local communities, for every phase of project and operational life.
PDAC First Engagement Field Guide
Many guides on community and stakeholder relations have been produced for extractive sector companies. The PDAC’s e3 Plus Framework for Responsible Exploration was the first resource designed for junior exploration companies, addressing their specific human resource, financial, and timeline challenges. More recently, additional resources like this one, have been created to support junior companies with their community engagement activities. This guide fills a gap by providing practical, step-by-step ideas that can be used at the site level.

Read the full guide online.
Preventing Conflict in Exploration Tool and Toolkit
A practical, simple guide that sets out the important steps for using constructive engagement to prevent conflict during exploration.The toolkit is a simple, practical guide that sets out the important steps for using constructive engagement to prevent conflict through during exploration. The toolkit brings in ideas and experiences from the three collaborating partners - the Corporate Engagement Program Framework, PDAC’s e3Plus, and World Vision’s Making Sense of Turbulent Contexts and pulls in its content from a series of field tests with exploration companies as well as the input of many contributors and collaborators.
William Ury: Getting Past No
William Ury, co-author of 'Getting to Yes', the go-to classic on negotiation walks through a five step process to use when the techniques for co-operative negotiation fail. Learn how you can:
- Stay cool under pressure
- Disarm angry adversaries and breakthrough resistance
- Stand up for yourself without provoking opposition
- Deal with underhanded and dirty tricks
- Find agreeable solutions
- Use power constructively to reach agreement
You can find (and buy) the book online.
Zandvliet and Anderson: Getting It Right
This book has been written for corporate managers who are responsible for company operations in societies that are poor and politically unstable. Many such managers are frustrated with the situations they face. They try their best to run effective, profitable and beneficial operations that take account of the needs of all their stakeholders, including local surrounding communities. But, even with their best efforts, they encounter community dissatisfaction, unrest, opposition, and delays and, worse yet, threats and violence. Why does this happen?

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work with Luc while I was feeling my way during my early days in Ghana and am forever thankful for the lesson (obvious with the benefit of hindsight) that resource development by default creates tension and conflict, and that it is how companies approach conflict – as an opportunity or as a threat – that shapes the ongoing relationship between company and community. Some of the ideas in the book have been particularly sticky:
1. Relationships matter – at a personal and business level this seems a no-brainer but sometimes the connection seems to get lost when it comes to communities
2. Company impacts are never neutral – they can be negative or positive but from the time a company starts work on-the-ground it starts to create change
3. People everywhere get annoyed about the same issues – this one gave me a lot of comfort that I could be confident applying the ideas to my particular circumstances plus, the issues are not complicated – behaving appropriately, taking responsibility for impacts and fair distribution of benefits are the keys
4. Relationships require ongoing effort – again not really earth-shattering news, so it is somewhat surprising how often it happens that over time we take things for granted and it takes a nasty wake-up call to show us how far we’ve gone off the rails
5. Company actions shape the nature of relationships – this last one relates back to the third point, because the reality is that the three issues that most influence a relationship - impacts, benefits and behaviour – are all company-initiated actions, and it is totally within the company’s control to determine what it is going to do and how it is going to act
You can find (and buy) the book online.

Intro

Guide

Guide to Community Engagement

More Resources