Stakeholder & Community Engagement

Designing Inclusive, Effective, and Collaborative Approaches to Urban Transformation

Engaging with key stakeholders — and, where appropriate, broader communities — is essential for ensuring that smart city, digital, and other socio-technical strategies are inclusive, responsive, and successful. By meaningfully involving residents, businesses, institutions, and civic actors in the design and development of strategies, cities can build legitimacy, trust, and alignment between public ambitions and lived realities.

We provide consultancy services to help towns, cities, and regions design and implement stakeholder engagement processes that are purposeful, well-structured, and tailored to the local context. Our approach goes beyond tokenistic consultation: we enable real dialogue, collective intelligence, and shared ownership of ideas, challenges, and solutions.

It’s much more about “follow-through” than initial contact!

Why Stakeholder Engagement Matters

Stakeholder and community engagement brings a range of benefits to smart city and digital strategy development, including:

  • Increased Legitimacy: Demonstrating that strategies reflect local needs, values, and aspirations.

  • Stronger Buy-In: Building public and political support for change by involving people early and meaningfully.

  • Better Insights: Surfacing lived experience and local knowledge that can guide more grounded and innovative solutions.

  • Collaborative Problem-Solving: Encouraging cross-sector partnerships and creative thinking that draw on a wider range of skills and perspectives.

  • Risk Mitigation: Addressing concerns, misinformation, or unintended consequences early in the process.

  • Long-Term Sustainability: Creating strategies that communities understand, support, and are more likely to sustain over time.

Whether designing a city-wide digital strategy or delivering targeted interventions in specific districts or sectors, engagement is a critical success factor.

Making Participation Meaningful

Done well, stakeholder engagement creates a sense of shared ownership and momentum that can carry a strategy forward well beyond its launch. It ensures that digital and smart city policies aren’t imposed but built in collaboration with those they affect—making transformation more relevant, effective, and enduring.

This type of work is about designing the processes that allow rich and meaningful communication to happen between people across a wide range of power and influence.

What We Offer

We support cities and regions in designing engagement processes that are proportionate, strategic, and inclusive. Depending on the scope, complexity, and local dynamics, this can range from lightweight consultation to deep co-design and capacity-building efforts.

Our services typically include:

  • Stakeholder Mapping and Analysis
    Identifying who needs to be engaged, their interests, influence, and the best ways to involve them. (See also here)

  • Engagement Planning
    Developing clear engagement goals, success criteria, communication plans, and engagement roadmaps aligned with wider project timelines.

  • Facilitation and Delivery
    Running workshops, roundtables, focus groups, and co-creation sessions with a range of audiences—from senior stakeholders to grassroots participants.

  • Surveys and Digital Platforms
    Designing inclusive and accessible tools to gather wider input, especially when reaching large or underrepresented groups.

  • Narrative Development and Communications
    Helping cities craft clear, engaging narratives that frame the strategy in human terms and explain its relevance and value.

  • Capacity Building
    Training city teams, community leaders, and institutional partners in methods for joint problem-definition, participatory design, and inclusive facilitation.

We draw on a wide toolbox of engagement techniques and co-design frameworks, selecting and adapting them to best suit the culture, geography, and goals of each project.

When and How to Engage

We help cities think carefully about who to engage, when, and why, recognising that effective engagement is not a one-off event but a series of conversations across the lifecycle of strategy development and delivery.

Typical phases we support include:

  • Visioning: Engaging stakeholders to define shared ambitions and values.

  • Problem Framing: Surfacing different perspectives on challenges and opportunities.

  • Solution Generation: Co-developing policy ideas, digital services, or investment priorities.

  • Feedback and Iteration: Testing concepts, prototypes, or draft strategies and improving them based on input.

  • Ongoing Involvement: Embedding engagement in governance structures, delivery teams, and monitoring processes.

We also pay close attention to power dynamics, accessibility, and inclusion—ensuring that underrepresented voices are actively sought and supported in the process.