Local Community Engagement

Identifying and bringing all relevant parties together at the start of the process, to identify and commit to the collective ambition, will always play a pivotal role in not only agreeing what is to be achieved, but how to realise that. Engaging the local community means working with LEPs, county councillors and neighbouring local authorities.  The Essex & Herts Digital Innovation Zone (DIZ) for instance works hard to foster and develop better collaborative working between local partners and businesses as well as identify cross sector challenges and opportunities.  Continuous and significant efforts are therefore made to engage local partners through a monthly online advisory board which is open for anyone to attend, ask questions of, or make proposals to. Proposals are considered on the same day by an executive board made of senior elected members from each District and county area.

Significant investment in community engagement at the pre-start stage of a project or programme can ensure you're rooting your endeavours in solving real challenges, rather than being perceived as a solution looking for a problem.

Be clear about the difference advanced connectivity, and particular use cases, will make to people so they can understand the benefits to them personally.  It’s important to be realistic about this and wherever possible, point to proven outcomes from other projects or deployments. The West London Alliance has undertaken a number of initiatives to make sure the community is engaged on multiple levels including, health, social care, and employment. The intention is to help residents see the link between the benefits they could get and the physical infrastructure required to deliver them.

You will need to regularly address both key local stakeholders and the public. Regular progress can also be communicated through social channels, with different channels enabling you to reach different audiences.  WM5G for instance has a LinkedIn account and issues newsletters to regularly communicate with interested professional parties.  Glasgow provides regular updates, with a strong focus on tangible benefits to citizens and local businesses, on their website.  While the Essex & Herts DIZ produces a weekly “top links” newsletter as well as hosting regular smart places seminars and events with partners and local businesses, which are subsequently written up and published as resources. Don’t forget offline channels to ensure nobody is left behind.

Community engagement should be an ongoing exercise - providing regular updates will keep stakeholders interested. A key way to do this is by developing dedicated websites (such as Sunderland and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority), ensuring key information is available on your website (as Oxfordshire and Glasgow have done) or by presenting your vision in the context of broader plans, for instance Worcestershire’s 2020-2040 plan for growth which is based on their vision of a “connected county”.  Keeping such assets regularly updated will ensure people stay engaged over longer deployments.

Monitoring community forums can be a useful way to monitor trends in your community, even if you do not actively engage.

town hall meetings and opportunities for community members to be heard and feed into plans can help to drive subsequent adoption of new services. Special efforts have been made from the beginning of the Essex & Herts DIZ partnership to ensure sustained involvement of the community and voluntary sectors from each area.  Monthly online advisory boards are therefore open to the public as well as local businesses and partners.  A number of 5G projects heavily invested in community engagement, listening to peoples’ expectations, concerns and questions. This helped to build trust and reduce resistance to 5G projects. Nottinghamshire County Council are helping the local community be a part of their 5G project in Sherwood Forest, with a competition for local schools to name their 5G-powered robot dog. Based on their experiences in the Mobile Access North Yorkshire (MANY project), North Yorkshire County Council and the other project partners created a community engagement toolkit.

5G technologies have the potential to offer significant social and economic benefit across the UK. However, sections of your community may have varying concerns around 5G deployment and it’s important to be sensitive to these; concerns and questions must be recognised, understood and addressed. We have collated and created a toolkit of assets, specifically designed to arm you with the facts around 5G safety - from peer-reviewed science and an evidence based approach - and answer the questions that people in your communities may have. From FAQs for planning officers to a cheat-sheet guiding you to the most appropriate tool, our toolkit has been designed to help you more quickly and effectively handle anti-5G sentiment. And if you’re facing questions around 5G’s green credentials, this report from Mobile UK explores the environmental impact and role of 5G in supporting broader net zero goals. Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority particularly recognise the potential of 5G to mitigate climate change and believe raising the profile of this opportunity will contribute to public support.

Not all stakeholders will have the same level of knowledge around what 5G is, how it differs from previous generations and what it can enable.  Bringing people up to speed early on is a critical component of any engagement plan.  We’ve compiled some key guides and assets to help upskill colleagues and stakeholders, as well as creating a helpful glossary to cut through the jargon.  Mobile UK’s Local Authority 5G Guide can also provide a useful insight into how 5G can transform places, while the West London Alliance has produced its own briefing materials for the local authorities it represents as well as any organisations interested in working with 5G in the boroughs.

Actively seek out evangelists to advocate on your behalf and engage with harder-to-reach sections of society. Sunderland has successfully recruited a team of Community Evangelists, who might be for instance a Headteacher of a primary school. This is an approach Manchester also successfully deployed during the CityVerve project, where they ran a local campaign to recruit citizen journalists who were given behind-the-scenes access to the project, got the opportunity to test run services and reported back to the broader community.  Recruiting a broad cross section of individuals can enable you to successfully reach all sections of society, as well as gain invaluable early feedback into services.