Crying “But we know it works!” doesn’t cut it with bean counters, as community development workers and empowerment enthusiasts know well. So it’s great to see another shot at turning confidence, engagement, participation and better decisions into brass. This time the magic words and spreadsheet come from Involve and Consumer Focus, under the name Making the case for public engagement - How to demonstrate the value of consumer input.
Written by Edward Andersson, Emily Fennell and Thea Shahrokh, the toolkit will enable organisations and projects to produce hard evidence of the cash they save through their work, with the help of a spreadsheet that does not look too intimidating. As the website says: ‘It has never been more important to be able to make this business case. The UK has recently experienced the most severe recession since the 1930s and public spending will continue to be cut heavily in the years to come, and engagement professionals will need to articulate the value of their work in economic terms.’
This is not the first toolkit to attempt this act of alchemy. Check out the work that Sue Oppenheimer led at what’s now known as Local Government Improvement and Development. That toolkit, part of a range of work aimed at encouraging local authorities to be more empowering, was called Mainstreaming empowerment and developing a business case .
And Empowering Communities was on the case back in early 2009, when we commissioned Gabriel Chanan to have a think about the subject (we didn’t think we were going to find the answer in one easy step). He called his paper, which contains much useful background to the subject, Valuing Community Empowerment - making the business case.
The hard evidence that engagement pays off is growing, but we still need more to belabour the bean counters with, so I do hope that this new toolkit will encourage more people to collect it. Even if it means even more work for which it is more difficult than ever to find the pay.
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