During these times, traditional methods for engaging your community may be limited but engagement remains critical to listen to your community and understand their needs, ideas, and priorities. There are online engagement platforms and low cost, easily implemented, creative and volunteer led tools to use.

This resource page provides information about the variety of community engagement tools that can be implemented right now.

Blog Posts:

• Top 5 Reasons to do Community Engagement Now. It is an important time to engage your community. There are many reasons to engage your community now: hearing new ideas, learning from new voices, reflecting on peoples’ new experiences, recruiting new volunteers and testing out new virtual engagement tools.

Resources:

• Creative Ways to Engage your Community during Social Distancing Information Brief. This information brief provides an overview of the variety of virtual and low-tech options for engaging your community as well as insights on which tools to select to reach different audiences.

Recorded Webinars:

• Meeting People Where They Are: Tools for Engaging your Community this Summer and Fall: Session 1. This webinar provides an overview of a variety of engagement tools: online polling and interactive maps; focus groups and interviews; and mailings, posters and community art.
• Meeting People Where They Are: Tools for Engaging your Community this Summer and Fall: Session 2. This webinar reviews a variety of virtual and low-tech engagement tools and includes insights from speaker James Vayo, Southern New Hampshire Planning Commission, who shared his experience using an online community engagement platform to gather input for a transit oriented development plan in Manchester, NH.