Guest authored by Annaliese McGavin, registered psychologist, consultant & researcher

Uncertainty leads people to bunker down in the familiar and look inwards. Between a global pandemic, natural disasters, economic downturns, and the stresses of life in lockdown, there’s one thing that we can be certain about—uncertainty is all around us!

When uncertainty is high, people tend to be less open to change, more rigid in their thinking, more fearful of new things, and more likely to procrastinate. People revert to behaviours, thinking patterns, and routines they find comfortable and familiar as a way of finding some certainty in a sea of uncertainty. Because of this, it becomes harder to engage people in anything beyond the essential.

So, how might we improve our understanding of our community members’ current context to better encourage them to continue to engage in meaningful and impactful ways? We’ve compiled expert tips to spark ideas and offer new perspectives to help you to better engage your communities during times of uncertainty.

Know your Community and How to Reach Them

Knowing your community and how best to reach them are some of the most fundamental factors to successful community engagement. Following the Christchurch earthquake, the Christchurch City Council drew from their experience and learnings to create a best practice guide to connecting with diverse communities. They identified that knowing the make-up of your community, refreshing that knowledge regularly, identifying the key community contacts (i.e., credible, respected elders; elected leaders; Culturally And Linguistically Diverse—CALD—service providers), and knowing how best to connect with those contacts, are all vital aspects of any successful engagement.

Key questions:

• Who makes up my community?
• Who are the key contacts within my community?
• What are the best ways to connect with those community leaders?
• Do you know where your communities meet/hang out?
• What matters most to these key groups? What are their main priorities?

Set Aside your Perspective and Take a Walk in their Shoes

We view the world through our own “coloured” glasses. Factors such as genetics, culture, location, education, socio-economic status, family, and friends, shape the way you interpret and respond to the world around you. If you think everyone sees the world in the same way, just remind yourself of the great dress colour debate.

To promote diverse inclusion, it’s vital for us to find opportunities to perspective-take and use that information to inform how and when we reach out. Taking the current pandemic as an example, a recent study from Monash University highlighted the breadth of considerations necessary when seeking to engage diverse communities around COVID-19:

"Some new arrivals, including refugees, may need information about how viruses are transmitted, for instance, because they may not have learned this at school. Some may be mistrustful of authorities because they could not trust their government at home. Others might be in low-paid, insecure work, cannot work from home, and have more than one job, which makes them reluctant to be tested, or to take time off. Or they may live in crowded conditions, making social distancing difficult – something that simple education cannot overcome."

The real art of empathy is in finding ways to understand what we do not, and cannot experience ourselves. Sometimes, a singular focus blinds us to what else is going. The feeling of safety is vital in allowing people to voice their opinions, and feel their voice has been heard and valued. By listening to others, we have the opportunity to understand the wide and diverse cross-section of perspectives and ideas people have to offer.

Key questions:

• Am I projecting my own expectations onto my community?
• Whose perspectives might I be missing? Who is harder to reach?
• How might we create a safe space for all community members to voice their opinions?
• Am I moving to solutions instead of listening for new ideas and insights?

Understand your Community’s Comfort Zone

When uncertainty is high, people will naturally revert to where they feel most comfortable getting their information. Finding out where your community members are most comfortable seeking information is key— this often includes people “like me”, community leaders, and inclusive messages.

The like me bias is our tendency to prefer familiarity. There's a reason that people tend to look like their dogs and why we're drawn to people who dress like us: we like familiar things that, evolutionarily, pose less of a “threat”. So, how can we use this bias to better engage with our community? By ensuring that our outreach efforts are diverse—e.g., have diverse individuals reaching out, ensure that messages are in tones and languages familiar to your community, use images that depict people like those in your community, and leverage a range of familiar environments, like shared-interest Facebook groups.

Community leaders are often the main sources of trusted information in many communities, so tapping into these people’s expertise, building their trust, and broadcasting their voices can all increase the effectiveness of community engagement efforts. Community-led COVID-19 information campaigns are a great example of this—a doctor in Western Sydney asked his community members who had contracted COVID-19 to record a video, in their own words and language, of their experience along with a message to their community; a Sheikh broadcasted his COVID-19 vaccine live on Snapchat while encouraging others to get vaccinated too, and an Ethiopian art group founder in Melbourne created a COVID-19 informational music video in the Amharic language for his community.

The manner of communication used to engage a community also sends its own message. A recent study found that an inclusive outreach strategy helps ensure that literacy (basic and digital), device access, cost, connection, or physical accessibility are not unintentional barriers to engagement. Not only can these barriers mean we miss out on the voices of these community members, but they also signal to the rest of the community that input from those unable to engage is less valuable or important. For example, how does an elderly person without a smartphone use a QR code? Successful engagement employs inclusive communication, as one study highlighted in Victoria when “Brett Sutton and members of his team… committed to hosting a series of interactive forums where people [could] ask questions back and forth to health authorities” the information shared was vital, but the message that kind of gesture sent to the community also spoke volumes.

Key questions:

• What practical support can we provide to break down unintentional barriers for engagement?
• How might we partner with our community leaders to better align our outreach strategies with our community’s preferred communication networks?
• What kind of message about the value of inclusivity is in our outreach strategy sending?
• How do we identify key support channels which service the community, and tailor our communications to suit?
• How might we build the trust necessary to access the environments (physical and virtual) familiar to our communities to be able to share our messages?

Leverage your Resources for a Win-Win

With resources spread thin during uncertain times, community engagement efforts need to ensure that they not only aim to deliver long-term benefits to the community but short-term ones, too. If your engagement is going to take away time that community members would otherwise be dedicating to basic needs like earning an income, educating their children, or feeding their families, then you need to make sure that you compensate them in a manner that reduces their burden instead of adding to it. Incentives such as gift cards to local grocery stores, access to educational resources or tutors, or food delivery from local eateries all ensure that the time people spend engaging with your outreach reduces their workload instead of adding to it. Furthermore, engaging with us should not put community members out of pocket, so free transport to a workshop, a meal at the meeting (not just chips and dips), and supportive care options—both for children and adults, can all decrease the barriers to engagement and increase the feeling of a win-win.

New digital engagement options can also provide a fun and simple way to engage often hard-to-reach sections of the community, while also being cost- and time-effective. Spatial collaboration like the project from Melbourne Water offers the opportunity to provide contribution directly onto a map; reducing the participation time and making engagement simple. Storytelling features, as used by ANU, to gather stories that include images and video can also be very powerful and encourage younger people to participate.

When it comes to engaging your community via a survey, cognitive fatigue can be a real concern. Your brain always has finite resources, so when uncertainty drains them even more, engaging in “non-essential” activities is often dropped by the wayside. However, small tweaks, like reducing survey length and complexity, can help increase engagement. For example, Survey Monkey found that under non-pandemic conditions, surveys that took more than 7-8 minutes led to completion rates dropping by up to 20%. So, accounting for the additional cognitive burden of uncertainty, survey lengths below 5-6 minutes are ideal for improving participation rates.

Beyond decreasing survey length, being upfront about the estimated time commitment, cutting out "nice to have" but never used questions—e.g., you don’t have to ask gender/age/language unless it’s actually useful to the outcome, and ensuring that questions are not overly personal in nature—e.g., some demographic questions can infuriate participants to the point of dropping out if there is no obvious reason for them to be asked or if privacy and confidentiality expectations are not clearly outlined.

Key questions:

• How might we simplify the expectations of our community members?
• If we could only ask two questions of our community right now, what would they be?

Engaging with communities during uncertain times is not about having all the answers, but instead, about finding ways to reach out to our community members in an inclusive and meaningful way. By understanding the make-up of our communities, perspective-taking, tapping into the resources within the community, and creating a win-win, our engagement efforts can be multiplied instead of divided.

We encourage you to go the extra mile, be creative, experiment and find new ways to foster meaningful engagement with your community.