How do you find out?
Resident engagement helps at three points: deciding what to build in the first place, getting the details right as you build, and keeping your work connected to the people it serves after launch.
The basic approach is the same at each step:
Be clear about what you need to learn
Put something in front of the right people
Ask good questions
Use what you hear to make decisions
Before you speak with residents, follow these five steps.
Identify a goal
What do you need to learn? The more specific your goal, the more useful resident engagement will be. Instead of something vague, identify something more specific you are trying to achieve.
"We want to understand residents better."
How can we help residents build emergency savings?
How can we make sure residents know what's available after a disaster?
How can we get more residents to use the services we already offer?
The most useful goals are tied to a decision you have to make, like what goes in your implementation plan or which of two services to pilot.
Talk to experts and look at what's already out there
Before you talk to residents, talk to the people who already have some perspective. For example, financial empowerment staff, community center coordinators, and partner organizations all speak with residents every day, and they can give you a good place to start. If your goal is to make sure residents know what's available after a disaster, ask them how they'd do it. What have they seen that doesn't work? Where do people get stuck or give up?
A note of caution
Staff report what residents tell them, which isn't always what residents do, and staff sometimes have strong opinions about why residents don't engage. Those opinions are worth hearing and worth testing, but they're a starting point, not the final word.
Create something very rough for people to react to
It's much easier for people to react to a prompt than to talk in the abstract. Take examples of what's been done elsewhere, or mock up a basic description of what you're thinking about. Don't invest much time in it yet. People find it easier to tell you what's wrong with something when they don't think you're attached to it, and polish gets in the way of that. Your level of fidelity will increase over time, as your confidence goes up that this is what residents actually want.
Rough really is fine
If it looks half-baked, that means it's probably at the right stage.
Two or three options work better than one. People open up more when they're choosing between things than when they're judging a single item, and what they say while comparing tells you what they care about.
Identify who to talk to
The most valuable input comes from the people you're trying to reach. To find people who are as close as possible to your target audience, identify the places they already go, like community organizations, libraries, or community centers. Ask organizations if they can connect you with people or post a flyer (sample flyer you can adapt). We recommend paying people a fair amount for their time (sample consent form).
You need fewer people than you'd think. You're not seeking scientific representativeness, you're looking for inspiration. Surveys work differently and need far more participation. For understanding and feedback, six to twelve conversations with people from your target audience will surface most of the key themes. You'll start to notice the repetition, and once you're no longer hearing much that's new, you've reached saturation and can move to the next phase.
Reach people who don't already show up.
If you recruit only through your own programs, you'll hear from the people who already found you, and those are usually the residents you least need to learn about. The most common failure in this work is building something that the people you meant to serve never use, and it often starts at recruitment. Some ways in:
- Partner organizations that serve people you don't reach
- Places people go for something unrelated, like laundromats, barbershops, clinic waiting rooms, and school pickup
- Outreach staff who already have trust
- Asking the people you do talk to who else you should be hearing from
Match the format to the stage
One-on-one conversations
One-on-one conversations let you follow someone's answers where they go instead of going down a prescribed path. They're also the best way to put unfinished work in front of a small number of residents and find out what's wrong with it. A conversation about a real draft will change your plan more than two hundred survey responses about preferences in the abstract.
Group co-design sessions
Group co-design sessions help you generate ideas, improve on early ones, and find new language and framing. In practice that means a small group, a real problem, and materials to work with. People choose between options, mark up a draft, put things in order of importance, or sketch what they'd want. What they make matters less than what they say while making it and how they build off of each other's ideas. This is where you'll hear the words and ideas that resonate.
Focus groups
Focus groups work well for structured feedback on something concrete, like a draft flyer, two program names, or a proposed set of services, when you want to hear people react to each other and disagree. Although they're often the default choice for resident engagement, they're usually less helpful than one-on-one conversations or formats like co-design that are more explicitly about idea generation. Group dynamics shape what gets said, one voice can anchor the whole room, and disagreement tends to get smoothed over. Money is also a sensitive subject, and on sensitive subjects you'll get more out of talking to people one at a time. Save focus groups for when the discussion between participants about advanced drafts is the point.
Surveys
Surveys are effective for measuring how common something is, once you already know what to ask about. They're a poor discovery tool. A survey can only return answers to questions you already thought of, so it will miss the thing you didn't know to ask. If you're using one to find out what residents need, the sequence is backwards. Use conversations to find the question, then use a survey to size it.
Observations and ride-alongs
Observations and ride-alongs mean watching what happens. Sit in on intake, watch someone try to complete the online application on their phone, attend a resource fair and observe how people participate, ride along with outreach staff. Attending existing offerings lets you reach people at a moment when the topic is already live for them, and you see the difference between what people report and what they do. It can be especially helpful to talk with people about their experience and ask questions about what they're going to do next.