You are Losing Your Credibility: Maximizing Appropriate Involvement of Community Members

By Phil Sirinides and Missy Coffey

You’ve heard it before: “Include stakeholders early and often.”

But what if, by doing so, you lose momentum? What happens when those energized early conversations – where everyone is excited over the prospect of a new analytic tool – begin to cool down? How do you pace the engagement, so stakeholders can see growth over time while working for years to bring an integrated data system to fruition?

For the last three years, ECDataWorks worked with states to test a paced model of engagement. This model focused on the maximum appropriate involvement of community members in a variety of engagement methods, including surveys, meetings and reviews. Following that work, we’ve come away with the following three lessons:

Build Buy-in by Engaging All Stakeholders

The development of a data system is not linear, and it does not lead to immediate changes in an early childhood education system. As a result, stakeholders can become frustrated when no progress is seemingly being made.

“They feel invested in the work that’s being done, but they also feel like their voice is being heard,” said Howard Morrison, early childhood technical assistance specialist at SRI International and former statewide coordinator for the Texas Education Agency. “They also feel like they’re going to have a product or a tool or a report that’s really going to assist them.”

By intentionally pacing your work to provide periodic data and highlight small successes over time, you can change those conversations and keep stakeholders engaged throughout the process.

Lesson: Create strategic goals for engagement and pace the sequence so your stakeholders can see the process and the small successes.

Engage Early and Often

Ostensibly it’s a good concept, but engaging too early and too often can lead to frustrated stakeholders.

“Some of the folks that you really want to have in the room or at the table are often juggling multiple other projects, you don’t want to rely on the same stakeholders for every initiative and project,” says Morrison. 

In the case of your data analytics, which take time to develop while, typically, you are simultaneously creating or enhancing an ECIDS, you need to differentiate the opportunities for stakeholder engagement.

Lesson: Differentiate the opportunities for general learning from the engagement opportunities where you require specific stakeholder feedback.

Engage as Many as Possible

Stakeholders can be frustrated when their feedback isn’t used. Yet, not all feedback is created equally. Do you know which stakeholders provide relevant feedback on certain aspects of the analytic tool? Should program representatives be weighing in on tech design or data integration, or would it be more valuable to seek their feedback on information use?

“If we engaged every stakeholder we’d probably have 100,000 people in a meeting,” says Morrison, “It’s just not logistically possible to have constructive feedback [that way] and be able to move a project forward in an efficient period of time.”

Drawing input from a diverse stakeholder group is a great thing, as long as you’re asking the right people the right questions.

Lesson: Create feedback opportunities that align to the skill set and role of each stakeholder, and avoid broad requests of the group. Stakeholders will learn that you really need – and will actually use – their expertise when it is required.

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Hear more on this topic in our latest ECDataWorks podcast, featuring interviews with Howard Morrison and Jennifer Martinez, consultant with the Texas Education Service Center, 20. Find us on your favorite podcast app, or listen here. 

Phil Sirinides and Missy Coffey are the principal investigators for ECDataWorks, a nationwide, nonprofit initiative dedicated to advancing early childhood policy and programs through the strategic use of integrated data.

This blog is part of the the ECDataWorks Community initiative, produced with support from the Heising-Simons Foundation.