Community and stakeholder engagement strategy

The creation of a new community engagement strategy for Welwyn Hatfield was a recommendation of the Local Government Association (LGA) Peer Challenge.

At the start of the development of a new strategy, we held a stakeholder mapping workshop and follow-up session with members of the Corporate Leadership Network across all services, and with political representation from the Leader of the Council. These sessions were guided by the LGA guide to community engagement, New Conversations 2.0 (2019). We discussed:

• Who our stakeholders are
• How we currently engage with them
• What we could do more of, less of, or do differently
• What impact those actions might have

The outcome was a set of strategic aims, themed as per the following principles. We went back to look at these five principles again in light of over 1,600 responses to our Your Welwyn Hatfield survey, as well as stakeholder engagement sessions at the Alliance Conference, making sure those contributions were reflected in the document.