Consulting with community stakeholders is key to making sure your community energy project is a success, and meets everyone’s needs.

However, there is a balance between keeping the community informed and saturating them with too many consultations, and making sure that they allow you to engage with all members of the wider community. This aspect of a community energy project can be daunting if you have not set up a community project before, so before you get started take a look at our quick tips and further resources below to make sure you start of on the best footing.

Produce a community development plan

A community development plan is an excellent starting point and is useful to present at the following community consultations. This document should outline the main aims of the project, the resources needed to achieve them and how the community will be involved in this process. It can also be a great tool to show external bodies such as planners and potential funders exactly what the project will entail and how the community will be involved.

How to engage your community

To increase the likelihood of success of your project it is imperative that the community around you feels engaged and involved in what is going on; here are a few suggestions of how you can do that;.

Face to Face
• Use established community networks to act as facilitators of promotion, for example town hall committees, as well as local environmental interest groups such as Greenpeace.
• Use a competitions or events (such as an energy saving competition, hosting a renewable energy seminar or a visit to an eco-house) to raise awareness of the issues around energy efficiency and climate change
• Have a group leader or industry expert visit the local school/s – a perfect way of kick starting the children’s interest.

Online
• Set up a website and use social media such as Facebook and Twitter to provide information about the proposed project. This also provides a great channel for questions to be posed from the community that can be answered in between community meetings, and a great way of engaging with people who don’t attend community meetings.
• Start a blog detailing your progress – it is a great way of getting people involved. Try using photographs to catch people’s eye. It is however; very important that these sites are monitored regularly and questions answered as quickly as possible.

Structuring your community meetings

• In your first meeting, it is important to outline all the proposed ideas and setting a clear mandate explaining the aims of the consultations. This should initially outline the project plans with focus on what the community want; it is often useful to have already come up with some suggestions to structure the session and to end with a vote.
• It may also be beneficial to invite a speaker from a similar successful and completed project to help the community members visualise what they might expect.
• Once your project is underway it is a good idea to engage with the media to ensure that everyone locally is aware of the development – you could even invite along members of the local press to your meeting
• Certain key aspects of the development process (such as deciding on the details of the planning application) require dedicated meetings. The detailed guidance below will give you more information on the format of these meetings – it is also a good idea to liaise with local planning officers to ensure all the requirements are covered.