Tomorrow Together

In 2018, the City of Launceston, in partnership with Capire, redesigned its approach to community engagement. Through a robust cross-organisation, co-design process, we developed Tomorrow Together, and delivered a major program of engagement to inform future needs of the city.

The program brought together over 40 significant projects into one streamlined campaign, demonstrating a new way of engaging on complex and big-picture conversations. Rather than asking for feedback on each of the 40 plus projects separately, we provided a single-entry point for the community to learn about the issues, provide insights, and see how Council uses the engagement findings to develop plans and strategies.

Through the program, Council wanted to build its internal engagement capacity by:

• changing the way it engages;
• implementing, supporting, and nurturing an engagement awareness for all Council staff;
• delivering appropriate systems, tools, information, and data to underpin a deeper understanding of community needs and views; and
• establishing, embedding, and executing a sustainable and high performing approach to engagement.

Six themes were identified for the campaign and explored with the community:

1. A resilient city
2. A well-designed city
3. A unique and prosperous city
4. A mobile and accessible city
5. A social, inclusive, and fair city
6. A focused and sustainable Council

Each theme had a bespoke engagement approach that suited the target stakeholders, the content and the engagement level for different projects.

Communication was central to building informed participation and reach a broad audience and included a Your Voice Your Launceston’ online engagement platform, a foundation document, pavement decals and banners, Pop-Ups, a foundation document, social media posts, radio advertisements and postcards.

Engagement methods included an internal baseline survey, participant evaluation survey, internal evaluation surveys for each theme, a standard set of civic participation questions asked across all theme surveys, an interactive budget setting tool and events such as talks, speak outs, symposiums, and family friendly activities.

Around 3,500 people participated in the engagement, making it Council’s largest engagement program ever. The large scale of the campaign gave the community confidence that Council cares about giving them a voice in its decision making.

City of Launceston will use the feedback to inform projects across Council. They now have a robust source of data to use when making decisions. Council is also working to provide training and learning opportunities across the organisation, rather than centralising engagement to one team.