Effective Practice #3: Community Engagement
The best practices outlined here focus on how place-based partnerships (PBPs) can embed community engagement throughout the life cycle of their dashboards – from design to use to long-term sustainability. They reflect a shift from community engagement as input-gathering, to community engagement as a pathway for developing local leaders, building trust, and mobilizing community-led action.
Finding Common Purpose
Finding Common Purpose
Central to FCP’s mission is the belief that publicly accessible and actionable outcomes data is key to strengthening the cross-sector collaborations that ensure that working Americans can thrive in ways that matter to them. The infrastructure and practices that support communities in identifying collective goals and tracking progress are essential to catalyzing action and driving the systemic shifts needed to improve lived experience across the country.
Within this context, community dashboards are an underutilized strategic tool that can accelerate and sustain common purpose and collaboration across the field of place-based work. If deployed well, they can act as vehicles for ensuring public access and commitment to outcomes that advance collectively-held communal goals. In a study of over 572 place-based partnerships, we identified six effective practices that when implemented together can support the success and sustainability of community dashboards. On a broader scale, these practices are valuable for ensuring the success of other modes of public outcomes sharing.
In this brief, we explore community engagement as an effective practice for sharing outcomes in place-based efforts. Our research shows that continuous community engagement, participation and collaboration can lead to successful design, continued relevance, and long-term sustainability of community dashboards.
Authentic and consistent engagement can expand community power and strengthen the legitimacy and impact of community dashboards to help meet north star goals. When residents are meaningfully engaged in defining local priorities, dashboards can more accurately reflect the lived realities and shared hopes within a community.
The best practices outlined below focus on how place-based partnerships (PBPs) can embed community engagement throughout the life cycle of their dashboards – from design to use to long-term sustainability. They reflect a shift from community engagement as input-gathering, to community engagement as a pathway for developing local leaders, building trust, and mobilizing community-led action.
Section 1: Empowering Residents to Define Community Engagement Strategies
Engagement is most meaningful when it reflects residents’ own definitions of what it should look like and why it matters. When engagement is tied to individual and collective purpose, it fosters greater trust, mutual respect, and long-term commitment.
This doesn’t happen overnight. PBPs we’ve spoken to say it can take years to establish strong connections and develop understanding and language around local challenges and a common vision before residents are ready to engage in collective action. But without this sustained investment, you risk misaligning PBI efforts with community priorities. In short, it’s hard work, but worth it to make lasting change.
Design community engagement strategies in partnership with residents to ensure opportunities align with and amplify what matters most to them.
Before starting a co-design process, consider using tools like actor maps to identify key stakeholders, trusted leaders, and resident groups whose lived experience or relationships are essential to the work. Understanding who is most impacted by an issue—and who holds influence, trust, or connections critical to solution-building—helps ensure engagement is intentionally inclusive, strategic, and well-aligned with the initiative’s goals.
Meaningful engagement also depends on understanding residents’ goals for their participation— whether it’s to create opportunities for their families, build relationships, or access resources—and creating spaces that honor and support those goals.
Remove logistical and financial barriers to participation.
Make it easier for residents to engage in community dashboard development, meaning-making, and use by designing engagement opportunities that account for everyday lives and responsibilities. This can include offering childcare or meals, translation or interpretation, transportation support, scheduling events outside of traditional work hours, and offering multiple options for participation (e.g., joining in-person, online, or by phone). Hosting gatherings in familiar community spaces like libraries, schools, or places of worship can also increase access and trust. Co-design engagement strategies for community dashboard work—including goals, methods, and compensation for engagement—with residents to ensure their time, insight, and lived expertise are fairly recognized and valued. This collaborative approach helps ensure strategies are relevant, respectful, and grounded in the day-to-day realities and aspirations of community members.
Section 2: Institutionalizing Engagement Practices
Codifying community engagement practices, including policies, protocols, and decision-making roles – in partnership with residents – can ensure transparency and accountability even as community leaders and roles may change.
Document and formalize engagement practices.
Documenting and formalizing practices creates enduring processes, supporting resiliency through things like employee or leadership turnover and evolving priorities. This helps institutionalize engagement as an ongoing commitment, not a one-time process.
Compensate residents for their time, insight, and lived expertise.
Recognize lived experience as a valuable form of expertise by offering fair compensation to residents who contribute to the development and use of community dashboards. Compensation can take many forms, such as stipends, honoraria, or gift cards; the type of compensation should be selected in partnership with residents, taking into account the length and nature of engagement, what feels most respectful and usablePosition compensation as a non-negotiable, built into community dashboard budgets and engagement plans from the start. Initiatives that name compensation explicitly signal that community members are valued partners and help shift norms within institutional cultures that may resist it.
When residents aren’t acknowledged or compensated, it can signal to them that their contributions are less valuable, which can undermine trust in future engagement.
Section 3: Investing in resident leadership and power
Treat engagement as a pathway for long-term community leadership. Create clear roles and meaningful opportunities for residents to lead, influence decisions, and shape how the community dashboard is used to mobilize local change.
Identify and build relationships with trusted community leaders.
Map individuals who hold trust, influence, and strong relationships in specific neighborhoods, cultural communities, or around key issues. These may be formal leaders (e.g., pastors, educators) or informal connectors (e.g., parent organizers, elders, small business owners). Bypassing these leaders can undermine engagement efforts. Fostering these relationships will help create a locally-grounded foundation for mobilizing broader networks of support.
Reframe engagement as a path to growing community leadership and talent.
Approach engagement not just as a way to gather input for the community dashboard, but also as a strategy to recognize, inspire, and grow the leadership and talent already present in the community. When initiatives invest in building residents’ confidence, skills, and connections, engagement becomes a key pathway for ownership and action on the issues that matter most to residents.
Create and support clear pathways for resident leadership within the initiative and its partners.
Support residents in moving from contributors to changemakers by building leadership roles directly into the structure of the initiative (e.g., roles on decision-making bodies, working groups, advisory boards). Connect residents with leadership development opportunities (e.g., advocacy training, community organizing workshops) that help them build the skills, confidence, and networks to support their leadership.
Section 4: Driving Community Engagement in Dashboard Data
Engage residents in making sense of local outcomes data to ensure it reflects their experiences and becomes more meaningful, relevant, and useful for advancing individual and shared goals.
Engage community members early in interpreting and communicating dashboard data.
Before sharing a community dashboard publicly, invite community members and partners to review it early in the analysis and communication process. This helps surface what might be missing, misrepresented, or in need of local context, with residents playing a key role in shaping how their local data is interpreted and communicated. Engaging residents early and consistently builds trust, increases the relevance of the dashboard, and makes it more likely that the information will be used to inform action and advocacy.
Partner with and support community ambassadors to engage residents with the community dashboard.
Trusted community leaders and ambassadors—individuals with deep relationships and credibility in their communities—can serve as vital bridges between institutional and community perspectives. They help translate language, context, and culture; facilitate engagement; and ensure the dashboard reflects community realities and values. They are essential for bridging data literacy gaps and helping residents engage with data to advance their own goals. Strengthen their leadership by providing training and support in areas such as data interpretation, facilitation, and storytelling.
Connect community dashboards to lived experience through community dialogue.
When residents see themselves and their communities reflected in the community dashboard, the data becomes more meaningful and more likely to inspire action. Creating space for residents and partners to make meaning of local data together helps reconnect the data with lived experience, deepen understanding, and spark connections that are critical to collective action and advocacy. Use visual and narrative storytelling, neighborhood-specific examples, and disaggregated data to make patterns more visible and relevant. Then, facilitate conversations—through town halls, gallery walks, listening sessions, etc.—that invite people to ask questions, explore what the findings mean for their community, and identify shared priorities and opportunities for change.
When institutions try to engage residents directly—without first building relationships with trusted local leaders or connectors—it can backfire or be less effective. In marginalized communities, institutional trust is often low, and efforts without trusted intermediaries can stall or even deepen skepticism, especially if there’s a history of broken trust or extractive engagement. Several PBIs shared how they were able to strengthen their work by partnering with trusted community leaders and ambassadors with deep community ties, and how doing so yielded more meaningful participation and stronger connections to local priorities
Section 5: Using Community Dashboards to Drive Action and Advocacy
Support residents in using the community dashboard to guide local priorities, drive action, and advocate for change—amplifying community leadership and power in decision-making.
Intentionally engage impacted residents in community dashboard decision-making.
Residents most affected by the issues reflected in the community dashboard should be central to decisions about how it’s developed, updated, and used. Move beyond one-off feedback to true power sharing by integrating proximate voices into advisory groups, governance bodies, and strategic planning processes tied to the outcomes identified in the dashboard. This ensures the dashboard reflects lived realities and priorities, making it a tool for credible, community-driven action.
Ensure community dashboard decision-making is transparent and equitable.
When residents understand where and how their voice matters, it builds trust, increases transparency, and encourages consistent engagement. Clearly define how key decisions are made, who makes them, and how resident voices are weighted. This includes formalizing resident decision-making roles with clear protocols—such as voting rights, defined decision authority, and accountability measures.
PBI leaders that we work with stress that the best community buy-in comes with an investment in community data literacy. This includes developing approachable tools and visualizations and leaning on trusted guides who can build confidence, translate language, and help residents engage with data to advance their own goals.
Support residents and partners in navigating shared decision-making spaces.
Help residents feel prepared and confident when joining governance or technical groups by offering orientation, mentorship, or peer support. These spaces often come with their own jargon, norms, and power dynamics that privilege institutional knowledge, professional experience, or dominant cultural norms—things that can make it difficult for residents to fully participate. This turns participation from symbolic to substantive.
Build community capacity to use dashboard data for advocacy and change.
When residents can confidently access and use data, they’re better equipped to communicate and advocate for the changes their communities need. Support residents in using dashboard data to advance the priorities they care about—from organizing campaigns, to influencing policy, to shaping decisions in schools, nonprofits, and local government. To do this, ensure that residents know how to access and use the dashboard data, understand what it shows, and apply it to the issues that matter most to them. Initiatives help build this capacity by offering trainings and tutorials on how to navigate the dashboard data, interpret key indicators, and tell compelling, data-informed stories.
Closing
The best practices detailed above are aimed at building trust and community buy-in. Doing so will ensure consistent engagement and strong empowerment. But it takes time. Inclusive governance and decision-making that can often move slowly. Reaching alignment requires deeper dialogue, more iteration, and a willingness to “slow down to move fast.”
At FCP, we believe that this investment is a critical component in driving a community-led vision for what it means to thrive. For more information on our approach, or for questions about how to learn more, please complete the contact form at LINK.