Engaging citizens and users

Governance International shows organisations how to re-design participation approaches to achieve better engagement, service quality improvements and efficiency savings...

In times of scarce budgets, engagement, consultation and involvement can no longer be organised just as ‘extras’, with unclear results. They need to be integrated into mainstream services so that they have a direct impact on the quality and cost of services offered to users and to citizens. Governance International is helping government, the third sector and business to redesign their engagement exercises to  produce these more cost-effective results.

Governance International has a strong track record, built up over eight years, in:

• Developing the Governance Audit as a Multi-Stakeholder Assessment and Community Empowerment Tool in several UK and European local councils, including Calderdale (UK), Barcelona, Ulm (Germany) and Baar (Switzerland), since 2002

• Delivering training courses and in-house training on co-design, co-commissioning and co-delivery of public services with users and community engagement in the UK, Germany, Spain and Central and Eastern European countries
  

• Leading the first European citizen survey on co-production of public services and preparing a report for the French EU Presidency, presented in a keynote speech to 1200 public administrators at the EU Quality Management Conference in Paris, October 2008
  - a summary of this research was published in “Public”, Guardian, Dec 2008,
  - key findings of the survey are quoted in a recent discussion paper on co-production by the Cabinet Office
  

• Consultancy for the National Audit Office for its recent report on “Promoting Participation with the Historic Environment”, July 2009
  

• Consultancy for the Cabinet Office on international best practice in “Citizens’ and Users’ Entitlements in Public Services”, June 2009