After 30 years working in community engagement across rural and regional Australia, you start to notice patterns.
One of the most consistent, and frustrating, is this: organisations managing complex projects go to market without a clear picture of what good engagement actually looks like for their project. The engagement plan, the document that should be driving the whole process, usually gets written after a consultant is appointed. By then, the budget is locked in and someone else is already shaping the approach.
And here’s the thing, that someone is rarely an engagement specialist.
On most complex projects, the brief is written by whoever is leading the project. An engineer. A planner. A project manager. All skilled, all necessary, but not engagement specialists. They set the scope, they estimate the budget, and engagement gets whatever is left after the technical work is costed. Which is often not enough.
Communities notice when engagement is thin. They notice when the process feels rushed, or tokenistic, or like the decisions were already made. And they remember. That shapes how they respond to the next project, and the one after that.
I built Groundwork because I kept asking myself the same question, what if the engagement planning happened in-house before anyone was appointed? What if the organisation came to market already knowing what they needed, with a scope that reflected their community and their project, not a consultant’s best guess at a budget?
Groundwork works with project teams, and where it’s needed, executives and councillors or board members, to develop a complete engagement plan and a procurement-ready scope before going to market. The people who need to own and support the engagement are in the room when it’s shaped. And when bids come in, they reflect what the work actually needs.
It doesn’t add to project costs. The engagement plan is already a standard deliverable in most consulting contracts; Groundwork simply moves that thinking to where it belongs. Before you sign anything.
Two packages are available, from $3,000. If you’ve got a project coming up and you’re wondering whether this might be relevant, I’d love to have a conversation.
Lisa McCoy Local Logic Place
📞 0428 644 070
📧 [email protected]
