Green and great!

What does it mean and how does it relate to our public participation (IAP2) training practice?

Well, it means taking a little step to improve our company’s green performance.Starting this April 22, Earth Day, the team at Delaney and Associates Inc. is greening its world-famous, Amazing Prize Bin – one of the fun things we do in class to engage (yes, it’s a P2 pun) our IAP2 participants.

We’re always looking for ways to make greener, healthier choices as part of our Corporate Social Responsibility promise; moving forward, we promise to find the greenest and healthiest prizes for our Amazing Prize Bin. We’re learning lots about really neat products and trying them at home, too.

Thanks to Terra20 – Ottawa’s new eco-department store – for the inspiration and for making green and great prizes so available.

Hint to Burlington IAP2 participants, April 22-26: Do some Earth Day research to win some green and great prizes.

Happy Earth Day; let’s make it Every Day.

I argue here that, the an organization’s willingness to be open and engaging (i.e. share decision making), the more people will judge, early in their relationship, the degree of openness an organization holds, or framed differently – their culture of consultation. This initial assessment guides their subsequent decisions on if and how they will invest their time and emotional energies to become engaged.

What this means to organizations for attracting people to our awareness sessions, education programs, online engagements, or other initiatives for shared decision making, is that we need to be mindful of the authenticity of our previous engagement efforts. This legacy can either hinder or help us going forward, but don’t be mistaken that our record on authentic engagement is benign when people consider an invitation to get engaged.

This may mean that to build or re-build relationships we may have to over-scope our engagement to draw people in and demonstrate a true culture of consultation. This can get further complicated when trying to obtain internal buy-in, in the absence of an organizational culture of consultation.

It may sound like I am blaming the victim here, but my experience tells me that a stakeholder group’s past experience with an organization can be a disadvantage moving forward and needs to be addressed if building social capital will bring a positive return on investment.

For our third Community of Practice webinar, we are excited to host Colleen Nystedt (Hardwick), Founder and CEO of PlaceSpeak, an online public consultation platform.

Join us on September 20, 2012 for a presentation about PlaceSpeak – an online, location-based public consultation platform that seeks to transform the way people interact with “location based topics”.

Colleen Nystedt (Hardwick), Founder and CEO of PlaceSpeak, will discuss how PlaceSpeak connects people’s online identities with their residential addresses so that they can voice their opinions electronically and provide proponents with confidence that they are receiving feedback from the right places.

The webinar will be in two-parts:

1. The first part of the presentation will overview the PlaceSpeak platform and the rationale behind it. 
2. The second part will demonstrate how to set-up an online consultation using PlaceSpeak.

Colleen has a degree in Urban Geography from UBC, is a former member of the City of Vancouver’s Development Permit Board Advisory Panel and is a member of Lambda Alpha International. She currently sits on the City of Vancouver Mayor’s Task Force on Housing Affordability and continues her interdisciplinary graduate work at UBC.

Recent PlaceSpeak success stories and clients include the Metro Vancouver Urban Futures Survey, City of New Westminster, Vancouver School Board, Town of Gibsons, District of Tofino and the The Recycling Council of British Columbia.

“We are advancing the public consultation process by creating an online platform that enables inclusive, informed participation, policy development and decision making.” – PlaceSpeak.com

Registration is limited to 100 participants, with 50 spaces reserved for Delaney-Thinkwell Community of Practice members.

We are excited to offer the IAP2 Planning  for Effective Public Participation course, October 3 – 4, 2012, in Halifax, immediately following the IAP2 North American Conference. The venue is the historic Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21.

Course participant learn how to use industry standard tools and principles to design and manage public participation, set clear objectives and manage the full scope of planning needed for effective participation.

The course is aimed at individuals in any level of government, the private sector or a not-for-profit organization, where public participation plays a role. Both beginners and seasoned veterans are welcome and will find the course informative.

For full details, please download our brochure.

Obtaining community support is paramount to reducing overall risks and executing sustainable and successful wind energy projects. Check out the following slideshow from the workshop for further points and strategies to ensure community support: Dealing with community opposition (NIMBYism) to wind power.

For latest information on wind power and clean energy check out the following hashtags on Twitter:  #windpower, #wind, #windenergy, #cleanenergy, and #renewableenergy.

As part of our professional development webinar series, we are holding a session on Online Engagement Tools and Techniques. This second webinar in our series will provide a high-level overview of the social media landscape and the top trends in social media use for local government. We’ll also go over the tools and techniques for effective management of social media and answer participant questions during the Q&A session.

This webinar will be hosted by Marko Pajalic, our online engagement specialist, and will explore current trends in using online tools for community and public engagement. Marko recently undertook a broad review of social media use by municipalities, conducted a social media audit and worked on the social media strategy for the District of West Vancouver. Prior to that, he worked on online initiatives at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia, which included online communications, online knowledge management, information visualization, and social media. Marko has a BA and MA from UBC and closely follows digital communication trends and their applications in public policy, citizen engagement and research.

For more information or to register visit our webinar page.

Registration is limited to 100 participants, with 50 spaces reserved for Delaney-Thinkwell Community of Practice members.

We’re very pleased to be working with the Canadian Wind Energy Association (CanWEA) in support of their community engagement efforts. As part of this collaboration, we will be holding a workshop on community engagement and risk management in relation to wind farms at the CanWEA Annual Conference and Exhibition (October 14-17, 2012) in Toronto.The rationale for this workshop is that community engagement helps developers work with the community to design projects that are socially and economically durable over the long-term. Experience has shown this is the best way to reduce transaction costs and time between development investments and revenue generation. During this workshop, Richard Delaney, President of Delaney and Associates Inc. will present and discuss the basis of community fear and anger relating to wind farms.

The session will demonstrate how this potentially destructive force can be managed based on risk management and communication principles and community engagement best practices. The session will help participants to identify community fear and anger before it manifests into group sentiment and actions that become unmanageable.

The workshop will help participants understand the roots of anger and how to assess the potential for activism. Based upon this understanding, participants will learn to develop communication strategies to address the potential for outrage – a potentially costly and even project-ending risk – and will learn how to respond with a well-structured and cost- effective community engagement program.

For more information, please contact us or register now via our Registration page.

We’ve expanded! We are very excited to announce the opening of our new Vancouver office at 580 Hornby Street. We love the new space, the accessible location, and our friendly colleagues at Navius Research.

The office is conveniently located in downtown Vancouver’s business hub, making it a great place to meet with current and potential clients across the health, natural resources, environment, government, non-profit and private sectors. The new location will support the online engagement aspects of our public participation and stakeholder engagement business lines, as well as other projects, and will help us strengthen the already great relationships we have with our West Coast clients. These are exciting times for Delaney and Associates Inc. as we broaden our expertise and tackle new opportunities – so, stay tuned for more information on our new online engagement platforms and capabilities!

If you are in Vancouver and would like to find out about our IAP2 training, or our facilitation, and community and stakeholder engagement practices, please stop by! We look forward to welcoming current and new clients, associates, and friends over the coming years.

The full certificate program is made up of 3 individual certificates: Planning for Effective Public Participation (2 days), Techniques for Effective Public Participation (2 days) and Communications for Effective Public Participation (1 day). The courses are aimed at individuals working in government, the private sector or a not-for-profit organization and the level of instruction is intended for relative beginners but also for seasoned professionals currently working in the field of citizen engagement, public involvement or stakeholder relations and interested in refreshing or enhancing their understanding of public participation.

Read the full details here or register now. If you need further convincing, read what our former students had to say via our testimonials page!

Delaney and Associates Inc. is pleased to present this 60-minute interactive webinar hosted by John Godec. John is president of Godec, Randall & Associates Inc., which offers consulting and training services for business and government in high stakes communication, consensus, crisis, conflict resolution and public involvement. He is an International Association of Facilitators (IAF) Certified Professional Facilitator (CPF), one of the original developers of the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) Certificate training course, a developer of the IAP2 Emotion, Outrage and Public Participation course with Dr. Peter Sandman, and a U.S. Board Director for IAP2. John is a roster member of the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution, and helped develop the risk and emergency communication protocol for the National Governors Association in the United States.

Title: Understanding and Managing Fear, Anger and Emotion in Public Participation
Date: Thursday, April 19, 2012
Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM EDT

During this webinar, you will explore these questions:

• What is “outrage” in the context of public participation and risk communication?
• What makes people angry when being engaged?
• How can one mitigate outrage in a P2 setting?

Who should attend?

• P2 professionals
• Facilitators working in the area of public participation
• Public and elected officials
• Policy and program managers who engage their stakeholders
• Corporate officials who must engage the public for legal compliance and permitting processes

Individual pre‐registration is required. Space is limited to the first 100 participants. Register early to avoid disappointment.*

* 50 spaces have been reserved for Delaney‐Thinkwell Alumni members.