Part 6: Creating effective community partnerships

handshake There are certain common issues that you may need to consider in order to successfully establish a partnership with community organisations:

Engagement

Describe your research and the purpose of engagement simply and accessibly. A useful way to think about this is to rehearse an ‘elevator pitch’ avoiding jargon and academic language.
Engage your partner as early as possible. The more involvement they have in scoping the project and co-designing it with you, the more likely they are to be positively engaged.
Ensure you feel you can work well with the partner. If your initial contact is too busy or isn’t interested in your project then you may need to look for someone different. Or ask them what they would need to be able to engage with the project – which leads to the next point…
Consider resourcing and funding needs of community partners. While they may be interested in working with you, many community organisations are under-resourced and under-funded. Reflecting their resourcing requirements in your funding bid or helping them to identify complementary funding for the project will ensure you have an engaged and effective partner. Please refer to the note on setting up partners and specialists as suppliers in Part 2 of this toolkit for some considerations if you need to pay community partners for their work.
The National Community Partner Network has a useful factsheet with tips for how to connect with community partnersLink opens in a new window.

Understanding

Agree shared goals and aims. Understand the aims of your community partner and make sure you are both getting something out of the project. This can be a good opportunity to explore the value of the project to the community ecosystem e.g. in terms of helping them to achieve funding or gain evaluation evidence.
Establish a shared language. Academic language is not widely understood and can place barriers between researchers and communities. Start the project right by agreeing a shared description of the project and language about its aims, methods and outcomes.
Manage expectations on timescales. Universities tend to move more slowly than community organisations so it is important to agree a realistic project timeline with partners at the beginning.
Discuss and agree ownership of intellectual property arising from the project. This can be an issue particularly when working with creatives, artists and freelancers who are used to owning the IP from their work. Get in touch with wie@warwick.ac.uk or the legal department if you need support.

Power

Respect the knowledge and expertise of your community partner. Researchers are experts in their field of study, but community partners have expertise you may not e.g. in effective ways of promoting activities and engaging target audiences, detailed local knowledge etc. Ensure you let your partner know that you value their expertise and do not assume you know more than them about a given topic.
Credit your community partner in your promotional and publicity materials. Agree branding guidelines at the outset and ensure you credit your partner appropriately.
Think about how you will share the findings/outputs of your project with the community: “extraction” of knowledge and information from communities through community-based research can exacerbate power imbalances. Try to think about how the community can experience, reflect on and use the outcomes from your public engagement activity.

Resilience

Flexibility is key. You may have an idea about a partnership or project, but this may change as the project develops. Be open to changing your approach, but keep in mind your goals and aims.
Maintain communication through the lifetime of the project to ensure your partner is still positively engaged. Online communication tools make this a lot easier to fit into busy days.
Keep and regularly review a risk register which considers external issues such as partner funding/resourcing/capacity and any issues that may affect the willingness and ability of the public to engage with the project. Think about actions you can take to address issues before they escalate.

Effectiveness

Reflect on your approach through a collaboratively devised evaluation. Review what did and didn’t work and ensure that you discuss the experience of the partner organisation as part of this.
The Evaluation toolkit can help you measure the success of your project and understand the experience of your audiences and partners.

Long term relationships

A research project for you can be everyday life for communities. Public engagement activities often take place on a project-by-project basis, but the community is always there.
Think about how to build long-term relationships with communities as part of your research practice.
This will foster trust and strong relationships between the university and the community and will enable you to conduct better quality public engagement with greater depth over time.

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