Case Study

Helping an ambitious Parish Council engage with local residents and understand desires for their much loved village

Giving local people a voice and involving them in the decisions that affect them and their community is at the heart of our work with local Councils. We are proud to have worked with a well-known Cambridgeshire Parish Council to help them better understand and communicate their residents’ desires for, and from the village.

The Council team had worked in house to design and distribute an in-depth residents’ questionnaire. Focussed on uncovering residents’ views, this feedback would help steer the strategy and investments for the Parish Council and its community groups over the next five years. However, when the data came in, there was a lot to look through – with hundreds of responses to the numerous questions delivered to the doorsteps and inboxes of the 1500 village dwellings.

The Clerk knew that it was important to gain an independent perspective on this key data, and wanted help from a consultancy that really understood community engagement from a local government perspective. Keystone’s experience with other Councils, like our work on the St Neots and Huntingdon Neighbourhood Plan campaigns, brought us to the attention of this highly motivated Parish Council.

The Parish Clerk approached Keystone after participating in Keystone’s Community Engagement workshop at the 2019 Cambridgeshire Councils conference. They immediately saw how gaining an independent review of the data, and a fresh pair of eyes to extract insights, would add real strength to the Parish Council’s presentation back to the residents at its upcoming AGM.

Once we’d extrapolated the data and presented the final report, we prepared presentation-ready graphs, charts and messaging in PowerPoint format; and coached the presenters ready for the AGM.

Calling on Keystone to develop a bespoke presentation on the back of our initial data report meant that the messaging and visual display of the content could be explained and displayed clearly. We helped the Council develop a presentation that was built with the audience in mind; taking them through each key area of the survey, written with a level of detail that the audience would best respond to.

The Keystone impact

  • Full data analysis of key questionnaire figures, stats and summary data
  • Text analysis to draw conclusions from open ended questions (where people gave unique, detailed, written answers)
  • Filtering and cross-tabulation of results to identify key highlights and emerging trends from respondents
  • A distilling of all data input to generate an understanding of the most regularly occurring comment
  • The packaging of data trends, core focusses and future commitments into an easily digestible, beautifully designed AGM presentation.

We’re confident that we can increase interest and inject impact into your community focussed activities – be it surveys, outreach events, awards or presentations. Put us to the test.