If we really want to get more people to engage with councils and governments on the important topics, then we need to shake up engagement.
Let’s apply a McDonalds or a Woollies / Coles / Aldi approach to public engagement projects and this is what you might do:
- Advertise your engagements – you certainly would never just post up some information on a website and expect people to find it.
- Open your doors out of the regular business hours – let’s face it most people can’t get to things between 9 to 5
- Create a Happy Meal – ok not exactly a Happy Meal, but you would “box things up” and add a toy to make the experience appealing.
- Upsell and cross-sell – once you have a customer, you’d want to keep them coming back. So, you’d focus on brand loyalty.
- Conduct market research and mystery shoppers – You would want an independent firm to research your customers (in our case community and stakeholders) to understand what they want.
- Run some great campaigns – There’s no way they’d be able to sustain a business if they all used the same brand and tagline so why do it in engagement. Search “have your say Australia” on Google search and you’ll yield 9.6m results in 0.47 seconds. It’s overused, dull and a bit misleading.
- Weekly specials – There’s nothing like a Saturday special, a freebie or a 2 for 1 deal to attract customers. So why can’t we run more competitions, incentives, reward schemes or programs to attract community.
Want to discuss this further? Contact us at info@articulous.com.au
