Giving Feedback

Feedback the results of the engagement activities as quickly after the exercise as possible. Giving feedback to the people who have participated in your activity is not only good practice, it is good manners, a good P. R. exercise and good for building up your relationship and reputation with local people.

Make sure you incorporate feedback as part of your initial planning stage for your consultation as it can take time and resources to undertake feedback properly.

When giving feedback BE HONEST! People are usually very realistic in their expectations and will understand the restraints your service may be under if they are told about them. Just ignoring an issue that has been raised because you cannot tackle it is not good enough, and research has show that this can lead to cynicism amongst the people you have consulted.

Feedback can be done in a number of ways depending upon your initial choice of consultation method

Postal feedback via a letter or short newsletter is useful for posted or self completed questionnaires. Can also be used to feedback to participants of a public meeting or focus group where names and addresses have been collected. Make sure that you keep people's names and addresses separate from any comments or views they may have given, take these details on a separate list or form.
Group feedback / presentation style - to community groups or focus groups where appropriate (maybe where names and addresses were not collected to encourage participation by anonymity or where you need to keep a group of people on board with a project).
By poster in local supermarkets, shops, community centres, schools or in council facilities like libraries, leisure centres etc. A simple "you said this, we did that" approach can work.
By newsletter / poster through doors, useful when working in a small geographical area.
In local newspapers if possible. Some papers are interested in this type of story.

Local Example - a consultation exercise took place in Summer 2003 with pupils at a local high school about the school's bid to become a Specialist Centre. The consultation took place with four classes of different age groups using a simple questions on flip-chart and answers on post-it notes method. The results formed part of the schools bid for funding.

Feedback was given to each class in the form of a copy of the final report with a covering letter which was sent to the class teacher. As well as this general feedback, every child that took part was sent a thank you letter with a brief summary of findings and what would happen to their views next.

The teachers involved said that the young people were very happy to receive their own, personal letter of thanks. They had received feedback from the young people about how valued they felt by this approach and even asked when the consulters might come back again! This was a simple but affective approach to giving feedback that showed the young people that they were valued in this work.