We’re feeling energised as we zoom through the first month of the new year. That’s because we can see what’s ahead, and we’re excited about the possibilities. Are you ready to set sail with us? We’re celebrating what’s been achieved in partnership with people just like you so far, while setting our sights on facilitating more important conversations in more places and having even more positive impact on more communities. We’re ready to embrace where engagement and deliberation are going, are you?
A message of thanks to you - our clients, participants, partners and friends - and hope for what’s ahead. As we head towards the end of a big year of big conversations, our team shares what they’re grateful for, their biggest highlight of 2023 and what’s really lighting them up when they think forward to the new year ahead.
Meet the newest additions to the MosaicLab team: Belinda Lowing and Fox Gillen. Both Belinda and Fox have long career histories that span across interesting and complex roles that have included facilitation and engagement in many forms. Learn more about these two and gain some insights into who they REALLY are through their answers to our fast five questions!
Ever wondered what makes our facilitators tick? Meet the newest additions to the MosaicLab team: Jody Kingston and Aaron Bosch. Both Aaron and Jody have fascinating, diverse backgrounds and have come to MosaicLab and facilitation via interesting pathways. Find out what they love about their work, what impact they hope to have and how they answered a list of fun and probing questions that we like to call The Telling Top 10...
Four language interpreters. Child-minding. Recruitment challenges. Birthday cake and a lot of laughs. These are just some of the unique highlights of our work with Quit Victoria and VicHealth in 2022 on a project to reduce tobacco-related harm in public housing. This case study takes a detailed look at how MosaicLab supported this process with a residents’ panel and sense-making workshops. All to drive improved, long-term outcomes for community and public health.
Deliberative engagement requires time, money and resources and that means you want high returns. Trusted, public decision-making is one (excellent) outcome. However, the benefits can go much further. Here are six ways to generate bigger benefits, longer-term impacts and higher returns on your deliberative engagement investment.
You want the best engagement supplier for the job, so it pays to have a critical eye when assessing that pile of proposals. The easy choice that appears to ‘tick every box’ isn’t always the right one. Here’s our guide to picking the best proposal, including red flags to look out for in the procurement process.
Development of a high-level engagement framework, policy or strategy is an important step in building an engaging organisation. Having this document finalised, however, does not indicate that the hard work is over.
To truly embed engagement across an organisation, overarching strategies must be brought to life through implementation. Today, we're addressing this myth by providing 10 ways to start embedding engagement across the organisation and see your engagement strategy put into practice.
When you’re preparing information inputs for a community engagement process, organisations can spend a lot of time producing glossy brochures and simplified, summarised content. It’s easy to get lost in all the posters and paragraphs and lose sight of what’s important - what you’re really saying about the issue or decision at hand.
Getting the balance right can be challenging. So, in this post we’ll not only address this months myth, we’ll also give you 6 simple tips for providing the right information at the right level of detail.
Many organisations try to minimise risk by 'holding the reins tight' when it comes to communicating with their communities and stakeholders around engagement processes and major projects/decisions.
This so-called 'risk averse' approach tends to include carefully constructing tightly worded (yet often very uninformative) key messages and strictly withholding any information deemed potentially inflammatory or uncomfortable - even when inextricably relevant to the issue at hand.
There's also approval processes applied to the release of any information, which can slow down communication activities - sometimes to a considerable extent - depending on how rigid or intricate these processes are.
While organisations tend to feel comfortable with this well-worn approach, the promise of 'safety' through control is generally just an illusion.
Welcome to our February #MonthlyMyth post! Today, we're exploring a commonly held belief that prevents many organisations from engaging in a meaningful way with citizens around complex, technical or information-rich issues.
This one misconception can reduce an engagement process to a surface exercise without any real outcomes, create unintended and less than desirable consequences down the track and even prevent a potentially valuable engagement process from happening altogether.
So let's get into it - what can everyday citizens REALLY handle and should we ask them to handle it?
Welcome to MosaicLab's first ever #MonthlyMyth post. There are a number of myths and misconceptions that often surface in relation to facilitation, deliberative democracy, outrage management, conflict management and community engagement more broadly.
As part of our work to promote quality engagement practice and share information and learning we are addressing some of the most commonly expressed myths and misconceptions each month on our blog. We hope you find this series interesting, informative, and perhaps a little surprising!
