Maintaining long-term relationships

Build on and support existing community assets and systems

You are more likely to build sustained relationships and engagement by building on what already exists within the community. Take an asset-based approach, where you look at the existing resources, systems and strengths within the community and understand how your organisation can add to and support these with research-related activities. 

This allows the opportunity for research to embed within wider systems and become self-sustaining. For example, if the Local Authority is already working in partnership with community groups on a health and wellbeing initiative, how can research engagement and participation play a part?

Ask community partners and members what they would like

Understanding what people would like to see happen in their community can help you to crowdsource ideas that could bring meaningful change for people that live there. Community partners and individuals may have ideas that you had not even thought of as a possibility, and have connections to local opportunities and resources. 

Don’t stick to research-only activities 

If people are interested in activities that are not directly related to research, see what you can do to facilitate this. For example, people may be interested in getting information about a specific health topic. 

For example, in 2021-22, the South London Clinical Research Network (CRN) worked with a local migrant women’s centre, the Baytree Centre, who advised them that people were interested in learning about diabetes. South London CRN arranged for a diabetes specialist to provide an information session about diabetes at a regular women’s health and wellbeing group held at the centre. Research only made up a small part of the session, but it meant that research as a topic was introduced in the wider context of a common interest. 

Showing up for our communities and their interests beyond our own immediate agendas and deliverables also helps to build trust, as it shows that we care about their priorities, and in providing them with things that benefit them. This may mean that they are more willing to engage with us and with research when opportunities arise. 

Be honest about what you can and cannot do

It is much better to manage expectations from the beginning about what is possible through your relationship with communities than to over-promise or be overly vague about what you hope to achieve. By being transparent about what is possible, and what you can and cannot do as a partner with communities, means they can make an informed choice about working with you and don’t risk feeling disappointed and disengaging with you. 

Plan and find resourcing in advance - both internally and externally

Once you have decided you want to do community engagement, make sure you have a plan for resourcing this engagement. You will need to plan for resourcing in the short term, i.e. the early stages of your engagement. If you are hoping to build long-term relationships and you know that your funding processes involve fixed-term budgets, you will need to create a ‘future-proofing’ plan to make sure you have enough resources to continue your engagement over more than one of your fixed-term budget periods. It can be tricky to do this, but even having an estimated amount of resources set aside provisionally for future budgets can help to ensure you can continue your engagement. 

Your partner organisations need to be resourced for their time. Providing them with grants that they can take ownership of can help boost local engagement activities with research. Consider how you can either provide grants directly or support your partners to find and apply for funding that would enable them to continue engaging with health and social care research. There are various funding opportunities that enable communities to engage with health and social care research (see further resources for more information). Could you share these with your partners and support them with filling in an application or applying together as co-applicants?

Fluctuation between levels of engagement 

Your engagement with your community may not look the same all the time. For example, in some time periods, you may be informing (such as sharing information about studies or areas of health research), whilst in others there may be opportunities for more in-depth engagement (such as collaborating on research priorities to inform your organisation’s research strategy). 

This is natural and okay, provided it is agreed in partnership with the community, and continues to provide mutually beneficial results (i.e. it does not become extractive or tokenistic). Provide feedback and updates on an ongoing basis to your community partners, regardless of whether you feel like there is a lot to update people on. If people have given their time and contributions to your project, they should know what you have done as a result of that contribution, even where you haven't done as much as you had hoped, or if there are delays for any reason. 

If there is a lull in activity or there is less activity to provide feedback or share information on with partner organisations, can you offer to meet for a coffee anyway?