Step-By-Step Guide To Organizing A Community Engagement Event

Determine Your Objectives:

1. A Community Engagement Campaign is quite flexible and can be tailored to your organization’s specific goals. To begin planning, you should call a meeting and ask participating staff, individuals, and organizations to identify their objectives and determine to what extent they can be involved.

Possible objectives include:

• Encourage dialogue among adults and children
• Raise awareness among adults, parents, educators and others
• Form new organizational alliances
• Make new contacts with the media and become a resource to which they will return
• Recruit new members through increased visibility

2. Reach Out:

• Identify a Campaign Coordinator.
• Formulate ideas about whom you want to take part in this event, including ages of the participants.
• Contact other community organizations and briefly describe the event you would like them to help you host.
• Create a list of community leaders or public officials whose participation you believe will be valuable to the event.

3. Logistics:

• Decide on a date prior to the broadcast.   We will advise you of the UNC-TV broadcast dates and time.

• Find a suitable location.   Depending on how many community members you invite, you might need a large room. You will also need a TV monitor and VCR. Let us know if there is any problem with finding the appropriate facilities.

• Choose a facilitator, preferably someone who is familiar with the issues and can create a friendly environment for open discussion and can generate meaningful dialogue about the issues raised by the film. To help your facilitators, we will supply all the material that is available to us about the film.

4. Media Outreach:

If you have a press release please send us a copy. Ask reporters to attend your event or review the film.

• About four days prior to the event, contact the people to whom you sent press materials and encourage them to cover the event. Pitch the value of this unique screening and the importance of encouraging dialogue.

• Encourage reporters to include local broadcast information (day and time of the broadcast) in their stories so others can tune into the program.

5. On the day of your event:

• Confirm facilities, make sure TV and VCR are running smoothly, and perhaps arrange for some snacks. Go over discussion points with your facilitator. Ask someone from your affiliate to take pictures.

• Ask your facilitator to adapt enclosed Sample Discussion Points for use in your meeting.
• If you expect a particularly large group of people, plan to break participants into groups for discussion following the screening of the film.

• Pass around a sign-up sheet at the beginning, and the enclosed Response Form at the end, so that you will be able to obtain written feedback and reconnect with participants after the event.

• Reserve the last half hour of your meeting to strategize about follow-up activities.

• Announce the local broadcast date and pass around tune-in/talk back flyers encouraging responses to the films.

6. Follow-up Activities:

We hope this project will serve to launch ongoing dialogue and activities in your community. There are follow-up activities listed at the end of our discussion guides.