Your Romford – A case study
The Project
Working in collaboration with Macreannor Lavington Architects, we conducted the public engagement for a project about Romford Town Centre’s future. From January to September 2019, the process identified local priorities, to help shape a Masterplan and Supplementary Planning Document.
Process
The audience for this engagement work was broad, involving residents and visitors coming from both the immediate neighbourhoods and wider borough, retail business owners, market stallholders, other local businesses and local political stakeholders. These audiences’ overlapping and conflicting priorities meant the engagement work needed to delicately balance the replaying of feedback to take the work beyond just listening and into action.
We developed a range of approaches to ensure that the engagement work reached this wide and diverse audience. Combining online and face-to-face engagement enabled people to contribute, even if they could not attend a physical event. Going to where people are, rather than expecting them to find us, maximised project reach and participation. Holding pop-ups in high footfall spots such as the Market Place, Romford’s main shopping street and inside shopping centres allowed us to reach and engage a passing audience.
Raising awareness among the varied audience was a key component of the project, and so our holistic and strategic campaign ‘Your Romford’ was launched. The project’s clear identity, strong messaging and bold branding were used across all materials and created awareness of the project across our timeline. Curious pop-up tools meant that people were drawn to us and wanted to find out what we were doing.
Your Romford’s consistent and clear messaging was distributed across the Council’s online and community networks, a dedicated website, social media campaign, press coverage and printed advertising e.g. borough-wide billboard ads, flyers.
Detailed data capture allowed us to monitor who we were reaching, analyse any gaps and add in additional activities/ change approach accordingly. Throughout the project, we reached over 1,400 people face-to-face, gathered over 1,200 number of pieces of feedback, and the final exhibition culminated in 92% of people stating that they either strongly agreed or somewhat agreed with the key priorities, and supported the Masterplan.
Outputs
- Digital and physical awareness raising campaign
- Local area walkabout
- 5 town centre pop ups
- 3 workshops with young people
- 5 tag on events
- 2 public exhibitions
- Targeted business drop-ins
- 1:1s with key stakeholders
- A dedicated website including an online feedback tool
Timeline: January 2019 – September 2019
Client: London Borough of Havering