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Community forum: Facilitation and moderation

Client name City of Cockburn
Year 2024
Work completed Government and stakeholder engagement, Public relations, and specialist communications
Team Renée Wilkinson

Overview

In a challenging phase of public consultation for the rezoning application for a contentious parcel of privately-owned land, the City of Cockburn was required to host a wide-reaching community forum. Purple was engaged to facilitate the forum.

The City sought external support to facilitate this forum, conducted in a challenging phase of the public consultation, with integrity, professionalism, compassion and impartiality.

Challenge

Purple was presented with a number of challenges:

To ensure the focus remained on the productive purpose of the forum and to reassure participants and inform them when and how they could formally submit their responses to the rezoning application to the City.
To host the forum virtually and provide the technical infrastructure required.
To moderate the incoming questions from hundreds of attendees and reject out-of-scope queries; and
To ensure the engagement method was inclusive and considered the various accessibility needs of interested and impacted community stakeholders.

Solution

Purple managed all elements of the Community Forum, including overseeing all participants’ enquiries, preparing and distributing the rules of conduct and legal review process to ensure the content of the submissions was not defamatory in nature.

During the forum itself, Purple undertook the key roles of facilitator, moderator and technical support, managing all technical requirements of the webinar, including third-party video presentations, lighting, microphone, sound and multiple screen-sharing components.

Results

Following the forum, a comprehensive report documenting outcomes of the Community Forum was delivered, summarising key matters raised by attendees and a list of all questions, as well as reasoning why some moderated questions were rejected and subsequently not asked during the session. In total 57 registrations were received and 47 of these attended the forum.

An edited video recording of the Q&A session was supplied to City of Cockburn for publication to support various accessibility requirements.