Engagement for Success

Community trust, acceptance and support are crucial to a thriving Australian seafood industry. People within the industry recognise that community values can and will affect their business directly or indirectly. Recent research suggests that the community generally supports the Australian seafood industry^[1]. Increasingly, seafood industry associations and organisations are looking at different community engagement approaches as a way of keeping or improving societal support for their seafood business, and the Australian seafood industry more broadly.

FRDC has already developed guiding material like the License to engage handbook to help industry operators do best-practice community engagement. Industry associations, sector organisations and seafood operators are already out communicating and engaging with the public about Australian seafood.

However, many seafood associations and organisations have been participating in community engagement activities such as festivals, cooking shows, and social media without a clear understanding of their goals and whether their activities are having a positive impact. This is where evaluating your community engagement work can help. Monitoring and evaluating your community engagement work can help you to plan your engagement strategy in a targeted way that makes the best use of available resources and more effectively achieves specific outcomes.

On this page, you will find diverse resources to help you successfully monitor and evaluate your community engagement. These resources are primarily designed to be used internally by seafood industry associations and seafood sector organisations who want to evaluate their community engagement. This page draws from the Monitoring and Evaluation Framework  for Community engagement.

Ultimately, industry community engagement seeks to achieve the following high-level goal:

• Gain and/or maintain a social licence to operate where most of the community trust, accept and support the seafood industry’s activities. This includes:
  • Becoming an industry that benefits the community through employment, food on the plate, and growth in regional communities
  • Gaining political support and acceptance of the Australian seafood industry
  • Becoming a resilient seafood industry with improved profits and viability

Industry community engagement activities will contribute towards the achievement of this goal through four key, long-term outcomes:

• The community valuing your seafood industry or activity
• More people are seeking employment in the seafood industry
• The press and community give the industry a fair go (there is less vilification of the seafood industry)
• Industry developing relationships that prevent, resolve, and minimise issues as they occur (credits up our sleeve)

Industry community engagement activities will contribute towards these long-term outcomes and broader goals through two impact pathways measured by this M&E Framework:

The first pathway focuses on engagement with the wider community. This includes face-to-face activities with the general community like festivals, targeted face-to-face activities like school visits or sponsoring hospitality events, and online engagement including social media, websites, and press media. These activities will contribute to the community hearing balanced messages about the industry and moving them along the spectrum from being unsupportive to highly supportive of the industry.

The second pathway focuses on building relationships with key influencers such as teachers, politicians, and NGOs. Improved relationships and partnerships with these influencers will help to prevent, resolve, and minimise issues as they occur.

Underlying all community engagement are the day-to-day operations of fishers and producers that “walk the talk” by showing respect for community values. For example, the work that industry does to operate sustainably and respect regulations. Where appropriate, this might include activities that bench-mark operations like gaining and maintaining accreditations or best-practice certifications.

The M&E Framework is based on four higher-level learning and evaluation questions (referred to as ‘key evaluation questions’). Key evaluation questions are ‘big picture’ guiding questions that provide the scaffolding for monitoring and evaluation activities. Ultimately, these are questions that we want to answer, and to do this we need to collect various forms of information and make a judgement call on what it all means. These key evaluation questions are:

1. What has our community engagement achieved? (Effectiveness)
2. How were the community engagement activities designed and delivered? (Process)
3. What are we learning about community engagement and what are we doing differently as a result? (Learning)
4. How has community engagement contributed to our social license to operate? (Impact)

Below are a series of tools designed to help seafood industry members and associations answer the questions outlined above.

This section contains a suite of tools to help industry associations and organisations monitor and evaluate their community engagement. The Digital Toolkit is structured across three sections:

• Getting started: tools to help you plan for your community engagement and evaluation.
• Gathering evidence against the key evaluation questions: tools to help you answer each of the key evaluation questions.
• Bringing it all together: tools to help you review, learn, and improve based on your M&E results, as well as communicate your evaluation findings.

The section below maps the tools to the relevant key evaluation questions. Click on the icon to open the relevant tool. Further detail on each of these tools, including recordings on how to use each tool, is provided below.

You can use this decision-making tool to identify the most cost-effective engagement activities tailored to your specific needs. The following interactive dashboard allows you to evaluate and compare different engaging activities by selecting your target audience, the expertise required, and your budget. The tool also provides case-study examples for each activity, giving you real-world insights to guide your decisions and help you achieve successful outcomes.

You can use the following How-to guide to easily adopt and implement the engagement activities most relevant to your needs. This PDF document provides step-by-step instructions for each activity, ensuring that you have all the necessary information to get started. The resources cover essential details such as activity objectives, target audience, format and content, as well as distribution and promotion strategies. For further support, it includes key contact information, making it easier for you to find help when you’re unsure where to begin.