As 2024 wraps up, our facilitation team is sharing their standout moments. From mysteriously missing catering and questionable gong skills to a surprise bush trek under the stars, 2024 had its fair share of laughs, twists, and unforgettable memories.
The City of Melbourne views affordable housing as crucial infrastructure for maintaining a liveable, inclusive, and prosperous city. With a projected shortfall of 23,200 affordable homes by 2036, immediate action is needed to address this long-standing issue. While there is broad community support for affordable housing, acceptance often wanes at the neighbourhood level. To tackle this, a People’s Panel of 39 diverse community members was established to represent local perspectives.
A support facilitator studying psychology, our first team member based in NSW and a brand new participant recruitment coordinator... meet the newest additions to the MosaicLab team: Polo, Polly and Gus! Learn more about this trio of terrific team members and gain some insights into who they REALLY are through their answers to our fast five questions!
How should we plan for the new energy future while providing affordable services that meet changing customer and community needs? Two representative ‘Voice of the Customer’ panels in Queensland answered this question. Randomly selected, everyday customers deliberated and agreed on recommendations that electricity distributors Ergon Energy Network and Energex used to prepare Regulatory Proposals for the Australian Energy Regulator (AER). Delve into a tale of two deliberative customer panels, and gain ideas and insights you can draw on for your next project.
We believe in supporting emerging and underserved people and communities to have deeper conversations that lead to stronger democracies. ML Giving is the new name of the not-for-profit part of MosaicLab - a banner for the work we do that gives back. We’re focussing on furthering community inclusion and action beyond just getting input and instead moving into enabling local decision-making. Explore the principles ML Giving will operate under, and the kind of projects and conversations we’re supporting.
Fires, floods, a pandemic, wars and economic stress – humans everywhere are living through or witnessing a multitude of distressing events at once. It’s a time to connect with and support each other, even if we fear emotionally charged topics or feel uncertain how to approach them. Here are nine skills you can use in everyday conversations with family, friends and colleagues to help you and them process these events, bear heavy emotions and move forward together.
Many of the engagement processes MosaicLab delivers are built around big, complex or strategic issues or decisions. These processes can result in outcomes that affect large cohorts of staff across an organisation.
Not only will some of these staff be required to implement the decision, but involving and informing them from the start of the process will contribute to the overall success of your project.
We wanted to delve deeper into this topic, so we sat down with two internal communication and change specialists with backgrounds in the public sector. They’ve shared easy-to-implement internal communications tips and ideas that you could apply to any big project, engagement process or change.
The rise of social media has transformed how we communicate with each other and how organisations communicate with their customers and communities. This rapidly changing landscape can be unforgiving to those who play it safe, and, often, government is seen to be lagging behind the private sector.
Effective communication is a key component of every engagement process. So, today we’re providing some communication inspiration - exploring some examples of bold, creative public sector campaigns that cut through the clutter.
When you’re preparing information inputs for a community engagement process, organisations can spend a lot of time producing glossy brochures and simplified, summarised content. It’s easy to get lost in all the posters and paragraphs and lose sight of what’s important - what you’re really saying about the issue or decision at hand.
Getting the balance right can be challenging. So, in this post we’ll not only address this months myth, we’ll also give you 6 simple tips for providing the right information at the right level of detail.
Online tools are an important part of the modern engagement landscape. They offer a broad range of benefits from ease and flexibility of access to handy data analysis options. They can be absolutely worth the investment, and are integral parts of most successful, contemporary engagement processes.
However, it's a mistake to think that a great online platform or tool alone will solve all your engagement problems or attract high levels of participation - no matter how much you spent on building it or how long you spent on perfecting it.
This monthly myth touches on a mistake that is pretty easy to make and can catch organisations out, leaving them without much of a return on what can be a significant investment.
Many organisations try to minimise risk by 'holding the reins tight' when it comes to communicating with their communities and stakeholders around engagement processes and major projects/decisions.
This so-called 'risk averse' approach tends to include carefully constructing tightly worded (yet often very uninformative) key messages and strictly withholding any information deemed potentially inflammatory or uncomfortable - even when inextricably relevant to the issue at hand.
There's also approval processes applied to the release of any information, which can slow down communication activities - sometimes to a considerable extent - depending on how rigid or intricate these processes are.
While organisations tend to feel comfortable with this well-worn approach, the promise of 'safety' through control is generally just an illusion.
