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A presentation at the office

Stakeholder and Community Engagement

Good decisions start with understanding the people, communities and organisations they affect.

McElrea Consulting designs and delivers stakeholder and community engagement for councils, organisations and complex projects across New Zealand. We help our clients understand different perspectives, navigate challenging conversations and create meaningful opportunities for people to shape the decisions that affect them.

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Our approach combines engagement strategy, facilitation, research and clear communications to generate useful insight, strengthen relationships and support better decision-making.

What we do

  • Stakeholder and community engagement strategy

  • Engagement design and delivery

  • Stakeholder mapping and analysis

  • Community workshops, hui and forums

  • Interviews, focus groups and surveys

  • Engagement for strategy and major projects

  • Complex and sensitive engagement processes

  • Engagement analysis and reporting

  • Strategic communications and narrative development

  • Facilitation of multi-stakeholder conversations

 

Our approach

Effective engagement is more than communicating a decision or asking people what they think. It starts with being clear about why you're engaging, who needs to be involved, what can genuinely be influenced and how people's input will inform what happens next.

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We design engagement around the context - from targeted conversations with key stakeholders through to region-wide community engagement. Our focus is on making participation accessible, gathering meaningful insight and ensuring decision-makers can clearly understand what they have heard.

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Where issues are complex or perspectives differ, we create processes that allow those differences to be understood rather than simplified away.

 

Engagement that supports better decisions

The result is engagement that gives people a meaningful opportunity to participate and gives decision-makers clear, useful insight.

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We help organisations understand different perspectives, identify areas of common ground and difference, strengthen relationships and make better-informed decisions.

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Engagement in practice

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Greater Christchurch Partnership - Huihui Mai

 

McElrea Consulting working in partnership with Great Scott Communications, delivered communications and engagement across Canterbury for the Greater Christchurch Partnership.

 

This involved working with multiple councils and agencies to engage communities in shaping a long-term regional vision. The programme combined community workshops, stakeholder forums, digital campaigns, and clear narrative development.

 

The result was thousands of community contributions, strong regional awareness, and national recognition.

 

PRINZ Award for Community Relations and Engagement (2024).

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