Project planning

The next stage will be a project planning session.

Suggestion cards on a Planning for Real modelThis session will involve a stakeholder mapping activity. Building up an understanding of the community will help us to understand the routes into the community, and the best ways of ensuring as many local people as possible are involved. The project planning session involves working out the best methods of raising awareness in the community, planning contact work, promotion and publicity, and looking at opportunities and venues for consultation events. Consideration of all of these things is vital in order to begin to develop a programme of events.

It is important to let everyone know how Planning for Real® (PFR) works and to take their advice on matters such as which venues would work – often what seems like an ideal venue to an ‘outsider’ turns out to be one that local people know always gets a poor turnout.

Suggestion cards are central to the PFR process. At the community events, local people will place suggestion cards on the 3D model to have their say about what’s happening or what they would like to see in their neighbourhood. At this project planning stage we will look at the option cards – are there issues specific to the neighbourhood that need to be covered? We have around 300 standard suggestion cards which are colour coded and fall into eight themes including housing, leisure and recreation, crime and safety and traffic and transport. We have developed different sets of cards for rural and urban areas and we can design specific suggestion cards to meet your requirements. Of course, there are always blank cards on the consultation days for people to write themselves.