Timing Outreach and Engagement

The next step in planning your project is visualizing all of the important deadlines, deliverables, and tasks. You can do this by creating a timeline of these dates.

You can use this Miro Board template as a starting point for creating a project timeline.

It’s easiest to start by listing out the dates that are definite. For example, your partner may have a deadline by which they need to spend grant money or you may need to plant new trees in a certain season. It is also helpful to list events that might be opportunities for engagement such as upcoming community meetings, festivals, or other local programming.

Once you’ve listed all the dates you definitely know, you can work backwards by asking yourself what other tasks need to happen by those dates. This is when you should list outreach and engagement milestones as well as other unscheduled project tasks. As you’re deciding on the timing of these events, it can be helpful to ask yourself a few questions:

Engagement Scheduling Questions

How many engagement opportunities were agreed upon in the MOU?

What are the constraints of the designs and where is there room for community input?

What information do I need to gain from each engagement event in order to influence the design?

When do I need this information by in order to meet deliverable deadlines?

Are there any upcoming events I can piggyback on? especially events that my target audience will be attending?

Outreach Scheduling Questions

Who was assigned responsibility for outreach in the MOU? What is their availability to conduct outreach?

How much time and effort will it take to contact your target audience?

How much lead time might people need to plan to attend your event?

How do you want to reach your audience and how much time and effort will it take to create outreach materials?

If you're piggybacking on another event... How can you also join and support their outreach efforts?