The Community Consultation Challenge

The role of the Police Crime Commissioners (PCC) is to be the voice of the people and hold the police to account.

A PCC’s aim is to reduce crime and deliver an effective and efficient police service in their force’s local area. To help achieve this goal, the PCC consults with residents of Lincolnshire annually. The project group was asked to report on best practices and suggest recommendations for increasing the scope of audience engagement in the PCC’s annual survey. 

To start the project, the group conducted a range of demographic research within the Lincolnshire region which had shown to be lacking in responses from previous years. This allowed the team to narrow their focus of recommendations on areas that would prove most effective. Some of the solutions to increase survey responses included partnering with external businesses to aid the promotion of the survey and having more marketing materials in specific areas of low uptake. The students also performed an analysis of the survey itself and provided suggestions to the PCC to improve the survey’s accessibility which would mean that all users had a fair chance of completing it. 

The group benefitted from working together on a project that, for most of the students, was very different from the contents of their degree subject- giving them a range of transferable skills that they could take forward and implement into their future careers.