What are best practices and principles around client engagement?

L4G’s pyramid of client engagement strategies outlines ways in which clients can contribute to, advise on, and effect change within organizations. No matter how you engage clients in your organization, we recommend keeping the following best practices in mind:

• Avoid tokenism: Asking clients for feedback, having them participate in an advisory council, or placing them on a board, but then not taking their voice seriously or letting their opinions affect decisions is wasteful and damaging. Tokenistic client involvement gives the appearance of engagement, but ultimately leaves clients feeling more disempowered and, worse, disillusioned about future engagement efforts. To counter this, show that you are listening and be clear about how client input will influence decisions. Another helpful practice: Always have more than one client representative on a committee. This ensures clients do not feel isolated or burdened by being the only client voice. One caution: if you find that you are never acting on the suggestions or ideas of clients, think twice about whether your client engagement efforts are genuine.
• Make it safe for clients to get involved: Just as you think about reducing courtesy bias in your feedback loops, make sure you think about creating a comfortable environment for clients to engage. Don’t wait until they ask you about confidentiality — address this point up front. If what they say will not be treated in the utmost confidence, say so and allow people to tailor their responses accordingly.
• Set expectations for client engagement: Be clear about the role of staff and clients — e.g., what your organization’s goals for the process are, how staff and clients will be involved, how decision-making rights will be shared, how conflicts will be resolved, and what timeline the organization is working on. Be sure to build in structures for regular check-ins to hear from clients about how it is going and pivot as needed.
• Address, don’t ignore power: In order for clients to provide input and be involved in decision-making, they need to understand who holds decision-making power and for what. Be transparent about budgets, timelines, capacity, and decision-making authority. Also, don’t shy away from naming historic or systematic power imbalances that you are trying to remedy.
• Make room for adaptive strategy: Organizations must have the flexibility to change course. Do not engage clients if there is no opportunity to adapt or allow client feedback to influence decisions.
• Recruit clients beyond the usual suspects: Be intentional about engaging people who have not historically been engaged or who have been under-engaged in providing feedback or input. Your most negatively vocal clients may be the most important to include.
• Build the capacity of both staff and clients involved: Staff/client partnership may feel like new and uncharted territory. Support the capacity for meaningful engagement by paying attention to logistics (e.g., offering childcare during meetings), compensation (e.g., pay people for their time), and effective communication and participation strategies (e.g., making sure everyone has a turn to speak). Additionally, provide internal support to staff who are most heavily partnering with clients by budgeting time for their efforts and giving them access to leadership.
• Invest time in your clients: It can be a time- and resource-intensive process to work with clients and support them to become involved. Plan for it! And know it is worth it. 

Additional Client Engagement Resources

 Want more resources on how to effectively engage clients?  Check out the following:

• Youth on Board’s Organizational Assessment Checklist: This checklist identifies important factors in client engagement and what next steps your organization might take. 
• Discussion Guide: Client Voice and Engagement: This is a team discussion guide from the Building Movement Project for how to engage clients.
• Sharing Power with Communities: A Field Guide: This publication from Community Wealth Partners summarizes best practices, tips, things to avoid, and provides models from the field to consider. It also has a strong bibliography for additional resources. 
• Equitable Compensation for Community Engagement: This toolkit provides practical advice about how to create compensation strategies that are equitable and support community engagement efforts.

Article Sources

• Ekouté Consulting, “Bridging the Gap: A Review of Foundation Listening Practices,” 2019. 
• The National Council for Voluntary Organisations’ “Eight Top Tips For Beneficiary Involvement” 
• Vancouver Foundation, “Youth Engagement Report: Learning from Fostering Change and Fresh Voices,” 2018.