Engaging a community through thoughtful design
Waikirikiri Selwyn is the fastest-growing district in Aotearoa, with its population nearly tripling since 2000. To support this growth, Selwyn District Council (SDC) set out to create a long-term Area Plan that would benefit both current residents and future generations. To ensure the plan aligned with the community’s needs and aspirations, SDC needed a way to drive authentic engagement. Public perception was that their voices weren’t being heard, leading to consultation fatigue and a decline in participation.
Traditionally, council engagement had relied on methods like surveys, so the first step was to develop a system for gathering meaningful feedback. This was essential to ensure the plan genuinely reflected the community’s needs – a challenging task given the district’s large rural population and low youth engagement.
We took a marketing-led approach to the engagement, treating it like a campaign with a fresh identity, name (‘My Future Town’), illustrations, and colour palette. The new visuals made the communications feel more inviting and youthful than the council’s branding, making it easier to bring people in.
Putting the design into action, we moved on to the physical challenge of engaging with the community in person. We created a unique mobile system that the council could take with them, engaging with locals where they already were – at markets, events, community facilities, Residents Association meetings, and other local gathering spots. This made it easy for residents to share their thoughts as part of their daily lives.
Our engagement kit featured interactive tabletop maps where people could leave notes and pins, along with a ‘dotmocracy’ voting activity that allowed residents to vote on key priorities using stickers. Alongside this was an online community video, featuring locals talking about why having a say is important, to educate those who were on the fence.
Recognising the need to reach rural communities, we also developed a mobile version of the kit, compact enough to fit in a car boot and easily set up anywhere.
The response from the community blew us (and our client!) away. Aside from the impressive stats below, the council received so many innovative and interesting ideas from the community, from youth to the elderly, truly creating a collaborative approach to future planning.
The numbers:
- 600+ face-to-face conversations
- 133,000 video views (the most views a council video has ever received to date)
- 250+ tamariki engaged through targeted school engagement
- 800+ workbooks distributed (The first print run was 50 copies but they were so popular we ended up printing 800+ copies)
- 4,600 visits and 1,000+ mapped points and lines on our digital crowd-mapping tool.
Selwyn District Council
"We worked with Celeste and the team at StudioC on community engagement for our Area Plan, and the experience was outstanding from start to finish. Their team brought an incredible level of expertise, creativity, and professionalism to the project, helping us connect with our community in meaningful and impactful ways. If you're looking for an extended team that truly understands how to engage with communities authentically, I couldn't recommend StudioC more highly."
