A Tale of Two Political Engagement Toolkits

Back in 2015, I worked with the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia (CBAA) to produce a Political Engagement Toolkit for Community Radio Broadcasters. It consisted of a 24-page report and six factsheets designed to support CBAA’s member organisations – over 300 community broadcasters across the country – to plan and implement their interactions with politicians at various levels of government.

The CBAA toolkit, factsheets and webpages we create are still available online here. The broad sections it covers are: Benefits of Political Engagement; Understanding Politicians; Promoting Community Radio; Tools of Engagement; Planning & Strategy; and Stories & Case Studies.

I mentioned this toolkit about a year ago at a talk I gave on some of my research to the Local Community Services Association NSW (LCSA). Not long after, they started producing a version of their own, now published as: Guide for Community-led Political Engagement – a Toolkit for Community and Neighbourhood Centres. 

You can access the LCSA toolkit as a pdf online here. Similarly to the CBAA toolkit, it features stories from LCSA members in action, including the local advocacy from the Forster Neighbourhood Centre which helped them secure affordable premises and keep the lights on.

I’m a massive fan of recycling content and ideas, so I was chuffed that LCSA found the work from 2015 useful and modelled their toolkit on the CBAA one. Having worked in politics and the community sector, I’m also passionate about demystifying political engagement, particularly for volunteer-driven community organisations who spend their sparse resources building, serving and supporting communities.

My favourite bits of content from the CBAA toolkit remain my three hot tips for what politicians want: (1) positive reinforcement; (2) simple requests with simple outcomes; and (3) keeping their jobs – as well as this awesome cartoon supplied by Fiona Katauskas (p10 of the original report), highlighting the focus of community media compared to commercial media.