Every year, I pull together an engagement forecast. It’s a bit of a look ahead and aligns with my thinking about personal and professional goals for the upcoming year. This year’s was harder to create. It might have been my state of mind or the state of the country. I found it increasingly more challenging to have a balanced forecast that could look beyond the immediate and challenging stories and trends of the day.
As I look ahead to my own 2025, I have realized that my health and that of my family is the most important thing. This means that I must make choices every day about what and how I do things – another meeting or a walk around the pond? Do school pick up or work on the report? The reality is that every day we make decisions, and none are perfect, they are merely trade-offs. Do I want this or that? What does it cost? What’s it worth? And so, this year’s forecast is very much on that theme: trade-offs.
- Budget Consciousness:
Affordability is not just a housing or grocery conversation. I believe in 2025 we will see organizations looking for ways to do more with less and that includes engagement. This might mean using collaborative approaches by working with community partners to activate an engagement program and scaling their engagement to be more targeted, shorter in duration, or more at the “Consult” level of the spectrum. Budget consciousness might also impact the degree to which in-person engagement takes place, the frequency, scale and set up. Everything costs more than it used to, and hosting events is no exception. Fiscal prudency is a good thing, and much can be done with little, but it will take relationships, commitment and sometimes our most precious commodity of all: time!
- Leveraging AI:
In 2025, I believe more and more organizations will look at AI as a tool to manage data and gain insights from their engagement results. The tradeoff here will be that organizations may also need to revise policies, consider staff training and study the privacy implications of how they use AI and opensource data. According to the IBM Global AI Adoption Index, 37% of Canadian respondents’ companies had actively deployed AI (you can read the full report here) and so in 2025, I can envision more systematic use of AI in engagement processes and that associated efforts will need to be made with approved uses to ensure they comply with organizational policies and procedures. If you haven’t already, consider reading Morgan Boyco and Dr. Pamela Robinson’s paper entitled: Artificial Intelligence: Its potential and ethics in the practice of public participation (April 01, 2024).
- Meaningful and Transparent Communications:
At the time I was writing this there was not yet a 2025 trust barometer from Edelman (though you can find their 2025 Tipping Points here), but we know that trust is on the decline and polarization is on the rise. More than ever, we need to focus on meaningful and transparent communications featuring fewer absolutes and containing real information about trade-offs. If, for example, property taxes are proposed to increase, share with me why and what the alternatives might be. Let’s talk about the impact of cuts versus increasing fees or taxes. There is often a temptation to have an “either / or” binary kind of conversation or worse – one of absolutes! I believe that in 2025 we will be compelled to provide clear communication which shares information, openly discusses trade-offs and impacts, and seeks a more respectful way of communicating with audiences who have a true and genuine interest in being part of the conversation.
- Engagement Practitioners:
As someone who does a lot of training in engagement, I am increasingly seeing more and more professionals from outside the field becoming trained and getting more and more experience in engagement. From project managers to clinicians, marketing specialists to construction and engineering professionals, there is more professional diversity within the engagement practice and this, in my opinion, is great news. Having more expertise in the area of engagement can help organizations embed engagement in their processes and culture. The tradeoff is that organizations will need to think about how to accurately reflect the engagement role in more job functions and break down silos that can be oh so tempting to adopt.
- Physical Safety:
Much has been done to consider how we increase psychological and cultural safety in engagement events, but increasingly we see that participant and staff physical safety can be put in jeopardy at in-person engagement events. The reality is that without physical safety, we can’t have psychological and cultural safety, so we need to prioritize creating truly safe spaces. We’ve designed a course to help engagement practitioners assess and plan for safe in-person events. Safety is one tradeoff we can never make. If you can’t hold the event safely, don’t hold the event.