As a construction company, you want to focus on leaving a positive community behind when your project is finished. You do not want them to think back on this time only to remember the nuisances you created for them, such as noise, dust, electricity and water cut-offs, and detours. Even if these go together with every construction project, it is possible to make a much more engaging and lasting impression on the people living and working around it.
By paying attention to social impact and leaving a positive and improved community behind, the residents will soon forget about these nuisances and remember the good things. That is why social impact is a very important measure to assess when working on community engagement.
In an earlier blog, we spoke about what social impact is and how you can measure such a transparent notion. Here we will focus on some examples of community engagement which will impress the locals and show social impact in construction projects at its best.
We also encourage you to download our Playbook on Community Engagement, for more inspiring ideas about how you can engage the communities, businesses, and other residents around your building site.
Why is social impact such an important measure?
By measuring the social impact your construction project has on the people affected by it, you measure the general attitude towards your actions. That means that you actually measure the success of your community engagement efforts.
By making these results of community engagement visible through data and ultimately graphs and infographics, you can show off your successes to current and future clients. It can help you win clients, gain respect from everyone you affect, and improve your community engagement strategies for the next project.
Maximise social impact with these 3 examples
Social impact is the effect your project has on the people, communities, and businesses around it. What follows are three great examples of how you can maximise this and leave a perfect impression behind.
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Give trees a new live
Sometimes trees need to be felled to make way for a broader street, a pedestrian area or a building. Unfortunately, this is almost always met with resistance from the local residents. And no wonder, they have come to love these trees as they have provided them with shelter and colour for so long.
Even though new trees will be planted or the outcome of the construction project will greatly enhance the area, residents find it difficult to part with the trees they have formed a connection with. To make it easier for them, you can give these trees a new life.
Turn the trees into breadboards, or another utensil. You can place a QR code on it, so the users can see which tree it came from and learn a bit about it. Other ways to give the wood a new life is by using them in a natural playground, benches in the park, sheds for the community allotments, or a pagoda/stage in the community square.
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Focus on the bigger picture
One of the reasons why construction projects are often met with resistance, is because residents are not always able to see the bigger picture. And that is up to you to remedy, especially if your project enhances the community area.
Once the community members realise the why of your project, the nuisances are a lot easier to handle. It is time to really engage the residents around it, to let them have a say, and to be as transparent as you can about everything that you do.
There are several ways in which you can make residents see why what you are doing is important to them in the long term. You can hold monthly open houses, show people around the building site, and use digital (or analogue) visuals to explain what the area will look like when you are finished.
Organise information meetings, open a visitors’ lounge with pictures or videos of the finished project, and invite people to come to you with questions, concerns and ideas. Keep reminding residents about how they will benefit from what you are doing and make an effort to keep the nuisance they need to go through to achieve that to a minimum.
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Give the community something back
Even though the local residents will be better off eventually, their lives are disrupted by your construction project. You can maximise social impact by giving them something back in return. Once your project is finished, you will organise a street party to celebrate and to reveal what you will donate to the community.This can be anything, a playground, a vertical herb garden, a public piano at the square, a running track, allotments, an outdoor gym, a mural (include the local artists), solar panels, etcetera. Your construction company will be remembered fondly every time the community members walk past your donation.
What is in it for you?
You might be looking at these examples for maximising social impact in your next construction project and think: what is in it for me? That is a normal reaction, because you do not have to take the community into consideration. Even though this is an important trend, held high by associations like the Considerate Constructors’ Scheme, you are there to finish the project and not to entertain the locals.
Having said that, paying attention to social impact also has many benefits for you.
- Your construction company will get a great reputation and through word of mouth this spreads like wildfire.
- By using the data you collected to present your social impact successes at tenders, you are more likely to get the project. Community engagement is a decisive factor in construction nowadays.
- And do not forget the internal impact of maximised community engagement on your employees. They will be proud to work for you, your turnover of staff will go down, and you will become the company everyone working in construction admires.
SitePodium and social impact
SitePodium is a communication app which brings communities and construction sites together. You use it for posting updates, milestones, polls, and other information to subscribers. They in turn are able to respond to your posts and really interact with your community engagement team.
This is all great, but SitePodium also enables you to maximise the social impact of your construction project. It has a section where data is collected and presented in useful reports. These reports immediately show you the social impact of your building project in numbers, without you having to organise polls, information stands, or door-to-door leafleting.
If you are interested in SitePodium, we are more than happy to give you a free demo to show you everything the app can do, including the reporting side of it. Alternatively, our brochure is there for you to download and read at your leisure and you can always contact us to speak about social impact in person and how you can maximise this with SitePodium.
