The Value of Community Engagement

Aligning business, community, and design processes

for maximum impact.
 Alignment for Impact
What’s the business case for community engagement?

As part of a comprehensive real estate Economic Impact

strategy, community engagement is critical
to building support for development,
achieving social impact, and improving
business and community outcomes.
Infrastructure Workforce Economy Research & Development

WHAT WE DID THE CONTEXT Environmental Impact

We audited best practices for community engagement
across a spectrum of industries, including design
and construction. Our goal was to measure its
importance—and effectiveness—as part of an integrated
design process. We surveyed a cross section of
professionals involved in community-related work
to understand how community engagement fits into
their design process today, and what advantages that
engagement brings—from achieving social impact
or meeting corporate social responsibility goals,
to improved business or community outcomes.
We also interviewed design professionals, not-
for-profit organizations, community development
groups, and academic institutions to seek a wider
range of precedents and experience with community
engagement. Our findings focused on a comparative
analysis of engagement strategies, and the identification
of best practices and recommendations.
Design and construction projects, by their very
nature, bring immense opportunity to positively
impact their communities and provide far-reaching
benefits. As individuals, organizations, and businesses
today continue to place significant value in social
responsibility, engaging the community in these projects
is an opportunity not only to gather important insight
directly from a project’s end-users, but also to improve
acceptance, commitment, and overall project success.
Today, however, community engagement is too often
treated as a nice-to-have—and when it happens,
Outdoor Space Sustainable Design Life Cycle & Use Access & Mobility
it is too often part of a pro bono strategy to assuage
community stakeholders.
Social Impact

Education Arts & Culture Well-Being Vacancy, Safety & Security

2 Gensler Research | Value of Engagement for Socially Responsible Design 3

 You are not here merely to make a living. You are
here in order to enable the world to live more amply,
with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and
achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and
you impoverish yourself if you forget that errand.
– Woodrow Wilson
Better engagement
can promote meaningful,
impactful design.
THE RESULTS
Community engagement can provide significant
economic, environmental, and social impact, and
should be considered an integral part of the design
and development process. By integrating engagement
strategies into the goals of every design project, we can
begin to better align the built environment with business
and community outcomes. To achieve this, design services
must evolve to include a broader range of stakeholders
in collaborative decision making.
The full potential to leverage community
engagement has not been fully recognized or
incorporated in the design process. Our research
uncovered significant, burgeoning interest, as well as
a range of engagement toolkits and best practices
geared toward social impact across the industry.
Better engagement can promote meaningful, impactful
design by broadening the dialogue to include key
stakeholders, ultimately revealing mutually beneficial
or unrecognized design opportunities.
4 Gensler Research | Value of Engagement for Socially Responsible Design
Engaging the community improves decision making.
By aligning diverse stakeholder and user voices, designers
and clients can make more informed decisions to align
project goals, community needs, and user expectations.
This information proves relevant at all stages of real
estate development, from master planning to move-in,
and is critical to identifying areas in the community that
hold the greatest opportunity for intervention.
Involvement in the design process also improves
acceptance. Designing with the community, rather than
for it, makes end-users and stakeholders more likely to
feel ownership of, and connection to, a final product.
Particularly for projects where the users or customers
represent a broader community, involvement can deliver
significant returns in terms of ultimate project success.
We must draw on our
diverse skillsets to identify
and maximize social
impact benefits.
WHAT THIS MEANS WHAT’S NEXT
Communicate the value of engagement. We must draw on our diverse skillsets as architects,
The importance of community engagement, and its designers, planners, and strategists to identify and
ability to improve project outcomes, must be better maximize social impact benefits related to real estate
communicated to our clients and industry. The more we investments. This requires developing and expanding
engage the community, and document its impact on our multidisciplinary capabilities to strategically advise
project work, the better. clients and communities about real estate and the built
environment, and continuing to pilot social impact tools
Create a diverse stakeholder group.
and methods.
Engaging a diverse set of stakeholders enables a robust,
informed design solution. For the community, the result
is a product better aligned with their needs and interests;
for the client, acceptance and alignment with community
goals improves overall chances of success.
Use input to target investment.
Soliciting and documenting community input informs
decision making and helps identify opportunities
for maximum impact. Use this information to align
resources to optimize community benefit through design
and real estate investments.
5
 Team
Maddy Burke-Vigeland, Katrina Barney,
Nina Charnotskaia, Jon Corish, Lauren Hibner,
Christopher Miller, Tom Milavec
Graphic Design: Gretchen Bustillos
Bibliography
Wilson, Woodrow. “Address of President
Wilson at Swarthmore College.” Swarthmore
Image Credits
All images credited to Gensler
unless otherwise noted.
About Gensler
College, Swarthmore, PA, October 25, 1913.
As architects, designers, planners, and consultants, we partner with our
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