Activities and exercises can help to liven up your public meetings and make them more engaging. Interactive tasks enable people to participate and contribute ideas, whilst also helping to build community connections and to incorporate a fun and social element.

Presentations. Presentations can provide important context for a public meeting, enabling the key concepts, plans and progress made to be explained to bring everyone up to date. However, presentations can turn people off and aren’t particularly interactive or engaging, so make sure they are kept succinct and just briefly cover the most important points by way of introduction.

Film screenings. Like presentations, film screenings [1] can provide context for a meeting and inspiration for discussions.

Guest speakers. Talks [1] by guest speakers can also provide context, expert information and inspiration at public meetings. Well-known speakers can help to raise the profile of your public meetings, encouraging more people to attend.

Question and answer sessions. Question and answer sessions can fit all formats of public meetings and can complement other activities and exercises, such as presentations, film screenings and talks from guest speakers. Recording questions and answers to develop an FAQs resource can be useful for those who don’t attend on the day, and inviting experts to answer questions on technical issues can help to instil confidence in your project and how it works.

Group discussions or interviews. Your public meeting will be more fun and engaging if people are encouraged to interact with each other. Possible activities include small group discussions, talking in pairs or informal interview sessions. For example, as a starter exercise you could ask everyone to turn to the person next to them to discuss their motivations for attending the meeting and what they want to get out of it. It can help to have a key question or theme to guide discussions and to have some kind of facilitation role to ensure that everyone has a chance to get involved. Allow time at the end for feeding back to the wider group and for recording thoughts and ideas generated.

Sharing ideas. Try asking people to contribute suggestions under key headings or questions, such as “what do you want from this project?” or “what can you offer to help us get started?”. Post-it notes and flipcharts are great for capturing ideas – why not ask people to write down their own questions, areas of interest or ideas for projects to discuss with the wider group or to feed into future meetings and discussions.

Social. Social activities [2] are another good way to ‘break the ice’ and to help build community connections. Why not plan your meeting over a coffee at a local café or around a shared meal, or arrange for a post-meeting pub trip?