LAKE MACQUARIE CITY COUNCIL

Project Objectives

Lake Macquarie City Council developed its Community Strategic Plan (CSP) 2025-2035. The CSP is council’s highest-level plan, which sets out the community’s vision and aspirations for the future. Council wanted to hear from the community to determine how they can best plan for the city’s future and ensure decision-making is in line with the community’s vision.

Our Role

In 2021 , Spectrum Comms conducted a successful Community Summit, as part of the initial planning for the CSP. In early 2024, Spectrum Comms and Micromex Research were, once again, engaged to work with Lake Macquarie Council to bring together 100 people from different backgrounds across the local government area, to discuss their vision and aspirations for the next ten years and beyond.

In total, 504 expressions of interest were received. With the goal of hearing from many voices, an independent research company reviewed all of the EOIs and selected 117 participants who, collectively, best represented Lake Macquarie’s demographic profile, drawing on a cross section of ages, genders and suburbs across the LGA. Spectrum Comms developed a bespoke 100 Voices Community workshop agenda and runsheet for the summit. We used Mentimeter as part of the workshop to incorporate real-time results into the activities and we developed a series of Lake Mac personas that each table of participants ‘adopted’ and then provided feedback on that persona’s aspirations, priorities and concerns for the future of the LGA over the next 10 and 20 years. Participants created vision boards for their personas and this data was used by Council to inform their Community Strategic Plan.

Outcomes

The 100 Voices “Lake Mac 100” Community Summit was held from 9am to 1pm on Saturday, 20 April 2024 at Rathmines Theatre. A total of 89 of the 117 recruited participants attended and took part in several workshop activities designed to help shape the future of the city. The 100 Voices Community Summit was part of a wider consultation and engagement program to gather feedback and support the development of Council’s Community Strategic Plan 2025-2035 and other strategic documents. Council will use the feedback from the summit, along with input from a series of Council-run community engagement activities, to develop a draft CSP.