Start by deciding what you want to achieve by your business case. The purpose is to get key players and decision-makers to invest time, resources and commitment in an activity.
The first question you need to ask yourself is who needs to be convinced of what, for the business case to be successful? How much resource do you have available to support the development of a business case?
You can use this toolkit to develop a business case for a number of situations:
| An individual engagement project | This is often easier than other options as the numbers involved are often smaller and easier to manage |
| Engagement - across an organisation or geographic area | Assessing multiple engagement processes in one go requires more data and is more complex than looking at each engagement exercise individually. The benefits include getting a fuller picture and being able to concentrate on the really significant costs and benefits. If there have been previous evaluations you can use the resulting values as proxies. |
| Comparing the costs and benefits of different engagement approaches or of non-engagement | If you are in the process of identifying efficiencies, as part of Total Place or otherwise, it may be worth filling in the calculation for numerous projects at once. This will show you which methods are delivering the most return, and in which circumstances, as well as identifying areas of duplication. |
It is important to understand what other engagement activities are being delivered in your organisation. This is predominantly to reduce the risk of duplicating ongoing processes but, it will also give you the opportunity to speak to other delivery teams to share learning, enable partnership working, more efficient public engagement and pooling resources and skills.