Step 9:
Plan your first dialogue series
If your first dialogue went well and your team is willing to further experiment with the format you should consider launching a dialogue series.
One-off dialogues are more compact but require a big time investment, especially in terms of recruitment, which feeds only into this one event. Doing a series requires more resources and planning but is also more efficient: you can offer potential participants a range of topics and dates to suit their interests and calendars. The effort you put into informing, engaging and recruiting people serves multiple events. A series is 3 and more dialogues which can be scheduled over multiple months.
The Polish Dialogue program consists of dialogue series which often run in parallel. For example, in 2023 we had a series on Polish-Ukrainian integration, running in parallel with a second one on climate change and a third on Polish socio-political issues. The three series intertwined in our dialogue calendar, offering participants more choice in terms of topics and dates. It is also easier to raise funds for a themed series of 5 dialogues than for a general-interest project of 15 events.
Hire a project manager
First and foremost: a dialogue series is a project and it will require a project manager with prior knowledge on the theme you chose. That person should come up with topic ideas, design the process for delivering the series and then execute the dialogues one by one.
Take a long run-up
Plan about a month of time before launching the communication and recruitment for the series and your first dialogue. People need time to get acquainted with the project before they decide to participate in the first, second or third dialogue. If you are impatient to start you might end up with half-empty events. All recruitment activities, whether Facebook ads, partner organizations or influencers, take time to yield results – three weeks of recruitment ahead of each dialogue is a minimum. Having this buffer allows for adaptive measures, such as increasing diversity in the group.
Define roles and allocate resources
Your project manager will need help with communication, IT, contacting the participants, arranging facilitators and liaising with partners. They might need technical support during the dialogues themselves and someone to develop post-dialogue materials such as evaluation forms, and organize knowledge from the dialogue (for details please see Step 10: Publicize output and evaluate impact).
Choose a salient issue and lively topics
The success of your series will depend on the usefulness of the dialogues. People want to talk about present-day issues, formulated as attractive topics. Attractive doesn’t stand for tabloid – it means topics that frame the issue in a way that underscores vital interests, group perceptions or key trade-offs. Avoid one-angle series – for example dialogues covering only economic aspects of an issue. Think about topics that will attract participants from different demographics. Publicize all topics in the series at the same time to offer your audience a choice.