Our Community Conversation with Oldham

Last year, Muse formed a long-term partnership with Oldham Council to deliver positive change for the Town Centre. As part of that partnership, we developed a draft Development Framework that set out our vision to build up to 2,000 new Town Centre homes over the next 15 years.

Our plans for the Town Centre aim to serve the people of Oldham better and to help provide a local solution to a national housing crisis. Therefore, feedback from the people of Oldham is fundamental in order to successfully deliver our vision.

To gather the views of the local community, we undertook a seven-week Community Conversation over the summer, which ran from Wednesday 24 July until Wednesday 11 September. During the Community Conversation we organised a series of engagement activities, working closely with community partners, to ensure we were able to reach as many people as possible.

Our engagement programme included:

– Nine drop-in events at Spindles Town Square Shopping Centre, Sainsburys, Sonali Supermarket and Oldham Athletic

– Three community workshops with Oldham Youth Council, OL1 Business Network and Oldham Personal Advocacy Limited (OPAL)

– A live public webinar, including a Q&A during which participants could meet the team, learn about the proposals and have their questions answered. This was the uploaded to our project website for people to watch back.

– An online survey hosted on Oldham Council’s Engagement HQ platform

– A ‘Ten Forward’ survey initiative with Oldham Youth Council

– Paid media advertising across The Oldham Times’ print and digital platforms

– Distribution of our hard copy material to more than 70 locations across Oldham, including leisure centres, GP surgeries, libraries, community centre, family hubs and education facilities

– Information shared across a range of owned and earned channels, reaching council staff, elected members, businesses, residents, housing groups and community stakeholders

– Dedicated project social channels – Twitter @Oldham_Living | Instagram @OldhamTownLiving | Facebook @OldhamTownLiving

Members of the public also had a number of feedback channels to choose from including:

– In person at drop-in events

– By filling in either digital or hard copy surveys

– A dedicated project email address

– Comments on social media posts

– A Freepost address

– A Freephone number

As a result, we were able to reach a wide range of people throughout the Community Conversation:

– 514 surveys completed

– 335 attendees at our Spindles dop-in events

– More than 600 conversations across all events

– A reach of 38,200 and 1,071 link clicks on our Oldham Town Living social media channels

– 75,891 impressions across our paid advertising campaign

Now the Community Conversation has closed, the project team are closely reviewing the feedback we received, whether that’s through the survey or based on the conversations we had face to face. We want to make sure where ever possible we take your feedback on board and update our plans, before we submit our final Development Framework to the Oldham Council Cabinet for review and endorsement later this autumn.