LIVE Park – Our Local Development Plan

We review and refresh our Plan every five years so there is a critical window where the public and interested organisations have an opportunity to really help understand and shape the future potential of the National Park.

It was crucial that we engaged a broad range of people and organisations at the key ‘Main Issues Report’ stage where we set out what we thought the main issues, ideas and opportunities were for Loch Lomond & The Trossachs, its communities, businesses and its visitors.

In addition to the usual tried and tested means of encouraging people to get involved, and with a clear focus on better engaging with harder-to-reach audiences like young people and working age families, the LIVE Park consultation took a distinctly digital approach – allowing us to use digital and social media to reach out to groups of people who might not normally get involved in planning but who nonetheless are important to the future of the Park.  We needed to hear what everyone thought about housing and jobs – and everything in between.

We created a series of bespoke digital channels to allow people to keep up with what was happening on the consultation, regardless of whether they could make it along to one of our events.

We recognised that Planning can be a complex subject for people to understand – the language can be technical and off-putting so we created a series of short YouTube clips that helped demystify planning buzzwords like ‘sustainable development’ – we cut out all planning jargon from our communications and ensured that they were tailored to highlight what really matters to local people. This differed from one community to another. We used blogs to explain more complex planning issues, such as affordable housing. Blogs were also a good way to record what was said at meetings and to encourage others to post questions or comments online.

In November 2015 we won the Overall Award at the Scottish Awards for Quality in Planning for LIVE Park recognising our innovative and people-centred campaign approach to our consultation.