Building participation monitoring and canvassing expertise in south-east Wales

Councils across the UK are increasingly turning to participation monitoring and doorstep canvassing to better understand resident behaviours and attitudes towards waste and recycling services. These activities gather rich, real-time insights, but can be logistically complex and costly, especially for councils with limited resources.

Over the past two years, our experts have supported ten councils across almost 40 monitoring rounds and around 65,000 households. During this period, we’ve worked with councils such as Torfaen County Borough Council and Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council to trial new delivery models that go beyond simple execution to deliver high quality outputs within budget limits.

Why participation monitoring and doorstep canvassing matter 

Participation monitoring and doorstep canvassing give councils direct insights into how residents engage with waste and recycling services. These methods go beyond assumptions or national trends – they reveal real behaviours, attitudes, and barriers at a local level.

Using this data, authorities can design targeted interventions that truly reflect community needs – making campaigns more effective, resources better used, and outcomes more impactful.

Mixed methods in action: Torfaen County Borough Council

One standout example is the flexible model we adopted for Torfaen County Borough Council, where we helped capture extensive food recycling data in two phases.

• In phase one, we delivered a full-service participation monitoring project – recruiting and training a dedicated fieldwork team to conduct food set-out monitoring. Covering 60% of the borough, our team filled in data gaps to build insights across all 23,500 households, helping the council identify areas needing targeted intervention.
• Phase two was a twelve-week doorstep canvassing campaign focused on engaging residents in food recycling conversations. We aided the council in recruiting internal staff and seasonal agency workers to undertake the fieldwork and equipped the internal team with comprehensive canvassing training, a survey script, and a bespoke online data collection tool, as well as supporting daily caddy orders.

This light-touch guidance approach – combining local knowledge with expert support – resulted in highly efficient data capture.

“The support and guidance provided by Resource Futures throughout the project ensured that the outcome was a success. Regular communication and discussion on how things were going and how things could work allowed for adaptability. Data and information was consistent, clear and timely – making results and analysis easy to understand and use. This allowed the doorstepping team to see the impacts of their efforts and keep the momentum and morale up.”

Josie Perry, Recycling and Waste Policy Manager at Torfaen County Borough Council

 

Acting as a ‘critical friend’ – rather than a direct provider

Deploying a large external team can be costly. By enabling and empowering council officers to take the lead instead, they can build internal capacity and reduce long-term costs – making fieldwork more sustainable.

Full capacity building: Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council

We were commissioned by WRAP Cymru to help Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council better understand the fieldwork process and build greater in-house capacity. Delivering our most comprehensive support package to date, our experts:

• Trained a locally recruited team – briefing wardens, enforcement officers, and other staff on the finer details of monitoring: from methodology and data collection practices, to handling real-world challenges such as assigning containers to the correct properties.
• Developed a tailored conversation guide and trained the local team in canvassing techniques – covering active listening, effective script use, doorstep etiquette, and recording resident feedback.
• Supported the council’s waste officer with planning set up, data collection management, and data interrogation to ensure high-quality data capture and insights.
• This in-house capacity-building approach empowered the council to run efficient, high-impact fieldwork independently. As well as the benefit of local knowledge, it builds cross-team understanding of services and significantly cuts costs compared to external hires.

“Resource Futures were very knowledgeable; I found their training regarding data very beneficial to build internal capacity to conduct monitoring work in house in future going forwards.”

Luke Lewis, Recycling Projects Officer at Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council

Bespoke support for unique council needs

Our delivery model trials have shown that every council operates differently – so flexibility is key. By adapting our services to meet each council’s specific needs, we’ve helped teams better understand their delivery needs and build confidence to take on more responsibilities independently. And we’re still on hand when needed – offering expert support through quality checks, troubleshooting, and acting as a critical friend.