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What we're up to
We're engaging with our community, stakeholders and Rights Holders to help shape our priorities and plans for the future, including our Price Submission 2028-33 and Urban Water Strategy. Follow our engagement journey so far.
Ongoing engagement
We're always working with our community on the issues that matter most.
We regularly ask for feedback through our twice-annual customer outcomes survey and annual customer satisfaction survey.
We also seek community input on important decisions throughout the year, engaging with surveys, focus groups, workshops and event pop-ups.
Whenever there’s an opportunity to have a say, we reach out to our Sounding Board – a group of community members who have said they want to be involved in decision making.
Throughout the year, we meet with our Customer Reference Group (CRG). This is a group of customers from all walks of life who help shape our engagement plans, consider what we hear from community and determine the actions we take. The CRG was established in Price Submission 2023, and given an ongoing role due to the great insights they provided. Recently we welcomed six new members to the CRG.
Our roadmap
Dive in - August 2026
Online Workshops
We're hosting two online workshops to allow us to directly hear from our customers.
Customer Outcomes workshop
We want to understand what matters most.
We'll share what we've heard already from customers about their priorities. Then, invite participants to share their input on what success looks like when we get it right.
Community value and partnerships session
Have a say on how we support our community.
We’ll walk through how we currently invest in our community, including commitments, costs and progress. Then we’ll invite ideas on how we can make the most impact.
People's Panel
We're inviting members of our community to apply for our People's Panel.
The People's Panel will bring together up to 50 people from a range of backgrounds to take part in a series of five sessions between August and November 2026.
This is the chance to dive deeply into the challenges and opportunities we face, have a meaningful say in our plans for the future and ensure our priorities and investments reflect what matters most to our community.
Together, the panel will consider this important question:
How can we balance the services our community needs, now and into the future, while keeping bills fair?
Throughout the process, panel members will:
- learn about the challenges we're facing
- explore the things that affect pricing and services
- consider the options
- make recommendations for the future
These opportunities will be facilitated by our engagement partner MosaicLab.
Check-in and talk - May 2026
Community outreach
We talked to our customers and community members across our service area at community pop ups about what matters most to them about water and wastewater.
We also asked people to rank our customer outcomes in order of priority for them. Our six customer outcomes are:
- Do your job well - provide safe water at a reasonable price and restore interruptions quickly with good communication
- Be affordable and fair - keep prices as low as possible, support people who struggle to pay
- Be environmentally responsible - care for the environment and protect natural resources for the future
- Be easy to deal with - resolve issues quickly and keep customers informed
- Plan for the future - think and plan for population growth, invest in long term water security and climate change
- Be involved - educate and support the community, involve customers in decisions that affect them
What we heard is that our community continues to support our current customer outcomes and believes they’re all still important. ‘Do your job well’ is the highest ranked customer outcome, followed by ‘be affordable and fair’. ‘Be environmentally responsible’ has continued to grow in importance over recent years.
The results show that our customer outcomes continue to reflect what matters most to our community while being flexible and responsive to changing needs and priorities over time. Soon, we’ll explore this more deeply with customers, to find out what success looks like when we get it right.
Community groups outreach
We’ve engaged with local neighbourhood houses and community groups who work closely with people who are experiencing vulnerability.
Getting bill support for people was the main priority of these organisations and the number one thing they expect from us. Help should be easily accessible for all and available in a variety of ways – online, phone and in person, particularly in community spaces.
All agencies reported growing numbers of people struggling with the rising cost of living and needing extra support. They all expect this to increase.
Apart from bill help and support, all these agencies mentioned a desire for sponsorship opportunities. They all rely on funding to deliver their business. Even though our sponsorships may be small, they can contribute to setting up or continuing programs – like free showers and laundry services.
Stakeholder outreach
We’ve been speaking with stakeholders to inform our future plans and explore opportunities to work together.
Our stakeholders represent a diverse range of people, organisations and agencies throughout Gippsland and the wider water sector.
So far we’ve spoken with councils, regulators, industry partners and advocacy agencies to share the work that’s underway, testing our proposed customer engagement and future opportunities for collaboration.
Rights Holders outreach
The Rights Holders of the Gippsland Water service area are the Gunaikurnai people and the Bunurong people.
We’ve begun conversations with Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation (GLaWAC) and Bunurong Land Council Aboriginal Corporation (BLCAC) to support self-determination and explore how we can continue working together.
This engagement will be ongoing throughout the entire journey. Conversations are focused on what we’ve delivered, the status of commitments made in our current Price Submission and Urban Water Strategy and how we could build upon those into the future.
Raising awareness and creating interest - March 2026
Next, we made sure our community, local organisations and Traditional Owners knew how they could get have a say and shape our future plans.
We encouraged people to join our Sounding Board, where they can hear about engagement opportunities. We included a flyer with customer bills, updated our website, shared information on social media and helped people sign up at community events.
The feedback helps us understand what's important to our customers. It influences the way we determine priorities, plan projects and deliver services.
In six months, Sounding Board membership grew by over 89%, with more than 800 community members now signed up.
Getting ready - November 2025
In late 2025, we began working with people in our organisation and community to develop our plans for making decisions together.
We held workshops with staff across the organisation to understand the challenges, opportunities and costs that could affect:
- customer experience
- service delivery (now, and into the future)
- customer bills.
We worked closely with our Customer Reference Group, asking them to challenge our thinking and help shape the issues we would discuss with the wider community.
We held three co-design workshops with representative stakeholders of difficult to reach cohorts. The purpose of these workshops was to test potential engagement topics, hear what is most important to them and how best we can engage.
We spoke with advocacy agencies representing people facing vulnerability including financial, educational and family violence, as well as organisations working with people living with disabilities. We also spoke with a small cohort of young Gippslanders as decisions we make today would impact their futures as a member of the community and a customer even if they’re not yet paying the bills.
The findings of these workshops helped inform our Planning for the Future document and also targeted future engagement with these cohorts.
Our conversations shaped our strategic engagement plan, planning for the future.