This method will help the Community Engagement events you organise so you’ve planned and organised your engagement event. If you haven’t, come back after you’ve read the section on planning and organising an event!
Now you just need to make the planning all worthwhile for you and your participants. It’s time to learn the art of facilitation.
Facilitation is how you conduct the workshop. It’s about managing, motivating and inspiring your group.
Good facilitators:
- tell a story about that helps people understand why they’re there and what’s expected of them
- prime participants with the information they need to contribute
- listen carefully
- are unbiased
- make sure the group stays on track, but guide the conversation, rather than taking control or showing off their knowledge
- know when to move on or change tack
Practicalities on the day
- Make sure you’ve got all the stuff you need to run the activities you’ve planned. You don’t want to interrupt the flow by going off hunting for missing pens and sticky notes
- Share an agenda and timetable. Let everyone know what to expect
- Use a warm-up exercise to set the tone and alleviate any tension people might be feeling. Choose an exercise that involves the kind of thinking you want to encourage for the rest of the event
- Some people may be more familiar with the topic than others. Bring everyone up to speed, so everyone can contribute
- Some activities could be a big jump for some participants, so build the group up to maximise their potential. For example, do a problem-framing exercise before a problem-solving exercise
- Sometimes it is useful to give participants space to work on their own before coming back together as a group to share, reflect and discuss
- Give the group a break if your event is longer than an hour. If it is a whole day, give them multiple breaks including lunch
- Give people a way to give you feedback after the event, so you can do even better next time
Thinking about your audience
Think carefully about who is in the room:
- Children might be more open with people closer to their age. Depending on their age, children might be more open with or without parents or carers there
- If you’re talking with an excluded or underrepresented group, the demographics of the facilitators might alter their engagement
- People might be less willing to honestly share opinions if their bosses or other authority figures are present
Being agile and reactive
Good planning will help the workshop go smoothly. But don’t expect everything to go to plan. Common challenges include:
- conversations going off-topic, going on too long, or going round in circles
- conflicting opinions or conflicts over language
- negativity and internal politics
- some people dominating the discussion – make sure every person in the room gets heard
- technical issues
Stay sharp, and if any of these happen to you, you might need to react and intervene!
This method helps you make sure your engagement events themselves are accessible and inclusive – not just its outcomes.
It is simply the right thing to do ethically. But it will also give you better results, that are more representative of the people you are designing for.
Here are some basic guidelines for both online and in-person events:
- If you use visual prompts, make sure there is high enough contrast between text and background colour
- Use alternative text descriptions (alt text) for images
- Send out an agenda and timetable in advance, including when any breaks are planned
- Some people might ask to see more details ahead of time
- Be flexible and allow more time for activities if you need to
- If someone doesn’t speak the language you are running the sessions in, you will need an interpreter
- Offer options and alternatives to the group before as well as during the session – some people might not want to tell you about their needs in front of other attendees
Online sessions
- If you are planning a session, workshop or other event online, check beforehand that your technology is accessible to everyone you’ve invited
- Some of the tools in this guide use virtual whiteboards like Mural or Miro. Some aspects of these can be difficult to use for some people.
- Use a variety of different-shaped sticky notes, so anyone who is colourblind can tell them apart
- Put a grid in the background to make it easier for people to find their way around the board
- Ask everyone to put their own name on their cursor
- Hiding cursors can help prevent motion sickness
In-person sessions
- Make sure the environment is accessible and comfortable for everyone. Is the venue accessible for wheelchair users and therapy pets? Also think about noise, light and temperature
- Let people sit if they need to. And if you’re sticking things on the wall, put them at an accessible height for everyone
- Use a variety of different-shaped sticky notes
This method will help you plan your Community Engagement events to get the best out of the people you invite.
Why you should do it
- Working with people helps you create things for them. This is more effective than making assumptions about what they need, a key goal of inclusive innovation
- Taking part in events gives people the chance to share their nuanced perspectives and experiences
- If you invite a diverse group of people to your event you will understand your problem from a richer and more inclusive point of view
- Watching people as well as listening to them can give you an insight into unspoken attitudes and behaviours as well as the things people tell you directly
- You get a chance to see people disagree with each other and work through their differences, helping you reach consensus and agreement
Number of attendees
There is no set limit for how many people can attend an event. If you have more than about 8 people, we recommend breaking out into groups of 4 to 8 people for activities.
Resources you need
You will need at least one facilitator (and maybe more for a big event).
For an in-person event you might need:
- tables for group work
- paper, pens or pencils, sticky notes
- anything else you need for your activities, like glue, scissors, Sellotape, Blu-Tak, magazines, Lego
- drinks and snacks, if your event is going to last a while
This might look like a list for primary school students. But in fact, activities that use things like glue, scissors and Lego are great for adults too. They can help open up different ways of thinking that don’t just rely on discussion and writing.
For an online event, you will need to choose and set up:
- videoconferencing software, like Zoom, Teams or Google Meet
- an online whiteboard if you want one, like Mural or Miro
Always make sure all your activities are accessible to all your attendees, and come up with alternative ways for people to take part. See our guidelines on running accessible sessions for tips on making sure nobody is excluded.
Organising your event
Start planning as soon as possible – ideally 6 to 8 weeks in advance.
Choose a date:
- Make sure there isn’t a competing event at the same time for the same group of people
- Or maybe you can tag your engagement onto an existing event, for example a community event that is already happening with a group you want to talk to
- Consider school holidays, travel logistics, and anything else that could impact people’s availability
Find a place (for in-person events):
- Make it as easy as possible for people to get to your event
- Think about locations your attendees already use, like a local community centre
- Consider physical accessibility like wheelchair access
- But don’t forget about other types of accessibility needs, like light, noise and temperature
Find out who you need to speak to, to check availability and book your space.
Invite the people:
- People are busy, so the sooner you send out invites the better
- For tips on finding the right people, see our advice on finding and building a network
- You may need to go back and tweak the dates, location and other arrangements until you find the sweet spot that works for the most people
This method will help you find the people you need to innovate in an inclusive way in your community.
Most of the tools in this guide need you to work with people outside your organisation. If you already have an established network to call on, then great. If you don’t, you will have to do some work to find and build one. It will be well worth your time.
Understanding who’s out there
The first step is to look around you and see which local organisations exist who might be able to help you.
- If you’re not already working for them, contact your local councils or unitary authorities. They can be useful in themselves, but can also help you find other people and organisations to talk to
- Find policies and reports that are relevant to your area. As well as being useful background information, they will often mention, be sponsored by or co-written by organisations you can get in touch with
- Look for bodies who fund schemes related to your area, and find out which organisations they are funding
- Organisations like Connected Places Catapult exist to bring others together and promote collaboration. Talk to us!
- Go to events. Even if the topic of the event is not 100% relevant to your work, they are great opportunities to network and make new connections
- Get yourself in the room where it happens. Spread the word that you are interested and available. Invite yourself to policy discussions as early as possible
- But to be truly inclusive, you don’t just want to talk to official organisations. You’ll need to find grassroots community groups, or if they don’t exist, set up your own
Organisations to try
- Your local city, county and district councils or unitary authorities
- Local enterprise partnerships
- Chambers of commerce
- Industry leading businesses
- Schools, colleges and universities
- Local community groups
This method helps you go beyond talking to people about their needs, to fully bringing them into the whole design process.
Words like co-design are often misunderstood or misused. Co-planning, co-design and co-delivery mean truly involving people every step of the way, and crucially, handing power over to them so that their input is not just a superficial box-ticking exercise.
Giving away power like this can be scary for organisations, but it leads to more successful results.
Co-planning
Co-planning means starting to work with people to plan your whole project, before you even get to the design stage.
It helps you:
- understand the local context
- prepare people for effective Community Engagement at the next stage
Things to do
- Use stakeholder mapping to make sure you engage a diverse group of people, and make a special effort to include people who are too-often ignored
- Consider the environment, not just humans, in your planning. This means animals, plants, rivers and the air we breathe. It also includes man-made infrastructure that we depend on, like buildings, roads and bridges.
- Build your core team, drawing on staff, stakeholders, community groups and organisations
- Give people specific responsibilities for things like the project brief and gathering feedback
- Review the results of any previous engagement activities
- Find out as much as you can about local issues, beliefs, needs and challenges
- Agree what you will do in the following co-design step
- Set timescales and deadlines, and allocate time and money (including fair compensation for people you engage with)
- Think about how you will make your engagement inclusive, for example to disabled people, people with childcare responsibilities, or who speak different languages
- Produce and share a co-plan report for feedback
Co-design
Co-design means designing together with your community, instead of just designing for them. Decisions should be taken together, not imposed on people.
Things to do
- Run engagements like meetings, workshops and community pop-ups with the diverse community members and stakeholders that you identified in the co-planning stage
- Don’t just go away and design on your own, you should be actually designing during those sessions
- Be aware of and take account of things like power dynamics and mistrust during your sessions
- Keep track of what you do and how you are making sure you have diverse and equitable community representation
- Agree clear roles and responsibilities, next steps and timelines for the following co-delivery step
Co-deliver
Co-delivery means involving communities in the delivery, running and governance of services, not just in their design.
Things to do
- Create delivery plans
- Get time and money to support ongoing community involvement
- Understand what skills members of the community already have, and invite experts to upskill them and staff
- Make continuity plans for when people have to leave the project
- Continue to engage less heard communities, even if they can’t get involved in co-delivery
- Be clear who is accountable for governance and monitoring
Ongoing processes
You can also communicate about and evaluate the success of your project in similar ways.
Co-communicate
Use existing ways that communities communicate to share information and updates widely and consistently.
Co-evaluate
Involve communities in evaluating success, based on metrics and outcomes that you have identified together. Make sure you consider inclusion and equity in your evaluation.
Source
Though the report is focussed on net zero, the guidelines are applicable to a much wider range of inclusive innovation projects.
This method can help understand things outside your organisation that could affect your success.
You can use a method like STEEPLE as part of a wider piece of work called strategic foresight.
STEEPLE stands for:
- socio-cultural
- technological
- economic
- environmental
- political
- legal
- ethical
For each category, think of what could go wrong, and what could go well, in big and small ways.
Start off wildly pessimistic. Write down everything from minor hiccups to complete catastrophe.
Then be radically optimistic. Imagine small wins as well as the most outlandishly successful scenarios.
| Socio-cultural | Technological | Economic | Environmental | Political | Legal | Ethical | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pessimistic | |||||||
| Optimistic |
Alternative approaches
If you don’t need to go into as much detail as STEEPLE, you can skip categories you don’t want to consider.
For example, PESTLE misses out the legal and ethical categories. But for inclusive innovation, we think it is important to not to miss out ethics!
Strategic foresight
If you want to do a more detailed analysis of the present and future, then you can use a method called Strategic foresight.
Strategic foresight is a method to help you make:
- informed best guesses about the future
- better decisions about what to do about it
Strategic foresight has 3 main stages, each of which can have multiple steps:
- Understand the landscape and decide on your vision for the future
- Decide what to do and how to do it (interventions and strategies)
- Make a roadmap, and contingency plans for when things go wrong
Further source reading
This method helps you understand which people and organisations you might need to work with to get the best results.
What is a stakeholder map?
A stakeholder map is a diagram of all the groups and people who are involved with, affected by or care about a project.
Whether you are designing a policy, process, service or product, making a stakeholder map is a useful thing to do at the start of a project.
This is especially important for inclusive innovation, as it will help remind you of important groups of people who might traditionally be ignored.
A stakeholder map will help you:
- plan a project
- scope out any research you need to do
- gather existing contacts
- develop new connections
- understand who is involved and how
- spot where you might need extra support
You can make a quick stakeholder map in about 15 to 20 minutes. Or you can take an hour to go into more depth, working collaboratively and allowing more time for discussion.
Setting up
Try to do stakeholder mapping as early as you can in a project. If you have existing research that is up to date and reliable, you can pull from this and do stakeholder mapping on your own.
But if you can, it’s best to invite some of the stakeholders you already know about to make the map with you. Especially people from the kinds of marginalised communities that you want to involve when doing inclusive innovation work.
Set up 3 concentric circles and sticky notes in 3 different colours. This can be in-person with paper, or online using a virtual whiteboard like Mural or Miro.
Label your concentric circles, for example with:
- Centre = Must involve
- Middle ring = Useful to involve
- Outer ring = Nice to involve if possible
Give everyone a brief description of the activity ahead of time, so they can prepare.
See our guidelines on running accessible engagement sessions for tips on making sure nobody is excluded.
Filling in your stakeholder map
Start by clarifying for everyone in the session the question you are trying to answer. This can be as simple as ‘who do we need to speak to during this project?’
For each person, group or organisation you can think of, put a sticky note into one of the circles.
Include people who:
- use the service or product
- are affected by any changes
- you need to keep informed about the project
- make decisions about the project
Use prompts like:
- Which groups should we talk to and why?
- How do they help us meet our project brief?
- How can we make sure we talk to people from diverse backgrounds and with diverse experiences?
Review the map you have created
- Is anyone or anything missing?
- Think about the map from the stakeholders’ perspective. What do you notice?
- Does anything need to be repositioned?
- Are you unsure or making assumptions about which circle you’ve put any of the stakeholders in?
Note any insights or questions that arise and use them to help guide your research.
Next steps
- Think about exactly how you will engage each stakeholder.
- Do they need to be collaborators, consulted, or just kept informed?
- How often do you need to talk to them? Regularly, occasionally, or in one-off events?
- How many people from each group do you need to talk to, to make sure you get a diverse set of views?
- This will all feed into your project and research plans.
Making your policies, services and products accessible to as many people as possible will give can give you advantages in growth and inclusivity.
There are already strategies, reports and laws in place to support innovation which is accessible to all and benefits everyone. These include:
Accessibility as a growth strategy
Accessibility is proven to drive connection, innovation, and profitability. Policy leaders need to get behind accessible, inclusive products and services. They are leading the way in inclusive innovation and growth to meet the demands of an increasingly diverse global audience.
Tools for accessible and inclusive innovation
We invite policymakers to encourage businesses to comply with accessibility standards by employing tools like:
When you’re running an inclusive innovation project, you need to make sure you communicate with participants and stakeholders in an inclusive and accessible way.
This includes writing clearly and plainly so that as many people as possible can understand you. Clear, plain English is easier and better for:
- many neurodivergent users
- people who are not fluent in English
- low-literacy users
- people who can’t concentrate because they’re ill, or in a noisy place, or…
- everyone – it respects everybody’s time and situation
10 tips
- Write like you’d speak. Read your writing aloud. Do you sound dull and formal? If you do, try again!
- Use everyday vocabulary:
| Instead of | Try |
| Ensure | Make sure |
| However | But |
| Such as | Like |
| Collaborate | Work with |
| Queries | Questions |
| Utilize | Use |
- Get rid of waffle, like:
- Please note
- Please be aware
- Please do not hesitate to
- Write short sentences. They’re easier to read than long ones. And that’s good
Long sentences, especially ones with subclauses like this, can be harder for people to read, which is bad
For example:
This email is to acknowledge that we’ve received your query → We’ve got your email
- Multiple short paragraphs are better than one long paragraph. So change paragraphs whenever you finish a thought
- Put the important stuff first:
- At the start of a page
- At the start of each sentence
- In headings and links
- Use plenty of subheadings. They help people quickly scan and get to the things that are important to them
- Don’t ask lots of questions in your headings (they will mostly start with ‘W’ words like who, what, why and when, which makes it difficult to scan)
- Link text on web pages must always fully describe the target
- Use sentence case not title case for headings and subheadings. This means only capitalising the first word of a heading or subheading. Using capital letters for each word makes your headings much harder to read.
Further reading
On an inclusive innovation project, you need to communicate in an inclusive way.
Inclusive communication means using language that is free from words, phrases, or tones that reflect prejudiced, stereotyped, or discriminatory views of particular people or groups.
You should think about inclusion when you are talking or writing about things like age, disability, health (including mental health), neurodivergence, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy or maternity, parenthood, socioeconomic status (including class and poverty), race, religion or belief.
If your organisation doesn’t already have an inclusive style guide, good places to look are charities (like Scope for disability or Mind for mental health) and other specialist charities, or the NHS for anything health-related.
People who belong to a group obviously don’t agree about everything. This includes the language they prefer. No guidance can guarantee that nobody will be unhappy with the way you’ve written about them.
This language changes. It’s okay to not always be right up to date. Do your best, accept correction gracefully, and people should be forgiving.
If you are not sure about something, ask:
- the person or people you are writing about how they would like to be referred to
- specialist organisations
Ask yourself:
- Do you need to mention personal characteristics at all? Only write or ask about these characteristics when they matter for the thing you are working on
- Do the references to people reflect the diversity of that audience?
- Overall, does your writing reflect the experiences of the people you are writing for?
- Is your vocabulary excluding people who may not have specialized knowledge? Writing in clear, plain English without jargon is more inclusive.
- Who are you excluding when you try to be inclusive? Some of the language we use when trying with best intentions to be inclusive is not familiar to everyone in the target audience. This means that sometimes we can accidentally exclude people when we try to be inclusive of everyone.
Inclusivity means more than just including people. It means making people feel actively welcome, that a product or service has been designed with them in mind.
