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:

1. understand the local context
2. 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

1. Run engagements like meetings, workshops and community pop-ups with the diverse community members and stakeholders that you identified in the co-planning stage
2. Don’t just go away and design on your own, you should be actually designing during those sessions
3. Be aware of and take account of things like power dynamics and mistrust during your sessions
4. Keep track of what you do and how you are making sure you have diverse and equitable community representation
5. 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

6. Create delivery plans
7. Get time and money to support ongoing community involvement
8. Understand what skills members of the community already have, and invite experts to upskill them and staff
9. Make continuity plans for when people have to leave the project
10. Continue to engage less heard communities, even if they can’t get involved in co-delivery
11. 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

These methods are based on the report The path to net zero: three steps for effective Community Engagement, by 3Ci – Cities Commission for Climate Investment (a Connected Places Catapult Initiative). Though the report is focused on net zero, the guidelines are applicable to a much wider range of inclusive innovation projects.