Staff and stakeholder engagement
Change always involves working across boundaries – we are experts in creating ways to engage different groups to meet a clear purpose.
We know from our personal lives that us humans are social animals, thriving best when with others. But then why can engaging with people professionally sometimes feel so difficult?
We can show you a better way. We are experts in how to engage all different types of stakeholders – staff, partners, communities, users, customers – in a way that combines insight with enjoyment. We are able to do this because of the range of expertise within our team.
Our approach to engagement
We work with organisations to design programmes of engagement that have clarity of purpose and meet your needs. We use our expertise in research and evaluation to ensure a robust, highly deliberate approach, using a variety of methods (events, surveys, interviews, and more) as appropriate.
We spend time with our clients to be clear about the specific outputs they are keen to achieve, whether that is the collection of different data points or perspectives, building understanding as part of a programme of change, or sharing learning with others.
But critically, we use our expertise in organisational and strategy development to create a cultural legacy from your engagement that will go on having an effect long after the process is complete.
It is this human element that is the core of any engagement process. As Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said… but people will never forget how you made them feel.” As such, we work with our clients to design how they want those they are engaging with to feel as part of the process, and what they want their participants to leave thinking about them.
Our work is completed by producing written outputs that meet your requirements, whether formal documents, board papers, or accessible highly visual summaries for participants. We use our past experience in writing papers for the highest levels of government to ensure the highest quality of product.
Our services
Our services are tailored to our client needs. These can include:
- Uncovering insight. We use action learning sets, interviews, focus groups, surveys, reports and digital and face-to-face events to reveal findings and stimulate productive discussions.
- Identifying who you need to engage with. We plan creative ways for people to be involved in the engagement process, so they and their organisation get the most from it long term.
- Using methods from deliberative democracy. We use engagement practices such as ‘citizens assemblies’ with participants drawn from communities, or within an organisation, to hear representative views.
- Engaging digital and face-to-face events, both large and small, to connect and engage stakeholders. Our event formats are tailored to each specific project and its participants.
- Producing high quality outputs. As well as reports and publications, we also find compelling ways – such as digital events, films, roundtables and workshops – to share insights and recommendations in ways that are most helpful to audiences such as funders, commissioners and policy makers.
Our experience
We have worked alongside dozens of organisations to help engage their stakeholders. This includes:
- Supporting the British Red Cross and the Co-op to engage public, private and charity stakeholders working to address loneliness. This included facilitating the Loneliness Action Group, as well as wider research, learning and engagement support.
- Working with Camden Council and its health and care partners to deliver a citizens’ assembly to improve local health and care. Using a deliberative democracy approach, we brought together residents, the NHS and the council to help make Camden the best place to grow, live and age well.
- Using innovative research dissemination methods with UCL to engage new stakeholders in an impactful way. The methods used provide a new way to share knowledge between research, practice and policy.
- Working with a partnership of NHS organisations and local councils in south east London to deliver a broad range of engagement work, bringing together patients, charities, NHS staff, local authorities, and wider stakeholders.