Researching with communities in a Pandemic
In the Innovation team, we always put the people we are trying to solve problems for at the heart of our work and decision making. For our Community-Led Approach work these people are the communities of Neath, Nelson and Camborne. When you think of researching and engaging with communities, you might think about exploring the towns, chatting with people in the local pubs, visiting the schools etc. So running community-led, research in a pandemic — sounds mad right? To quote Jessica, Head of Innovation here at the British Red Cross, If we didn’t find creative ways round it then we wouldn’t be the Innovation team.
So we got creative, we tried a number of different things to truly understand the strengths and needs of these communities. Let me talk you through the methods we used, and what we learnt from trying them.
Planning the work
We were aware right from the start of our work that we are not the first team to do research in Neath, Nelson and Camborne. It became quickly clear to us that many other organisations and funding bodies have asked people to share their expertise and experience, with very little apparent positive impact on the communities.
We wanted to take a different approach, embedding the community in our work by hiring local team members in all 3 towns, Bethan, Chloe and Cara help us to co-design our research, to advocate for the local voice as well as being subject matter experts themselves.
Our research
Different research methods can bring you different kinds of insights, so when trying to understand the complexity of a community eco system, we used a varied approach:
1. Remote user interviews
User interviews are a common and well known way to carry out qualitative user research. We have been carrying out 1–2–1 interviews on zoom or on the phone, sometimes even on Whatsapp or Facebook messenger — whatever feels most comfortable to the members of the community.
By creating a safe space to explore thoughts with people in the town, we’ve been able to gain really rich insights around the challenges locally, what people are proud of, and how people interact with each other at a hyper local level.
A key reason to carry out user research is to be able to see the world through your users eyes, particularly when we couldn’t visit the towns directly. These semi structured interviews provided us with a crucial space to delve into local interests, and deeply understand peoples’ experiences within their local community.
Things we learnt:
- Building trust through a computer is hard, spend ample time warming up, getting to know each other and allowing time for their questions before jumping in.
- Have maximum 3 (ideally only 2) of your team on the call (one interviewer, one note taker, one observer) having many faces on the call can be overwhelming to the person you are talking with
- A discussion guide is just that — a guide, deeper local understanding emerged when we facilitated the conversation to meander organically around our research questions.
2. Group events
After hearing from many individuals in interviews, we also wanted to learn by bringing people together in an interactive way. These events, similar to citizens assemblies run by local governments, were organised for both voluntary sector and the wider community.
The events not only helped us to understand more about community strengths and needs. It also provided direct value into the community — let me explain how.
Miro helped us record conversation visually whilst discussing local strengths and challenges. This meant people could actually see they were being heard, and provided a space for reflection on the thoughts of others. Viewpoints complemented and contradicted, providing and fascinating space to facilitate and learn from. It also became a constructive opportunity for community members to consider alternative perspectives of their town.
We wanted to make sure people who came to the event left with more information about their community and therefore had immediate value from our work. Taking inspiration from Cormac Russell and an Asset-Based Community Development thinking, we asked people to offer something which they could potentially share with their neighbours and community — there were 3 categories:
- Skills and super powers (e.g. a football coach who could teach football, or an avid gardener who could offer advice)
- Objects and things (e.g. an extra long ladder which is only used once a year)
- Places (e.g. a large garden, or the keys to the village hall)
The purpose of this activity is to shift thinking locally from ‘I see a problem, but someone else has the skills or resources to fix it’ to ‘I see a problem and I know who can help’ building community capacity and therefore in turn — resilience.
We gave people time to reflect about what they could offer and had some fantastic offers as you can see in the image below. Even better — people then started to build connections — a youth group was looking for a mini bus driver, and there was a qualified one in the room. Another gentleman expressed his current battle with his mental health, and a trained counsellor on the call offered him some free sessions as support. Community led, community power!
Sharing all of the notes and input from the community across the events back with those who attended ensured we were not gatekeepers of important community information.
Things we learnt:
- A year into the pandemic and we are all exhausted — joining another online call is not a priority for many and so remember this when estimating participant numbers
- Simplify the technology… it can be easy to get excited using many online engagement tools. But asking people who are less confident in technology to move from Menti, to Miro to EasyRetro was overwhelming
- People are sometimes suspicious of the research motivations and goals, make this and the expectations of the session clear.
- Reflect often! Every event is different and provides an opportunity to learn and improve, holding retros after every event improved our offering and also boosted team morale.
3. Activity boxes
When planning our research we had hoped to embed ourselves into the community, visiting and observing. Interviews are great to help us understand what people say and think, but we want to understand more about what people are feeling and doing. This is especially important because we want to understand both current experiences and how people would like their community to develop , so we can understand where to support. So we designed a creative pack which allowed people to think differently about the world they see everyday, and creatively dive into what they really experience and feel. The packs were posted directly to the community members door, and through a pre-payed envelope, they could post their thoughts straight back to us.
Not everyone felt comfortable being interviewed over the phone, and due to digital exclusion, some people were unable to even if they wanted to so we were able to send them a pack instead!
There were 8 tasks ranging from exploring individual’s support networks to ‘5 wishes for the town’. We designed them to be playful, engaging and thought provoking, supplying coloured pens and stickers to help people ‘Label parts of Camborne they would like to change’ or ‘Write an advert for the best part of Neath’.
Things we learnt
- Make the box look appealing and relatable, not scary and like ‘school work’
- Insights gathered were instrumental, however the assembly of the boxes was very time consuming and is important to consider in the planning phase
- I’m sure many of us can relate to the excitement and keenness to get stuck into something fun and new, signing up to take part. The short delay from ordering a box to it arriving meant situations had often changed and the box was not longer prioritised even with monetary incentives. We saw this happen a lot and navigated it by our local innovation officers dropping the activities boxes off on the same day which increased return rate.
- There are a number of online platforms that can facilitate some of these activities, we decided to stay paper based for accessibility but depending on your audience online may be a better and faster choice.
4. Engaging people where they were already communicating
As we mentioned — joining another zoom event is not everyone’s cup of tea. Rather than inviting people to join our space, we wanted to try and meet them somewhere they were already communicating and felt comfortable sharing thoughts and ideas.
One example of how we did this is a Facebook take over for a popular town Facebook page in Neath one evening for two hours. By asking some fun and likeable questions like ‘describe neath in 3 emojis’ we built engagement and momentum on the page. we got quite a few emojis that looked like the following:
But we also asked questions like ‘What are you proud of in Neath?’ and ‘What would you like to change in Neath?’ which received an overwhelming response of ideas and insights from over 3500 people over the evening and following days.
What we learnt:
- People engage better in environments they are already comfortable in, utilise this to get wider engagement
- Along with the great ideas and positive stories from the town, there was also a lot of negativity, have team members on hand to support in replying to these sensitively whilst not shutting down conversation
5. Community mapping
In order to help us understand existing services, strengths and support locally, our local innovation officers undertook some community asset mapping.
What’s asset mapping I hear you ask? What we quickly realised is what people are aware of in their town, vs what is actually available in their town are vastly different (an insight in itself) .To ensure we had the best holistic understanding of both people’s perceptions and current community resources our local innovation officers spoke to key community members, and carried out further desk based research, bringing it all together in one map of information. Not only are these maps important to ensure we don’t create any duplicated effort as an organisation, it was also imperative in identifying potential collaborators and allies as we move into the testing phase.
What we’ve learnt is that community research in a pandemic is possible, challenging, but possible. We know that with high levels of digital exclusion in all 3 towns, that there are many other people locally that we have been unable to reach safely and we acknowledge these gaps as we move through to the testing phase of our approach.
We also know that through our creativity we have had the opportunity to have deeply insightful conversations with a cross section of these communities — from 16 year old dancers, to teachers, single parents, post office owners and flood victims.
The empathy and understanding this has created within the team is imperative as we continue to explore what a community led approach could look like for the British Red Cross. If you have any questions or would like to chat through our work, DM me on twitter @charjwilton or email me at CharlotteWilton@redcross.org.uk.
