What we learned in exploring the co-creation of a Community Research Network…
Last March, we announced that Noisy Cricket had been awarded a small pot of funding from InnovateUK to explore the establishment of a Community Research Network. Trialled through the now defunct Responsible Tech Collective — for which Luminate and Co-op Foundation funding was completed in December 2022 — we explored what community engagement might look like in the context of bringing home the humanity to tech.
Our Context
Our Journey So Far
Bringing over seven years of Noisy Cricket’s extensive experience and expertise in delivering community engagement initiatives, plus Responsible Tech Collective activity to map the end-to end journey, we were clear from the outset that the scope of a Community Research Network was HUGE. That’s because establishing best practice involves so much more than just jumping in head first to delivery.
The value of community engagement — for both your organisation and the communities you exist to serve — plus the readiness of individuals and teams to do things differently, are essential if an organisation is going to optimise its impact. All three are founded on being able to create mutual trust between a community and an organisation, regardless of the social issue, specific challenge or wider theme in question.
Focusing on responsible technology for the discovery phase of the Community Research Network project, the legacy Responsible Tech Collective project on Citizen-Led Security Standards provided a rich opportunity to test and learn. With former members of the Responsible Tech Collective still committed to evolving their own approaches to community engagement, we established a network with various test cases to explore.
Our Collective Focus
GMCA and Metropolitan Metropolitan University came on board as official partners, plus the NHS, Bury Council, University of Manchester, Nexer Digital, Open Data Manchester and Salford CVS as participants. The potential to optimise the performance of solutions and reduce the risk of failure (plus reputational regulatory and reputation costs in its wake) were key motivators, plus uncovering opportunities for innovation and differentiation too.
In choosing a stage in the journey to minimise scope, the importance of building trust was key for the cross-sector network of partners and participants. Keen to optimise impact — under the proviso that it would highlight the importance of creating value and ensuring readiness — content and communications were identified as an essential first step, leading to a research question focused on raising awareness of responsible tech topics.
Mapping hypotheses and assumptions to shape the project, an organisation’s propensity to prioritise their own agendas — over and above those of the people they influence, impact or benefit — was flagged as a key area of concern. Overly formal approaches and sector-led language were highlighted as potential challenges too, and the need to establish alternative, inclusive methods of engaging communities.
Our Approach
Our Participants
In exploring what good looked like in raising awareness, it was essential to hear from both the organisations intending to deliver content and communications plus the communities who would receive them. As a result, twelve cross-sector organisations, with an active interest in data and digital, plus six people from marginalised and disadvantaged communities who had been impacted by digital inclusion were recruited.
Explicitly engaged to research, co-create and test potential solutions which met the needs of both organisations and people in communities equally, the delivery team — comprising strategy, research and design expertise from Noisy Cricket and Honeybadger Clan — set out to understand the challenges and opportunities around current awareness raising activities.
Project initiation blogs, scoping conversations plus workshops were undertaken with organisation participants from business, and government. academia and charities, highlighting the importance of mitigating risk and building trust through community engagement. Senior leaders were clear on how harmful doing community engagement wrong could be.
Our Methodology
For community participants, expression of interest forms, initiation surveys and one-on-one interviews emphasised the need for organisations to understand the wider context of people’s lives, above and beyond the topic being raised awareness of. Responsible tech was important, but only inasmuch as it intersected with the issues and challenges they were currently or had previously experienced.
From April through to June 2023, the delivery team followed the research workshops and interviews with shared insight reflection, need prioritisation, constraint identification and solution ideation sessions. With both community and organisation participants determining what good looked like, the network voted on the most promising ideas to raise awareness, enable content and communications and most importantly, build trust.
Noisy Cricket and Honeybadger Clan then assessed the feasibility of organisations engaging with the chosen solution, plus the viability of Noisy Cricket to enable it through a Community Research Network. Early-stage prototyping allowed for testing, feedback and refinement, and highlighted where further research and interconnected solutions were needed to enable future delivery.
Our Insights
Structural Influences
A systemic lens on the insights which emerged revealed that structural barriers within the organisation were the main hindrance in helping organisations raise awareness of responsible tech topics. Power dynamics, leaning in the organisation’s favour on account of controlling budgets and resources, meant decision-making sat beyond the community’s realm of influence.
With limited or no effort made to understand the real needs of communities, a top-down approach to communications is often the norm for cross-sector organisations. As a result, organisation agendas are prioritised over what’s important to those they exist to serve, and content is pushed out to keep on budget and time. Regardless of what this means for communities, a disconnect is created as a result.
Addressing organisational hierarchies to empower communities was seen as vital, with transparency offering further potential to bridge the gap in trust. Open conversations, moving beyond one-sided communications and shorter feedback loops are all important, underpinned by organisations being clear about the purpose, approach and intention behind any efforts to engage with communities.
Sporadic communications were also a source of frustration for community participants, and organisations lamented the lack of follow-up once insights had been gleaned from a community. More explicit and informed consent, especially when data was involved, was seen as essential to maintaining trust, meaning organisations must go beyond basic engagement and give communities more control.
Cultural Influences
While structural influences inform what organisations do, cultural factors are far more influential in determining how. Both organisation and community participants cited the importance of deeper and more meaningful connections, moving beyond transactional interactions, and ensuring humanity was central to any approach. Lived experience, and therefore diversity, within delivery teams was seen as essential to achieving this.
This ensures assumptions are dispelled, pre-determined approaches can be challenged and more tailored solutions can be explored, with empathy at the core of any engagement. Understanding the context of people’s lives — beyond the topic the organisation prioritised — is imperative in identifying with others. The team’s capacity to experience the thoughts, feelings and experiences of a community, therefore, is essential.
Active listening is a key facet of empathy, as is proactively responding to needs. Both implicit and explicit power dynamic plays a role here too, seen in an organisation’s willingness and ability to offer agency and autonomy to community members. Equally important is committing to long-term relationships with communities, showing the impact of engagement over time, and ensuring mutual value creation throughout.
Personal Influences
Regardless of the issue, challenge or topic in discussion, understanding what’s important to both communities and organisations is therefore fundamental to awareness-raising activities. Necessitating regular and honest communication, moving from broadcast-style communications to an ongoing dialogue requires a major shift for organisations to connect with communities.
Instead of telling communities how to access online communications, for example, community participants shared they want a much deeper understanding of how their data is used to make decisions as a result. The process is as important as the outcomes and outputs it produces. Yet, as people’s circumstances are likely to fluctuate, being mindful of the varying capacities and capabilities of those being engaged is important.
Therefore, it’s incumbent on organisations to meet communities where they are — mentally and emotionally as well as physically — to ensure inclusion from the outset. With investment, organisations can completely change the relationship dynamics between themselves and users, consumers, customers or residents. In its wake, the trust that’s essential for both organisations and communities to thrive and succeed can be built.
Priorities and Constraints
In exploring priorities with both organisation and community participants, the relevance of content and communications to people’s lives was key. Contingent on organisations understanding what’s important to communities, organisations first have to listen, followed by transparency around the organisation’s agenda. Awareness raising therefore shifts from the organisation to the community in order to enable effective engagement.
Yet to achieve a more human and empathic culture, where communities lead on sharing what’s important, organisations have to overcome significant bureaucratic constraints to do so. Irrelevant broadcast content and communications need to be replaced with open and regular communication, and transparency through shorter feedback loops made available to understand and align with community needs in real-time.
Predicated on shifting power to (rather than directing it at) communities, organisations need to do things differently, starting from a place of shared understanding before any content, communications or awareness-raising activities are embarked upon. Tailored activity is what’s required to build trust and ensure successful engagement between organisations and communities.
Our Next Steps
Our Deliverables
Organisational transformation is required to enable community research, content and communications and awareness raising. The COMMUNITY INSIGHTS HUB — which was ideated by, voted on, protoyped for and tested with both organisation and community participants — is a tool with significant potential to help organisations come to a shared understanding of what’s important to both them and the people they exist to serve.
Designed to allow organisations to transparently share the information they currently have on community issues, challenges and topics, listening is built in by asking communities to prioritise, challenge, build or add insights. Inherently providing feedback for organisations too, the COMMUNITY INSIGHTS HUB helps organisations and communities get on the same page, and ensures future communications can be relevant.
Understanding how this fits into organisations’ current engagement processes is the logical next step, as well as further research and design of content and communications tools plus feedback resources to make it viable to offer up as an informative and useful solution. Yet, to do this, organisations first have to see the value of community engagement, and ensure their readiness to do things differently before they invest in optimising impact.
Our Opportunity
So, our next step is to take a step back. With continuation funding on offer from Innovate UK to evolve the work initiated during the discovery phase — plus Noisy Crickets existing insights, experience and assets — we’ll be looking at the bigger picture of community engagement, and what’s needed to help organisations transform.
With the intention of creating value for organisations while ensuring impact for communities, you can find out about the first stage of the project here, and more here about the journey ahead.
