Why involve people?

When thinking about involving people in your organisation's work, you need to be clear about why you want to do it. Ultimately, it should help your organisation to achieve more.

Many organisations in our sector see involving people in their work as an essential element of what they do. For community groups, co-operatives and umbrella bodies, for example, involvement is integral to their operation, because they are constitutionally led and managed by their users, staff or members. For others, involving people is a choice.

Involvement for improvement

Whether you feel it is a necessity or a choice, involving people should lead to some sort of improvement within your organisation. It should not only be an end in itself. Otherwise, the experience can easily become a tick box exercise which benefits no one.

Not for everyone

It's also important to remember that involving people isn't right for every organisation in every circumstance. If done for the wrong reasons or for no reason at all, it can be distracting, costly and unnecessary.

Reasons to do it

As a starting point, ask yourself what your organisation needs from involving people. Here are some common benefits:

To improve communications

You could involve people to help promote your services, attract more users, improve your public relations or influence policy-makers.

To evaluate services

You are likely to need some help from service users in assessing how well you have achieved your intended impact. After all, they are the ones who should have experienced many of the benefits and undergone some form of change as a result of your work. Getting feedback from other people affected by your work is valuable too. Find out more about evaluating your work.

To develop a strategy and design better services

Would you like to hear a range of views on different options for your organisation's future? Or maybe you want to seek advice on the design and delivery of planned projects. Perhaps help with staff recruitment or training could be useful as a way of improving service delivery.

To empower service users

If your organisation's aims or values include developing and empowering your service users, involving them in your work is an obvious way to help them to have more control over their lives. For example, a voice in the strategic decision-making processes of your organisation could be an option (and will be essential for user/member-led bodies).

Once you have identified why you want to involve people, the other key decisions are who to involve, and to what extent?