This was the question we posed for insight and discussion at our latest
Charity Collective Lunch for Service leaders, an afternoon designed for honest conversations, shared challenges, and practical ideas.
While every organisation in the room had different missions, they all shared one truth,
The need to build services with people, not for them.
And yet we heard that meaningful participation is still hard. Not because people don’t care, but because it can be difficult to know where to involve lived-experience voices, how, and to what end.
Participation done well
We know when participation is done well, the benefits are practical and immediate:
Sharper focus - effort goes where it will have the greatest impact
Better decisions - assumptions get challenged and blind spots shrink
Broader reach - services resonate with underserved or unheard groups
Deeper trust - people see their voices reflected in what you deliver
Faster learning - feedback loops shorten and change happens sooner
And examples of how this has worked in practice are exactly what we heard from our guest speakers, Sarah Bell (Pancreatic Cancer UK) and Sally Kum (Breast Cancer Now).
Do listen to our conversation in the recording here.
And we reflected as a team on what we hear from our experience and conversations with service teams here are some of our own insights and observations.
It’s not always about doing more
A big learning we see across organisations, it’s not usually about doing more participation. It’s about doing it more purposefully.
Many charities already have pockets of great practice across teams, but without clarity on why they are involving people, participation can become scattered and inconsistent.
Is it about trying to understand changing audience needs?
Improve the beneficiary journey?
Extend reach into underserved communities?
Evolve or redesign services?
Inform new service development?
With clarity on the business need, the participation need becomes clearer too.
From there, who to involve and how to involve them starts to fall into place.
Start With “Who” and “How”
‘Who’ to involve will depend on the objectives,
The full user base?
A particular demographic?
Carers or wider community members?
Prospective or past users, not just current ones?
And the ‘how’ becomes much easier to design once the ‘why’ and ‘who’ are clear.
A great example comes from a Dutch epilepsy charity. Research topics were always decided internally. But they asked their community to submit research questions they’d like answered, narrowed them to 18, then invited the public to vote, directly shaping the research agenda for coming years.
It wasn’t about what the charity assumed people wanted to understand more, it was about what users actually wanted.
As Linda from Woodgreen put it during our recent digital transformation project,
“It’s not about what we think people need. It’s about what they actually need and what they’ll actually use.”
Overcoming Organisational Barriers
One of the most common challenges raised is organisational capacity:
How do you build a culture, structure, and capability that genuinely enables participation?
In our work, this often involves five big steps:
Assess how things really work - the enablers and blockers
Design how you want things to work - challenge assumptions and raise ambition
Co-design a future model - who decides what, how teams collaborate, how progress is tracked
Activate capability - equip people across the org to lead and sustain participation
Pilot and scale - test in real teams, learn fast, and embed new ways of working.
It’s never simple, but it is achievable with the right foundations.
Innovating New Ways to Involve People
Teams are always keen to learn from others about innovative methods for involving service users.
Examples include:
To help service teams involve people meaningfully in the design and delivery of services, we’ve designed the ‘Participation Playdeck’, a pocket toolkit. It turns good intentions into practical action, so you choose the right level of involvement, widen who’s in the room, and make better, faster decisions. If you'd like a deck, or want to talk about any of these ideas, we’d love to continue the conversation.
Contact Ryan - ryan@goodinnovation.co.uk