Charity Sector Case Study
Co-producing a Mission and Priorities
Working with a user-led Disabled People's Organisation, we helped to orchestrate the co-production of an updated mission statement. Our aim was to produce an identity that reflected the diverse community the organisation was designed to serve.
We supported the client in ensuring the different, and sometimes conflicting, needs and priorities of members were taken into consideration. This new clearer direction has allowed funding to increase as well as membership numbers.
Client: User-led DPO
Sector: Charity
Service: Co-production
Date: 2019
Our client for this project was a user-led charity and Disabled People's Organisation (DPO) with a diverse membership of disabled individuals including those with physical impairments, learning disabilities, mental health issues and long-term conditions.
The Brief:
Design and deliver the co-production of an updated mission statement.
As a user-led organisation, the charity was created to represent the interests of local disabled people and it was vital that their organisational identity and focus reflected the community they were designed to serve.
After some years of financial and structural instability, the new board of charity trustees and management team approached Inclusion Unlimited to design and deliver the co-production of their new mission statement and strategic priorities.
The Challenge:
Ensure that the varying needs of the organisation's members are accurately and authentically represented.
As a DPO, the client was technically confident in the theory and practice of co-production. However, as a pan-disability organisation, its membership included many impairment-specific groups with many different, and sometimes conflicting, needs and priorities.
Aware that reaching consensus within this context would be challenging, the client wanted to ensure that all of their members' voices were heard and that an external independent partner with an understanding of user-led environments would support this aim.
Our Approach:
Accelerate clarity through encouraging a landscape of honesty and reflection.
Working closely with eh CEO of the charity, we identified the different stakeholder groups whose experience and expertise needed to inform the co-production, including members, staff, trustees and users of the charity's services. We then identified the subgroups within these where accessibility needs overlapped.
We designed and delivered a core workshop which guided attendees through the different elements of the charity's identity and encouraged them to articulate these using their current experiences of the charity and its work, and their own needs and hopes for the future. The workshop was adapted according to the needs of each stakeholder group.
We collated all of these ideas together, identifying the common and conflicting ideas and themes and where these commonalities and conflicts were located in the stakeholder landscape, along with our understanding of the origins of these conflicts.
We worked with a group of representatives from each of the stakeholder groups to narrow down the ideas. From these options we created a survey which was sent to all those who had taken part in the workshops and any members who had not.
The Results:
Funding and memberships increase due to a new clear direction for the charity centred around their stakeholders.
Our co-production activities involved more than 75% of individuals identified as stakeholders of the charity. This allowed for previously undiscovered commonalities between different impairment-specific groups' needs and priorities to be identified and codified in the organisation's mission, values and objectives.
This new vision provided a foundation on which the charity went on to build a new visual identity and suite of communications. The stronger sense of clarity achieved through our co-production process helped to accelerate the growth of the charity, allowing them to attract more funding and a broader membership.
