In late July, a group of governors from Lancashire Care Foundation Trust explored and documented their thoughts on how they engage with their members and the public at events, how they document the engagement and hold the Trust Board to account. (See the workshop blog here.) Laura combed through the documented processes to label and code themes and challenges that came up for the governors with the help of colleague, Hayley. The themes that came out included…
- Communication before events
- Purpose of inquiry
- Behaviour at engagement events
- Synthesis of results
The most common theme across the data was the purpose of engaging and reporting, which could link together the different stages in the engagement, reporting and holding the Board to account process. Based on this, we created a simple diagram that we felt represented the process and the key areas that could be used as a focus for the tools.
A small group of governors, including Keith and Lorena who had joined us previously and Emma and Pam who were new to the project joined us at Lancaster University, along with David Keddie, Stakeholder Engagement Manager at the Trust to look at the findings and start to design tools. The group felt that they did not need tools to help with documenting and reporting on engagement, instead, they felt that they might need something to help them read and understand the many papers they are asked to read as governors. Through discussion, we felt that it would be useful for the governors to have a way of sharing their knowledge from various events, visits and media together, either online or in their meeting every six weeks.
Laura and Hayley helped the group explore the different areas and begin to pick out areas that could potentially be ideas for tools. To conclude the workshop, the group invited Laura and Hayley to attend their meetings to observe the format and potentially design tools to fit into the meetings.
Laura Wareing