What I have learned about consultations from doing loads of them

I absolutely can't stop talking to people.

Almost every week this year I've held a focus group, consultation, one to one, round table, or some other form of getting people together to tell me what they think. I've met with students, university leaders, local authorities, businesses, politicians, civil servants, and maybe worst of all members of the general public.

And, genuinely, as someone who is quite nosy about what people think it's one of the best parts of my job. What I like about people is that they have an endless capacity to be surprising and to offer insights on things that you didn't know about.

There are some things I've learned that in my experience lead to doing better consultations. As a starter I think it helps if you like doing it. I suspect most people can tell if you don't.

What is the point

Asking people to spend time with you can be an inconvenience for them (yes I am sure it is particularly arduous to spend time with me.) Understanding why you are bothering to do a consultation in the first place helps to make sure you're getting the most of their time. In my experience there are broadly three kinds of consultation

• The kind of consultation where you believe a broad set of things to be true and you want to speak to people to confirm it is the case and build deeper insights.
• There are consultations where there is little pre-determined knowledge and you want to hold focus groups to discover a novel insight, understand how something will land, or otherwise find out something that isn't obvious.
• And there are consultations used to confirm an idea. This might be a consultation with the public on a new strategy, or with legislators to understand the feasibility of passing an idea, or a poster up on a lamppost for a new garden extension.

The point is the purpose of the consultation is important. Asking people to think widely about a narrow set of possible outcomes is a waste of everyone's time. Rushing to an outcome when the thinking hasn't been done is just bad consulting. And so on.

What do we know

It's increasingly uncommon that I work with an organisation that don't know something, and often quite a lot, about their own stakeholders. To take the university sector they will, to a greater or lesser degree, know the progression, continuation and drop out rates of their students. They will know which services get accessed and how often. They will (often) know which programmes have the lowest satisfaction and the highest satisfaction. And they will know which modes of studies report the highest level of satisfaction etc.

Unless there is a problem with existing insight, or to set context for a different insight, it's not helpful to re-ask versions of the same question. The whole point of a focus group, for example, is to create a novel insight based on a set of existing presumptions.

It's the difference between asking students "do you think the career service is good?" which is likely known in existing survey data and "could you tell us which careers you are hoping to go into and how the careers service might support that ambition?" a kind of knotty, trickier, personal response that is hard to get out in a survey.

Who to ask and in what format

What is known should lead to who to ask (aside from statutory consultees). Generally, this might be experts who can shine a light on a problem. It might be service users or beneficiaries of an organisation (students in students' unions), it might be someone who is neither an expert or service users but plays an important role in the wider decision making infrastructure (a leader of a neighbouring local authority), or it might be members of the general public to get a feel for what they think on any given issue.

The information that is being sought and the people it is being sought from should then dictate the format. Smaller focus groups are generally better for getting more detailed insights from a more limited range of experiences. Larger groups are better for workshopping broad themes and ideas. And one to one meetings are best for eliciting specific expertise. The composition of each group is also important and in the case of something like testing the political salience of a message or designing a service for a specific cohort of people the representation of the group is especially important.

How to ask

The aim of the game is to find out what people genuinely think. Don't lead them down a specific path where possible. Serve the group with good questions don't steer their opinions, open up the debate, and allow a plurality of people to speak (be strong in shutting down noisier participants). Allow time for others to join in and try to make the room feel comfortable with your own presentation style.

How to report

Occasionally a client will want a read out of every group that has been consulted and what they thought (make sure they know on what basis their thoughts will be reported in advance.) More often they want an interpretation of what the consultation means in the context of other data sources.

There are two parts two this. A description of what has been reported that represents a wide range of views expressed across the consultation. The analysis should aim to develop themes, ideas, and wider range of enquiries. It's important, at least to my mind, to not try and find a middle ground between consultees. If one group wants a new train station in the town and one wants a new bus station the solution isn't to propose a new motorway.

Reading

Public First The Pub and the People: https://www.publicfirst.co.uk/the_pub_and_the_people.html

The National Centre for Social Research: https://natcen.ac.uk/

University of Manchester Conducting a Focus Group: https://www.methods.manchester.ac.uk/themes/data-collection/focus-groups/