Designing participation with Anthony Nolan and the Motor Neurone Disease Association (paired consultancy)

The challenge

In 2022 we published a series of blogs on the barriers and opportunities that health and care charities face in involving their supporters and beneficiaries in their work. Following this, we were approached separately by Anthony Nolan and the Motor Neurone Disease Association (MNDA) who were both looking for support in applying the ideas within their organisations.

Both charities felt that although they could reference a number of excellent examples of participatory work at their charity, these were often one-off, tactical activities. Within these projects, there was a lack of a shared purpose and strategic vision.

Our approach

Rather than entering into a consulting relationship with each organisation individually, we proposed that each might benefit from working together. At New Citizen Project, we have always used collaborative consulting in our work, mostly via larger-scale innovation projects. For this project, we decided to test a paired consultancy approach. Both were excited about the potential benefits of having a thinking partner with first hand experience of similar challenges in their sector.

We delivered the work in two parts. First, we supported the organisations to set a strategic ambition for participation using our Participatory Strategy Map. Then, we worked with them to put this plan into action. Guided by our team, both charities developed a set of participatory activities they could go and test. Throughout the programme the teams were encouraged to co-mentor each other - providing critical friendship, challenge and support as they developed their ideas and plans.

Impact and learning

Since our work together, both Anthony Nolan and MNDA have developed their involvement frameworks and have started to experiment with different participation approaches within their projects.

At Anthony Nolan, a project has been established to explore how the charity will support those who are going through bereavement due to blood cancer. The learnings from their work with us and MNDA have fed into the design of the process and have surfaced a need to work collaboratively internally to co-design the resources. The Anthony Nolan team found our adapted ‘double diamond’ tool particularly useful in structuring conversations to gather insights and generate ideas.