Communications Toolbox for Civic & Nonprofit Tech: Participatory Approaches

This resource is part of our Communications Toolkit for Civic & Nonprofit Tech.

Traditionally, communications is about crafting a message and delivering it to an audience. You decide what you want to tell people. You choose words, media, and channels to get this message across to those people. And you put the message out in the world, and measure whether it’s having the effect you wanted.

But this approach contains assumptions that you, and we, may not actually agree with.

• You assume that you know what needs to be communicated, and to whom.
• You assume that you are the right person to be communicating it.
• You assume that you know the most effective way to communicating it.

Put another way: you assume that you know what others want and need.

What if we flip the traditional communications approach on its head? What if we put the needs and priorities of our community first?

This point of view has been beautifully articulated by the Design Justice Network, a group that aims to move beyond “design for social good,” which assumes that a benevolent designer knows what’s best for the target audience, and towards a “design justice” that centers the people affected and aims to heal, liberate, and restore.

If this sounds too lofty for organizational communications, consider that the role of communications is to connect. In the nonprofit world, connection is not as easy as declaring our desire to help. Depending on your own positionality related to the communities you’re working with, you may have centuries of patriarchy, colonialism, ableism, and other supremacist mindsets gumming up the channels of communication – even if you personally see yourself as not perpetuating these forces, you still need to push back against them, and your communications practices are a key piece of your strategy.

Your name, branding, and overall vibe can either distance you from your community, or bring you closer. Your use of social media will either make you into cringeworthy do-gooders, or show that you’re serious about making a difference.

This change in approach can be described in many ways. You may hear the terms “co-design,” “participatory design,” and “human-centered design.” These terms indicate different degrees to which the community is involved in the process. We aren’t going to define the terms here, since the nuances depend somewhat on which field you’re coming from; for example, the terms mean different things in citizen science than they do in urban planning.

Whatever you call the process, you can involve the people you serve in every phase of your communications work – and you’ll be glad you did.

What’s different about a community-led process?

• You’ll need to give people an overview of the whole process. Let them know where decision-making power lies at each part of the process: with the community, with a small committee, or with your organization? (This may challenge you to give the community more decision-making power than you had originally intended - that’s usually a good thing!)
• If people come to a meeting, offer to compensate them for their time. Cash or a gift certificate are common acknowledgements of people’s time and effort.
• Expect some drop-off from people who don’t have time to participate in a longer process; start with a slightly larger group than you need.
• Replace an extractive mindset – you’re gathering material and using it to make decisions – with a collaborative mindset – you’re learning and making decisions together.
• Be clear with everyone involved when you are in a “flare” mode, where more input and ideas are better, and when you are transitioning to a “focus” mode, when you are editing down and making decisions. In our experience, collisions between one person’s flare and another person’s focus make up most of the conflict in a participatory session or project.

Folks we admire

We have learned an enormous amount from the collaborative design studio And Also Too. They were instrumental in helping us shape the community-driven approach that we took to our own rebranding.

The Design from the Margins (DFM) methodology developed by re|center is a research-based methodology that emphasizes deeply taking the perspectives of vulnerable people into account. The case studies of DFM in practice are powerful and important to read.

Practical resources

There isn’t exactly an existing toolkit for community-led design in organizational communications. (That’s one big reason we’re writing this series!)

If you’re interested in taking this approach, first, understand and scope the communications issue you want to solve.

Then, peruse some of these participatory design toolkits developed for other applications, and consider which ones might work well for different phases of your communications project.

If you’re stuck, you can contact us! We did our own rebrand using a community-led process, and we’d love to talk through your ideas with you.

• The 35 patterns of Liberating Structures are an excellent jumping-off point if you have a bit of facilitation experience. They describe ways to arrange and structure a group in order to challenge or even invert the existing power dynamics.
• The Crown Wellness Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder has a Participatory Research Toolkit that is primarily geared towards health and wellness research, but could also be useful for communication design, especially since the methods are described for both physical and digital groups.
• The majority of participatory design toolkits deal with the topic of space – urban space, architectural space, affordable housing. These methods can be challenging to translate to the digital realm, but they are helpful to understand the mindset of participatory design.
• The Liberatory Design Toolkit works at a broader level than the other toolkits above, and may help you to rethink your relationship to the communication project you’re planning.

As Shannon Webber of Northeastern University writes:

Participatory design is not about not fearing the public, it’s about engaging with them in spite of the fear of rejection. As a facilitator it is your job to figure out the problems that they want solved by asking as many questions as possible. More questions mean more answers. More answers mean more information. More information means better opportunity for understanding.

There aren’t so many examples of participatory design in communications, and we’d like to create more. If you end up using community-centered methods in your communications project, please let us know! We would love to feature your work and help others get inspired.

This toolkit was developed with the support of the Open Technology Fund Learning Lab. Got feedback? Want to work together? Please write to us at [email protected].