Use this Guide if you want to facilitate a group of people with a range of needs. For example, people with learning difficulties or a lack of confidence using digital tools. The Guide shows you how to do this using a combination of Zoom, Basecamp and Mailchimp.
Steps to facilitating a group of people using different digital tools.
You need to have a clear idea of the information that participants in your project will need.
At the start of a project, it’s helpful to know if participants have been involved in similar work before. This will help you decide how much detail to offer about the project and what they’ll be doing.
It’s also good to have a sense of how project participants are feeling. Are they nervous? Excited? Wary? This will help you identify the types of information that will be most helpful for them. For example, they may need reassurance about what they can offer the project, as well as practical details about timings and meetings.
There are guides on running things like focus groups and one-to-one interviews, and free tools you can use to gather feedback, in the further information section.
The Empowering Women Panel is a group of 20 women and girls who live in different parts of Scotland. It was set up in 2023 by Sleeping Giants on behalf of the National Advisory Council for Women and Girls (NACWG), and the Scottish Government. Panel members come from a range of backgrounds and from across the country.
The panel uses in-person and online meetings, and digital tools, to carry out its work. It carries out research, collects information and shares members' shared experiences of issues affecting them as women and girls. They’ve reported their experiences of the cost of living crisis and issues with different kinds of care (for example, childcare and social care) to the NACWG, and the Scottish Government.
At the start of the project, panel members made it clear that they needed logistical information. For example, what happens during panel meetings? How often are they? How long will they last for? Who’s my mentor? Members also needed responses to their concerns and expectations. These included worries about:
feeling safe in the project
fear of not having anything valuable to contribute
having their voices heard – would people holding institutional power actually listen to them?
People have busy lives and consume information in different ways. So you need to give your project participants what they need, and in the ways that are most helpful for them. For example, giving them short summaries of meetings instead of lengthy minutes.
Communicating inclusively and accessibly will help people participate fully in your project.
During its first in-person meeting, the panel talked about the ladder of participation as a tool for exploring power. Though panel members sometimes did not have much power in their day-to-day lives, they were very aware of how power operates and its impact.
Sleeping Giants wanted to share informational power. It did this by taking the time to avoid creating the same information barriers found in the bureaucratic systems that panel members face in their everyday lives.
This meant deciding how much detail to include in communication with panel members. For example, the panel needed job titles of people who attended meetings, the actions agreed and the next steps that were going to be taken. But it didn’t need information about policy contexts in its meeting notes.
Initially, Sleeping Giants used email or hard copy documents at in-person meetings. As it got to know panel members better, it learned what communication channels worked best.
You need to understand people’s level of confidence with using digital tools. That way you know what support they need to use them.
Barriers to using digital tools include a lack of:
confidence
access - having consistent and reliable access to the internet
skills - being able to use digital devices
accessibility - having access to assistive technology like screen readers, electronic magnifiers and adaptive keyboards
Sleeping Giants learnt about panel members' comfort and confidence with digital tools during the onboarding process. Mentors explored this in one-to-ones with panel members. And if panel members’ mentors weren’t in place yet, a member of the Sleeping Giants team talked with them.
Panel members have a spread of digital skills, confidence and preferences. Some are confident using digital tools and happy to try new ones. Others were unfamiliar with many tools, and reluctant to try them.
Some panel members need EasyRead content. So the team attended EasyRead training. They learned how to produce information in clear, concise and easily understandable English, and using simple images.
There are panel members who are dyslexic or autistic. So the team also went on autism awareness training. This helped them feel more confident about working with autistic panel members. And understand their communication styles better.
Although the training focused on autism, it prompted the team to discuss neurodivergence more generally. This helped them understand panel members’ approaches. And it meant the team could put supportive strategies in place. For example, texting a panel member with ADHD to remind them about mentoring sessions, meetings and travel arrangements.
Other panel members had financial barriers that made it difficult for them to participate digitally. For example, one person didn’t have a device. So Sleeping Giants bought them a tablet.
Once you’ve understood participants’ digital skills and confidence levels, you need to decide what tools to use. Your staff will also have needs, and views on, which tools as they will be using them too.
Create a shortlist of possible solutions. To help you choose which ones might be suitable, think about:
what participants have told you about platforms they already use
what your team already knows and likes using
how many people will need to use the tools (how many licences you will need)
whether a potential new tool is clear and easy to use
if you’ll need a digital expert to help you set it up
if the tool is secure and private
if you’ll need access to analytics data
prices – for example, subscriptions or developer support
You could use free trials or free plans to try them out first.
You can also use NCVO's digital tool choosing guide.
Sleeping Giants needed a tool to share information with the panel. It chose Basecamp because:
people can categorise different types of information, making it easier to find
panel members can chat and share articles and videos with each other
it didn’t believe that a social media platform like Facebook would be secure enough. Or have the features it needed
Basecamp is more of a workplace platform than Facebook, so it’s easier to keep people on topic
their Scottish Government colleagues were already using it, so it would be easy for them to share information with the panel too
panel members can be notified when certain information is added. This focuses their attention on the highest priority information
For many panel members, a short video is often easier to digest than a page of text. So Sleeping Giants uses video to share complex information.
For example, it used video to explain what would happen in the panel’s first peer research project. It also used video to introduce civil servants and an external researcher to panel members. This way the panel could see who they were, as well as understand their role in the project.
It’s important to assess and mitigate the potential risks of using your chosen tool.
Digisafe is a guide to digital safeguarding created by Catalyst. It covers how to carry out a risk assessment and create a risk register. It also shows how to educate your staff and members about online safety.
Panel members and Sleeping Giants’ staff co-produced a group agreement. This guides how everyone engages with each other in-person and online. Sleeping Giants remind the panel about the agreement at the start of every meeting.
The panel’s work centres on sharing lived experiences. Oversharing, and sharing personal details, could result in panel members finding and contacting one another outside of panel meetings. So far, this hasn’t been an issue. But Sleeping Giants were conscious that it might be. So panel members are often reminded that they can’t unshare information.
3 panel members joined the panel after receiving support from Rape Crisis. They felt safer and more comfortable in women-only spaces. So Sleeping Giants staff made sure that there were no men visible, or audible, in the background when they were on video calls with members. And it encouraged members to do the same.
During online meetings, some members choose to keep their cameras off because they feel safer that way. And some use the chat instead of contributing verbally. Some panel members don’t want to share their surnames publicly for a variety of reasons. That includes concern that involvement in the panel could lead to losing their benefits. Because the guidance around remuneration for lived experience activity isn’t very clear.
You need to ask people what support they need to use the digital tools you've chosen.
You can do this through a group or a one-to-one training session. Or you could create a guide, a list of FAQs or a set of video tutorials. If people are confident enough, you can encourage them to practice using the tool, and let you know if they have any questions or issues.
None of the panel members had used Basecamp before. Some people felt ok about learning how to use it by themselves, but others needed support. So Sleeping Giants held an online training session. It covered logging on, navigating your way around Basecamp, and where to find different kinds of information.
Sleeping Giants also put together a written guide that included screenshots. One of the panel members needed more help. So their mentor met them and helped them set up Basecamp and talked them through it.
All panel members had used Zoom. But some people were more confident than others, and there were a couple of initial problems. For example, people having difficulty joining meetings. But panel members could phone Sleeping Giants’ staff if they needed help. And the panel members who were more familiar with Zoom provided support too.
You need to collect feedback to find out how the tools you’re using are working.
There are guides on running things like focus groups and one-to-one interviews, and free tools you can use to gather feedback, in the further information section.
If the tools you’re using aren’t meeting people’s needs, you might be able to change how you’re using them. Or you might need to look into using different tools.
Sleeping Giants gets feedback about how it uses its digital communication tools in 2 ways. It asks specific questions about communication in the end of year evaluation that it sends to all panel members. And throughout the year, mentors and panel members share their comments, ideas and suggestions.
For example, some panel members mentioned that having photos of meeting rooms (and of meeting points at train stations) in advance would be useful. And at the start of the project, Sleeping Giants notified everyone every time information was added to Basecamp. But panel members told them it was overwhelming, so the organisation now uses this feature sparingly.
By the end of the project’s first year, Sleeping Giants realised that some panel members weren’t using Basecamp at all. These members found it overwhelming. So it now writes project updates and shares them by email using Mailchimp (an email marketing platform). It means that panel members who don’t use Basecamp still have access to the most important information about, and updates on, the panel’s work.
Further information
Contact: Rebecca Giblin, Deputy Managing Director: [email protected]
See Weekday Wow Factors’ Guide on how they ran an online group while helping people new to video calling learn to use video software
See Khulisa’s Guide on communicating with young people safely using Zoom
Here are guides on running:
And here are some free tools you can use to gather feedback:
These guides can help you produce accessible information for project participants:
the Home Office has posters on designing for accessibility
The Plain English Campaign has a selection of free guides
Content Design London has a set of readability guidelines
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