Our goal at People’s Voice Media is to use lived experience stories to change the world. One of the key ways in which we can do that is through building and supporting a movement of lived experience storytellers. In the run up to our conference, we’re asking anyone and everyone who works with lived experience stories to fill in our survey to help us get a better understanding of the challenges people face and what solutions we might be a part of. In this blog, Communications and Community Engagement Manager, Lauren, explains why we’re asking these questions, why now, and how you can help.

My role as Community Engagement Manager is a new one at People’s Voice Media, and, for me, the starting point for understanding how I do my absolute best in this job is to ask questions and listen to the answers. The world around lived experience storytelling is full of passionate, dedicated and frustrated people, who are often juggling competing demands on their time and energy. This is true of a mother fighting to get support for her autistic daughter who is struggling to feel safe attending school. It is also true of a NHS middle manager who wants to make the service they provide more person-centred, but is hampered by budgets and dismissive senior staff. We appreciate that most people don’t end up in this arena unless they care deeply about other people and about making things better. 

So the big question in my head is: how can we support people to do that? Whatever we deliver, I want it to be absolutely the thing that helps people take their work or their advocacy forward. Of course, what that looks like will be different for everyone and their own individual circumstances and goals. But it is also crucial that we link people to build a community and a movement around lived experience storytelling. Doing a survey in this way helps us see common areas where we might step in to provide that extra training, support or expertise that will help people progress the change they are trying to make.

I’ve already had informal chats with people during our online Community Reporter Catch-Ups and skills sessions, but this survey is an attempt to formalise a bit of that learning and reach a wider range of people. In particular, those who aren’t able to, or haven’t been attracted to come to our events for whatever reason.

About the survey

Surveys aren’t generally how we work here at People’s Voice Media – we are always championing methods that give in-depth responses in people’s own words.

Gobby surveys are a little different to your standard tick-box response form, though. They allow free-text answers, so you can answer in your own voice. They also allow us to work a little bit with “the wisdom of crowds”, because when you are filling in a Gobby survey, you can find answers from other people that “match” your own, and give those answers your support too.

Here is a video from Gobby explaining a bit more about how their surveys work:

Ready to join in? Click here to complete the survey, or read on for more information.

What am I being asked to do?

Take our short survey over on Gobby, which contains 10 questions and should take about 15 mins to complete. You can complete it on a phone, tablet, or computer

The survey asks questions about:

• how you are using lived experience storytelling and the issues you care about
• how we can support you and what skills would you like to develop
• how we can make our support and communications more accessible to you
• creative and alternative ways of lived experience storytelling
• making sure we don’t cause harm or re-traumatise people in our work

Why should I take part?

We do have a carrot for you – everyone who takes part has the option to be entered into a prize draw to win a £50 gift voucher.

However, even if you’re not the lucky winner, we will actively use these answers to plan the activity and support that we offer to our network and community in the future, so if you’ve ever thought something like:

• “I wish People’s Voice Media would do a session on this topic.”
• “It would really help me if I could build some skills in writing policy briefs.”
• “I wish I could go to that catch-up, but lunchtimes don’t work for me at all, I’d rather meet in the mornings.”
• “I keep missing the advertising of these events because I’m not on Facebook.”

Or similar, then now is your chance to influence the direction of People’s Voice Media’s support.

Who can take part in the survey?

Anyone who works with or is involved with lived experience storytelling – in the broadest sense. You might be:

• a trained Community Reporter
• someone campaigning for change based on their own lived experience
• a professional whose role involves hearing and acting upon people’s lived experiences
• a community organiser or activist on an issue that affects people
• an academic with a research interest in lived experience methods
• someone with lived experience trying to get their voice heard

If you are interested in lived experience storytelling in any capacity, we’d love to hear from you. You don’t have to have worked with or engaged with People’s Voice Media before.

Also, if this applies to you, you might also be interested in attending some or all of our Stories for Change week of conversation and learning! 

I’m interested in the results – will you be sharing them?

The survey is being run to tie into our week of conversation and learning, Stories for Change – you can find out more about that in our blog here. This will run from 23rd-27th November and the results from the survey so far will be fed into the discussions held in these sessions, and summarised in our Day 5 Celebration and Community Commitments workshop. We’d love to see you there to expand on the answers or reflect on other responses. You can book onto all the events that week here.

If you have any more questions or would like to chat more, please drop me a comment below or email enquries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk

This year, People’s Voice Media turns 30. That means that for 30 years, we have worked alongside communities to create spaces where people can tell their own stories, share knowledge, and influence change. To celebrate our birthday, we are calling people together for a week of conversation, learning and community – Stories for Change. Find out more below or book your sessions now.

We’re getting rid of conference lanyards and dry sandwich buffets this year – this is a conference you can join from the comfort of your sofa. All sessions will take place on Zoom, and will be interactive, conversational spaces with a focus on building knowledge and practice as a community of people who care about lived experience storytelling.

What will the conversations be about?

We’ve spent a lot of time over the past 30 years championing the value of lived experience stories and trying to get people in power to recognize the expertise held by people who have first-hand knowledge to share. It does feel like the rest of the world is finally catching on. However, at the same time, the culture in which stories are created and heard has transformed. Speaking about your lived experience now means engaging with a structure of digital platforms owned and controlled by billionaires, algorithmic gatekeeping, AI deepfakes, a media landscape hostile to issues of social justice, and shifting questions about who gets to speak and be believed. We are now in an age where anyone can publish their story online, yet whose voice gets heard, believed, and acted on still depends on old and unequal rules. Technology has given communities new ways of organising and connecting, but inequalities around access, power, representation, and whose stories are trusted, remain. The Zoom conversations we have across the week will centre around this question:

Who holds the power around these stories, and how do we make sure they are seen as real evidence, knowledge, and insight?

How will the week work?

We will be hosting five guided sessions across the week, taking place on Zoom from 1pm – 2:30pm each weekday. Each day builds on the learning and questions from the previous one, but all sessions will make sense as standalone events, so you can attend as many or as few as you like.

Here’s the schedule for the week:

Day 1: Monday – The Storytelling Landscape Now, 1-2:30pm

What does it mean to tell lived experience stories in the current moment? Join us for the opening provocation of our week of conversation and learning. In this 90 minute online session, we will confront the storytelling landscape as it actually is: digital access and exclusion, the rise of fake news, disinformation, AI-generated content and a public conversation pulled apart by polarisation. To set the scene for our learning this week, we name the conditions everyone telling a story now has to work within.

Day 2: Tuesday – From Problem to Possibility (A Calling-In), 1-2:30pm

How do we build community around lived experience storytelling in the face of current challenges? This is a 90-minute online reflective practice session about our collective role as guardians of stories. Where Day 1 names the problem, Day 2 turns towards the solutions. This is a calling-in space for building a movement that protects and champions lived experience storytelling, and for asking what the community needs to do to advance storytelling in the face of everything named the day before.

Day 3: Wednesday – Showcase: How Community Reporting Makes the Difference, 1-2:30pm

What can we learn from recent projects employing lived experience storytelling? A showcase of real examples of how People’s Voice Media and partners’ work happens. In this session we’ll explore the difference Community Reporting can make through three case studies of lived experience storytelling in practice.

Day 4: Thursday – Mobilising Knowledge, 1-2:30pm

How does learning from lived experience stories get transformed into real-world change? This session explores what happens once the data is gathered – how does community knowledge connect to research, policy, commissioning, services and campaigning – and what are the blockers to success in this area?

Day 5: Friday – Celebration and Community Commitments, 1-2:30pm

A birthday bash with a difference. We’d love you to join us at the end of our week of learning and conversation in a special Friday session to celebrate 30 years of People’s Voice Media. This is a collection of human stories – voices from People’s Voice Media’s history, Community Reporters, partners and the grassroots. We will also share insights and findings from the Gobby Community Reporter survey and what we’ve learnt across the week. We will close by agreeing commitments that the community will carry forward together.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I have to attend every session? No, just book on to the ones you are interested in or able to attend. Although the sessions are designed to “speak” to each other across the week, the content, learning and discussions should also stand alone.

Can I attend all the sessions? Yes, absolutely, we’d love to have you join us for the full week. Just make sure you register for each session separately.

How do I book? You can choose your sessions and book via the events page on the Community Reporter website.

Do I have to pay to sign up? No, all sessions are completely free to attend.

I have access needs, how will you make it so I can join in the sessions? Drop us an email enquries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk and let us know how we can make it easier for you to participate in the session. You don’t need to have a diagnosed disability to do this – just an idea of what we can do to support you or an access problem that we can try to solve. We will also send out a communication nearer the event to ask people about specific adaptations.

Can you cover personal assistant costs or other attendance costs? We have some budget put aside to support people who would otherwise not be able to join in the sessions – please get in touch with enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk to discuss this.

Why is the conference online? We know that sometimes people who would like to attend our annual conference face barriers because of travel, accessibility, cost, caring responsibilities, geography and people’s different circumstances. Moving online for this year gives us a chance to experiment with a way of meeting up that removes some of those barriers. However, we know that online does not automatically mean accessible. Running an event digitally can also exclude some people or present difficulties, and we are trying to work with everyone attending to make sure we put in place as many things as we can to open up participation and adapt things to suit as many people’s needs as possible. If you have an idea for anything that would support towards this aim – please do let us know by emailing enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk.

What will happen after the event? We don’t want these conversations to end there. We’ll be taking the learning into the year ahead, and using it to inform our planning, combined with the things we find out from the Gobby survey that is running alongside the event.

What topics will be discussed and how are you looking after people’s psychological safety?
Some of the conversations during the week will explore sensitive and personal issues around social justice, lived experience, power, and inequality. Where we think there are potential triggers, the facilitators will give notice about this before and during the session. All sessions will be run according to our anti-racist principles and guidelines for communication. We will share details of relevant support organisations during each session, and encourage people to participate in ways that feel right for them.

How can I contribute to the discussions? We want to make sure that everyone can contribute in a way that feels comfortable for them. This might be – through talking in a large group, contributing in a breakout room, writing your thoughts in the chat, using tools such as Flinga or Mentimeter. If we use any additional online tools, we’ll always do a demo first to show people how to use them, and if you’re struggling, please do ask the team for help!

Who will be facilitating the sessions? The sessions will be facilitated by members of the People’s Voice Media team, alongside co-producers from the Community Reporter Network. Some workshops will also have special guests from our projects or from other organisations connected to our work.

I have another question not covered here. If you’ve got a question – there’s a good chance other people have too! Please email us enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk or leave a comment below and we’ll get you the answers, and update this guide too.

Ripple Effect Mapping is a hugely useful and flexible evaluation tool for those working in communities and change-making, dealing with trying to make change on social issues where benefits aren’t always immediate, obvious or tangible. As part of our recent work with Bristol City Council on the evaluation of their Community Resilience Fund, People’s Voice Media led four Ripple Effect Mapping sessions with people representing community organisations that had received grant funding for capital projects. In this blog, Lauren Wallace-Thompson, our Communications and Community Engagement Manager, gives our top 6 reasons that we love to employ this tool to support partners, communities and clients with evaluation and learning.

Does it seem a little OTT to have a favourite evaluation tool? I’ve been a researcher for over 15 years now, and to be honest, the word “methodologies” still kind of brings me out in a cold sweat. At People’s Voice Media, we spend a lot of time bigging up the importance of “qualitative” data (that is, data other than pure numbers – which could be words, feelings, pictures, videos). We collect lots of stories from individuals via our Community Reporting method, and use these to create datasets of people’s experiences in their own words. Sometimes however, we want to “zoom out” slightly, and look at the bigger picture. Where we are trying to create change in a community, a system, an organisation or on a social issue, we need a way to capture all the various ways in which an intervention has an impact.

Enter, stage right, waving a flipchart marker pen: Ripple Effect Mapping. It’s a people-powered, flexible tool for discovering what has changed. It has lots of great features, and you can find out a bit more about how the process works on our previous blog. It involves getting people together in a room with a giant sheet of paper and some marker pens, and really thinking through all the changes that have happened. In the case of the Bristol City Council work, the “intervention” was funding for capital improvements awarded to 56 community organisations or projects. But it could be anything – the results of a campaign, a change in policy, a training programme, a social action, a charitable act.

Here are 6 things that we love about using Ripple Effect Mapping for evaluation:

1. It’s collaborative

Ripple Effect Mapping is always most powerful when undertaken in groups to make the most of the “hive mind”, and to gather perspectives from different parts of an organisation. You can bring in views and ideas from senior management, volunteers, beneficiaries, trustees, project coordinators, local residents and more. Different people will have experienced the changes in different ways, and observed things others haven’t. It really makes the most of collective knowledge.

2. It gives over power to the people who understand best

Ripple Effect Mapping hands over the identification of impact to the people with the real expertise. Can an external evaluator judge exactly what changes have occurred? Can they notice subtle and unintended consequences (especially that go beyond those stated on the initial project brief, for example)? Well, maybe. But probably not as much as someone who has been embedded in the organisation, or lives in the community, and has witnessed the change first-hand.

3. It’s flexible

Sometimes evaluation markers can be set from the outset of a project – and they remain fixed. Which means that other things that change might be overlooked.

Ripple Effect Mapping starts with a blank sheet of paper, which means there’s no parameters on what can be recorded and tracked.

For this reason, we always say that it’s good for tracking:

• both postive and negative outcomes
• expected and unexpected consequences
• intentional and unintended results
• direct impacts, and others that are more tangential
• changes that have already occurred, and things that are now in progress for the future

4. It’s genuinely joyful

Of all the different sessions I deliver when facilitating with People’s Voice Media, it’s Ripple Effect Mapping sessions that I look forward to the most. For lots of organisations or community groups, it’s the first time they’ve ever stepped back and put down all their achievements and successes down on paper, and they are often both surprised and proud (rightly so!) at the impact of their work. We do always make sure as facilitators that the group spends some time considering any downsides, challenges or misfires that have occurred, but overwhelmingly these sessions are full of positivity and celebration.

5. It tells a story

A key part of our Ripple Effect Mapping sessions is where we ask participants to talk us through their maps. This really gives people the chance to process all that they’ve discovered into a narrative that shows a journey of change, improvement and learning. This in itself can be a really powerful moment for a community or organisation, where they recognise their own capacity to create change. And you know how fond of a story we are here at People’s Voice Media!

6. It can be longitudinal

Or perhaps we should make that, it should be longitudinal. With many projects, interventions or changes, it can take a long time to see the full picture of the real world impacts that are created. The old “Rome wasn’t built in a day” cliche holds especially true when you’re dealing with complex social issues or within rigid systems where change can be slow.

Ripple Effect Mapping is really useful for tracking change over time, and supporting continuous learning and improvement. We often recommend that groups repeat the Ripple Effect Mapping process at intervals both during and after a project (say every six or 12 months), or after key milestones are achieved. A snapshot immediately after a project finishes might not give enough time for the impact “ripples” to have worked through and spread out, so try doing a Ripple Effect Map again 6 months down the line, and compare the two to get a fuller picture of those longer-term impacts and changes.

“This approach to evaluation was an exciting venture for us. It has allowed us to be creative and highlight the real life impacts of our work – we often get stuck behind figures, so it’s been fantastic to bring the fund’s impacts to life. We’re already, as a team, using the REM tool in other areas of work, so this project has given us all some professional skills!” – Bristol City Council Community Development Team

And one thing we don’t love so much…

It’s messy. Oh, it’s messy. Getting the sprawling thoughts of a group of people down on paper in a limited amount of time can mean that some of those maps look like a toddler has been let loose with the felt tips. That’s okay, though – it’s all part of the process and we’re here to help hold you in the chaos. That’s why it is really helpful to have someone external to come in and facilitate the process, adding in some structure and ensuring there is time for interpretation and explanation, and then working to extract and analyse the data from the maps into useful learning and action.

If you would like People’s Voice Media to design and facilitate a Ripple Effect Mapping process to support your organisation with its learning and evaluation, please get in touch. Just email enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk or leave us a comment below!

We’re big fans of projects that really showcase the versatility of Community Reporting, and those that put communities and people at the heart of local decision-making in truly meaningful ways. So, you could say that working as evaluation partners on Bristol City Council’s Community Resilience Fund was a dream collaboration for People’s Voice Media. Read on to find out more about this people-powered project that put funds into the hands of grassroots local organisations, and how we used lived experience methodologies to assess its impacts.

Bristol City Council’s (BCC) Community Resilience Fund was a £4m grant fund designed to support community organisations with capital works, especially those that challenged power imbalances in the most deprived communities by improving accessibility, sustainability or offering other future-proofing benefits. The council worked very hard to ensure that people from the local community had a say in where the funding went, how it was allocated and how it was spent. This included having a panel of 100 community experts acting as “resident decision-makers”, supported by local councillors and experts in sustainability, accessibility and capital works. Community and voluntary groups seeking funding were guided through the grant-making process by the BCC Communities Team and by capacity-building organisations WECIL (West of England Centre For Inclusive Living), BSWN (Black South West Network) and Voscur, to ensure greater equity in the application process. But BCC also wanted to make sure that the evaluation of the funding followed the same process and centred community power and participation. That’s where People’s Voice Media came in!

Community Reporting for evaluation

From the panel of community decision makers, seven people were recruited and trained as Community Reporters. The training from People’s Voice Media gave them the skills to conduct video and audio interviews with the grantee organisations, using open questions to explore the on-the-ground experience of applying for the grant, how the money has been used, and what impact it has had on beneficiaries, staff and the local community. We also conducted sense-making sessions with the Community Reporters to help understand what the key themes were emerging from the stories gathered, which then informed the findings in the evaluation report. You can watch our short Impact Snapshot film for some of the highlights from the 23 stories gathered or find all the video and audio interviews here. Some of the headline findings from the Community Reporting phase of the evaluation process were:

• The CRF grant allowed community groups and organisations to meet diverse community needs
• The improvements funded by the CRF broadened and deepened the organisations’ reach within the community
• Organisations achieved greater financial resilience through cost reduction
• The CRF allocations supported strategic planning and futureproofing
• The CRF process was a positive, trust-based funding experience

Ripple Effect Mapping for evaluation

We also wanted to give the grantee organisations space to explore themselves what the impact of receiving the funding had been so far. People’s Voice Media facilitated Ripple Effect Mapping sessions with representatives from 20 of the community groups that received the funding, where they could explore the impact that the works funded from the grant has had on their organisations, individuals and society. (More about Ripple Effect Mapping coming up in a future blog!) A thematic analysis of the maps was then carried out, which identified the following key areas of change across the participating community organisations:

• Accessibility and inclusion
• Skills development and employment creation
• Income generation
• Environmental sustainability
• Support for mental health and wellbeing
• Improvement of community offerings

Evaluation findings

From all this detailed qualitative research, we were able to produce an in-depth analysis of the impacts of the Community Resilience Fund, and also a set of detailed learnings and specific recommendations useful to Bristol City Council and other local authorities or grant-makers looking to support community capital works projects in the future. 

You can read about these in more detail in the Executive Summary or download the Full Report.

If you are interested in finding out more about how People’s Voice Media can support your organisation or local authority to undertake evaluation in a way that prioritises the voice of communities, please get in touch. You can contact us at enquiries@peoplesvoicemedia.co.uk.

Today we are sharing an important campaign from one of our partners, Disability Rights UK (DRUK). DRUK is the UK’s leading Disabled People’s Organisation (DPO), led and run by Disabled people. In this blog, People’s Voice Media’s Head of Partnerships and Practice, Isaac Samuels, explains why this campaign is so important to them as a Disabled person:

As a queer Disabled person, I know how powerful it can be when someone takes the time to listen, to go beyond the words to truly understand our experiences, our challenges, our hopes and our dreams.

For too long, Disabled people, and especially those of us with multiple identities, have had decisions made about us without us. Our experiences can be overlooked, our barriers misunderstood, and our voices pushed to the side. But our stories matter. Our knowledge matters. Our lived experience is expertise.

This is why I want to share and encourage people to take part in the Disability Rights UK Strategy Survey.

This is an important opportunity for Disabled people and allies to help shape the future of disability rights work and ensure that the priorities reflect what people are actually experiencing in their everyday lives.

For me, creating change starts with listening. It starts with recognising that every person’s experience is different, whether that relates to disability, identity, access, healthcare, employment, relationships, community or simply being able to live life with dignity and choice.

As someone who believes deeply in the power of lived experience, co-production and inclusion, I know how important it is that our voices are part of the conversation. We should not just be invited into spaces after decisions have been made. We should be involved from the beginning.

I am asking my networks, friends, colleagues and communities to please support this important work. If you are Disabled, have lived experience, support Disabled people, or care about equality and inclusion, your voice can help make a difference.

Please take part and share widely.

Take the Disability Rights UK Strategy Survey:
https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/take-part-our-strategy-survey

Thank you to Disability Rights UK for continuing to champion Disabled people’s rights and for creating opportunities for people’s voices to shape the future.

Our voices are powerful.
Our experiences matter.
Our stories can create change.

DisabledVoices #QueerDisabled #NothingAboutUsWithoutUs #DisabilityRights #LivedExperience #CoProduction #Inclusion