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Online workshop: Sustaining engagement from your patient community
22nd March, 2022 at 11:00 am - 24th March, 2022 at 1:00 pm GMT
Online Workshop: Sustaining engagement from your patient community
Beacon is delighted to announce its next online workshop: Sustaining engagement from your patient community.
In the rare disease community, the challenges don’t end once the mammoth task of finding patients and families has got underway. It can be equally challenging to keep families, individuals and community members engaged and actively participating as part of the community. There are many things that can get in the way as individuals may be struggling with their health, caring responsibilities and managing their time.
A lot of patient organisations look to have a reciprocal relationship with their communities and beneficiaries to solidify the community feel rather than just act as a service. It is often up to the people managing to understand what their community wants and expects to see from them. But this can be difficult to find out and put into action when there are so many competing priorities and things to do.
This means it is important to have a clear strategy when it comes to engagement and participation that takes into account the demographics of the community and what practical and successful engagement actually looks like for your group.
This workshop aims to cover the basic strategies of approaching projects with engagement in mind and demonstrate how this can be put into practice in a range of contexts. It will also highlight case studies of how different patient groups have addressed the challenges of engagement and how your community can become engaged through coming on board as volunteers.
Tuesday 22nd March 2022, 11am- 1pm
Day one of our workshop will look at creating a strategy that puts engagement at the forefront of projects and activities. The session will be run by executive coach and consultant, Daniel O’Driscoll from Engagement Consultancy. He specialises in executive coaching, strategic planning, audience engagement, and learning & development interventions. With a focus on volunteering, staff and supporters in the not for profit and higher education sector.
The session will cover:
- A case study from Bowel Cancer UK
- Understanding what successful engagement looks like for your organisation and how to construct goals around this
- Understanding how different groups in your community might engage and why, and the barriers that might exist to stop participation
- The different contexts where engagement might happen
- Utilising a framework to turn your ideas in actions
Wednesday 23rd March 2022, 11am- 1pm
A really great way to get your community involved with your projects and organisation is by bringing them on board as volunteers. They are well placed to do this as they possess a great understanding of the cause and mission and their contribution can be of real benefit to both the organisation and themselves. The challenge lies in creating opportunities with value that will keep volunteers engaged and committed to their role. The day will include presentations from Dr Jurgen Grotz, director of the Institute for Volunteering Research, UEA and Elaine Duffy, Volunteer Development Officer at the VSI Alliance.
The session will cover:
- Creating projects that can easily integrate volunteers
- Building opportunities that have appeal and value to your community members
- Retaining volunteers and sustaining commitment from volunteers
- Building relationships with your community through volunteering
Thursday 24th March 2022, 11am- 1pm
Learn from other patient organisations so your group doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel! This session will see case studies from Daniel Lewi from CATS Foundation, Jared Griffin from Annabelle’s Challenge, Craig Mitchell and Arti Patel from Unique and Suzie Morris, part of the Beacon PGEC.
The session will focus on:
- Patient group case studies of building engagement into organisational structure and culture
- Using social media to engage your community
- Creating a support network
- A case study of engaging the un-engaged