This week we spent a day at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University to lead a full-day training on designing effective stakeholder engagement.

The morning session focused on the bigger picture: what does meaningful participation look like, who should be co-designing an engagement process with you, and how do you sequence the whole thing so each step builds on the last? Participants brought their own real cases to a peer clinic, where they helped each other map out who to involve and how to structure their processes. Examples from our project work helped ground the frameworks in something concrete.

The afternoon got into the details of putting together a great workshop: the building blocks of any activity, how to frame tasks clearly, distribute participation, and manage energy across a session. Participants then put the learnings into practice, working in groups to design full workshop agendas for their own upcoming cases.

What we find again and again in these trainings is that researchers are highly motivated and already have strong instincts about what good engagement looks like. Getting to spend a day helping them sharpen those instincts into a set of tools they can use right away is one of the best parts of what we do.

If you’d like to bring this kind of training to your team or institution, get in touch: info@stickydot.eu