This autumn, Stickydot is running two online courses for anyone designing or facilitating workshops in research, innovation, or policy. Both speak to a question most engagement professionals know well: how do we make this work actually move things forward, rather than tick a box?
Designing Engagement is about thinking through participatory processes deliberately, before they happen. Facilitation Skills is about handling the room well, once people are in it.
You can take either course on its own, or both as a bundle. They run in parallel across the same four weeks (Tuesdays and Thursdays, 14:00-16:00 CET, from 29 September to 22 October).
Why these courses, why now
Stickydot has been designing and facilitating co-creation and stakeholder engagement processes for research and innovation projects across Europe for the better part of a decade. Two questions come up constantly from clients, partners, and people we meet at conferences: how do you actually design a participatory process well, and how do you handle the room once everyone’s in it?
We’ve put together two courses that address each of those questions directly. The examples come from real work we have delivered, the skills are practical, and the peers you learn alongside are people doing similar work.
Designing Engagement
A four-week online course on designing participatory engagement processes that actually work.
Good engagement design starts with hard thinking before anyone enters the room: who needs to be there, how to actually put together a workshop, how to connect sessions across a broader process, how to keep energy and engagement up throughout, and whether you’ve created the conditions for real input. This course is for people who run workshops and participatory processes but suspect they could do it more deliberately, with better structure and clearer outcomes.
The four workshops:
- When engagement actually works (and when it doesn’t): deciding whether engagement is the right approach, and clarifying what you’re actually committing to
- Reaching the right people, for the right reasons: finding the right participants and partners for meaningful engagement, and understanding what would bring them to the table
- Designing at three scales: activity, workshop, process: designing engaging workshops that keep people participating and lead to solid outcomes, whether standalone or as part of a longer process
- Energy management, and putting the craft to work: the small moves that keep a workshop alive, such as icebreakers and energisers, plus applied practice on a real workshop of your own
Facilitation Skills
A four-week online course on the practical skills of facilitating workshops where different voices need to be heard.
Facilitation Skills is about running workshops with confidence, keeping people actively engaged, and steering discussions towards fruitful outcomes. You’ll practice setting a clear framework for dialogue from the start, active listening, drawing out the quieter voices, helping groups build genuine consensus, and reframing tense moments back toward something the group can actually use.
The four workshops:
- A facilitator’s role and establishing a framework: growing into the facilitator role and setting up a workshop for honest, productive conversation
- Active listening, questions, and reframing: the core techniques for making participants feel heard and asking questions that move conversations forward
- Brainstorming, prioritisation, and consensus: helping groups generate ideas, narrow them down, and reach genuine common ground
- Challenging contexts: handling the harder moments: dominant voices, silence, conflict, and multi-stakeholder tensions
Considering both?
Designing Engagement and Facilitation Skills are two halves of the same work: one gives you the design thinking, the other the practical skills to run what you’ve designed. Take them together as a bundle and get the full arc in a single month, at a better rate.
Format and pricing
Each course is four workshops of two hours each, held live on Zoom, one per week over four weeks. The two courses run on different days of the same weeks, so you can take one or both in parallel.
Single course: €390 standard, €300 early bird (book by 8 September)
Bundle (both courses): €650 standard, €500 early bird (book by 8 September)
All prices are VAT-exclusive.
We don’t want price to be the reason you don’t join; if the standard tier doesn’t work for your situation, get in touch and we’ll figure something out.
Who’s it for
- Researchers bringing stakeholders into their projects
- Project managers and coordinators in Horizon Europe and other R&I projects
- Engagement officers and outreach coordinators
- Science communicators running dialogue events, workshops, and citizen engagement activities
- Policy officers facilitating multi-stakeholder dialogue
- Civil society and NGO staff running participatory processes
- Consultants and freelancers working at the science-society interface
Facilitation Skills is also relevant beyond engagement work: it applies to anyone running workshops, leading meetings, or facilitating team dialogue in any context.
What past participants have said
“The training has already impacted our team, as members have implemented new facilitation methods, leading to improved collaboration and decision-making. We highly recommend Stickydot’s facilitation training for organisations seeking to boost their team’s skills.”
– Ryan Titley, Director of Projects, ERRIN, Belgium
“The Stickydot facilitation course enabled me to learn (and try!) new techniques in a safe and fun environment. The sessions were really interactive and kept me on my toes! A big bonus was meeting other facilitators so we could learn from each other. Highly recommend!”
– Kate Baker, Senior Research Fellow, University of Exeter, UK
“I had a great experience during the Facilitation Skills course. I felt challenged in a very positive way, and I got very useful tools for improving my facilitation skills.”
– Claudia Aguirre, Director, TRACES / Espace des Sciences Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, Paris, France
Any questions? Get in touch at info@stickydot.eu and we can talk it through.
Ready to join?
