Consultation, facilitation and compliance

More and more organisations are realising that they need to communicate with their stakeholders – whether these are staff members, the customers they depend on for their business, or the public they serve. Barry Creasy can help you get the best out of your consultation projects, either by training your staff, or by providing professional input to the consultation itself.

Consultation: training services

Training provided to individuals or groups of people on the following:

• Different ways of consulting: how to decide which methods are best.
• Using creative consulting techniques.
• Focus groups, stakeholder seminars and workshops: how to set them up and run them (including stakeholder identification and mapping, question construction and meeting organisation).
• Public meetings: how to set them up and run them (including how to publicise them, how to structure them, how to chair them, and how to deal with difficult situations).
• Facilitation/moderation skills: how to acquire and develop them (including active listening, prompts and probes, dealing with difficult participants).
• Questionnaires: how to construct them, who to send them to, and how to get the most out of the information they collect.
• Consultation interviews: how to construct and run them.
• Data: how to collect it, interpret it, synthesise it, and report it.

Consultation: professional input

Barry can help you with your consultation by doing some of the work for you. He offers the following services:

• Focus group design
• Questionnaire design
• Interview schedule design
• Data coding
• Data analysis
• Report-writing

Consultation: compliance

Barry offers a range of professional consultation compliance services (all following The Consultation Institute’s compliance guidelines) to help give you confidence that your consultation is following best practice; these include:

• A comprehensive compliance assessment during the consultation process – acting as a ‘critical friend’ to ensure that you follow best-practice consultation in line with Consultation Institute standards.
• Activity-based compliance assessment – review/evaluation of individual consultation activities (such as data collection, data analysis, conduct of public meetings etc.), either during or after the consultation.
• Risk assessment – a pre-consultation audit of proposed activities to point up where risks may lie that may open your consultation up to criticism, e.g. through Judicial Review.

Facilitation/moderation services

Consultations often benefit from using an independent, experienced facilitator/moderator. The following services (including briefing and planning sessions) are offered:

• Focus group moderation
• Seminar moderation/chairing
• Public meeting chairing

All training, consultation and moderation services are to the standards set by The Consultation Institute Charter.