Consultation and deliberation

We help organisations make informed decisions by offering well-designed, cost-efficient consultation, deliberative and participatory methods for stakeholder and public engagement.

What we offer

We offer a wide range of approaches to help you engage with experts, policy and decision-makers and the public. These include:

• deliberative engagement events which provide people with balanced and accessible information on all relevant issues and time to reflect and discuss them. Deliberation is supported by tools such as future scenarios and case studies
• participatory processes designed to involve people directly in local decision-making. Using tools such as trade-offs helps to ensure that recommendations or priorities are grounded in the real world of hard decisions about budget allocation
• small and large-scale consultation, and public workshops, to support stakeholder and public involvement in statutory public consultations. These can be run in tandem with formal online consultation
• engagement of ‘seldom heard’ groups to overcome social exclusion.

Deliberative approaches include: citizens’ juries, citizens’ forums, deliberative workshops, collaborative conferences and World Café.

Participatory processes include: participatory budgeting, community planning, service mapping and improvement, and working with organisations to support their own participatory approaches to decision-making.

Consultation processes include: public consultation, stakeholder consultation and grass-roots consultation with hard-to-reach and seldom-heard voluntary and charity groups.

We also make extensive use of digital technologies covering social networking tools, online consultations, gaming and trade-off tools, video ethnography, web-scraping and semantic indexing.

Why choose OPM?

Our approach

Our approach to consultation, deliberative dialogue and participatory processes draws on tested practical expertise and theoretical knowledge. We understand the role of the public and stakeholder voice within the wider policy and organisational context and we can advise you on the approach that will best meet your needs and budget. We design and deliver projects that address the real issues facing local and central government and the people they serve.

We apply our experience and knowledge to the problems and questions our clients bring to us then design effective and thoughtful approaches that address people’s needs. As well as being interesting, thought-provoking and enjoyable for participants, our approaches position the specific questions within a wider context. They’re also flexible enough to adapt to the people and circumstances present ‘on the day’.

We always involve as wide a range of perspectives on an issue as possible. We pay make sure that people from diverse backgrounds and with different experiences can take part, including those whose voices are seldom heard and those in hard-to-reach groups. We provide balanced and comprehensive background materials on the topics to be discussed so that participants have a full overview of the issues and debates. This supports informed deliberative dialogue and ensures that public consultations are transparent and able to withstand scrutiny.

The OPM way

OPM has worked to improve social results for 20 years. We understand public policy and service delivery and we have a wealth of public service experience. We listen carefully to your requirements, assemble a team with the most appropriate skills, and then tailor our work to meet your objectives, timescales and budget.

Find out more

If you would like If you would like to talk to someone about our consultation and deliberation work, please email Anne Schuetz