Stakeholder engagement & Participant recruitment

Overview

Engaging stakeholders and recruiting participants are pivotal steps for a successful trial. Stakeholders might be those who may not directly interact with your solution but will have influence over if the solution is deployed or commissioned. Participants are those who will be directly interacting with your solution or will be directly impacted by the introduction of your solution. It is important to start recruitment of both actors as soon as you start working on your trial proposal. This section guides you through this recruitment process, supports the identification of key stakeholders and participant user groups, details the recruitment process, and considers ethics approvals required.

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Questions and prompts

Within your trial plan, it will be useful to detail the following:

Stakeholders: who do you need to include in the trial?

• List any relevant stakeholders who need to be involved with your trial

• Detail what will be required from each stakeholder group (for example, will they be able to provide access to key infrastructure, or provide access to participants, etc.)

Participants: Who do you need to trial your solution with?

• List those who will be using your solution, considering both audiences that are already engaging with the solution and prospective users

• Consider capturing a diverse range of users, use a screener to help capture different profiles of participants, whilst also filtering out audiences who might not be relevant.

Strategy: What is your recruitment and engagement strategy?

• List the questions do you need to answer and how engaging with participants will help you get to the answers

• Detail how many participants will you need to validate your results

Outreach: How will you engage with participants?

• Describe how will you be communicating to participants, and how will you encourage them to participate

• Ensure that all participants are informed of any associated risks with the trials, are aware of the mitigations and any corresponding action they need to take. Do you need them to sign that they understand and will comply?

Ethical Approval: What approvals need to be in place for you to engage with participants?

• Consider if you will you be speaking to vulnerable persons (someone who is unable to look after themselves), you might require ethical approval. If you are unsure if this is the case please ask one of the project team.

• Data Protection – do you need to collect any personal data from the participants as part of the trial results? If so, ensure that all the necessary consent is obtained and that GDPR is adhered to.

To support you in answering the above question(s), please find a link to the 'stakeholder map' diagram below that can be downloaded in both PPT and JPEG and used within your trial plan.

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Stakeholder Map

2MB

Stakeholder Map - Template.pptx

Useful resources

The following external resources may be useful in preparing your recruitment strategy:

• GOV.UK provides numerous resources within their User Researcher Service Manual, particularly related to Finding participants for user research, Writing a recruitment brief, and Getting informed consent for user research.
• GOV.UK's policy paper on Safeguarding policy: protecting vulnerable adults, describing the Office of the Public Guardian's policy on protecting adults at risk of abuse or neglect.