Identifying and engaging diverse stakeholders from across Liverpool City Region

The success of the sessions hung on its participants, so we focused our efforts on securing relevant and engaged people who would add depth and knowledge to the wider conversation. We needed the breadth and depth of the purpose-driven community and as such called on key contacts and networks within:

• Chambers of Commerce across all boroughs
• Combined Authority colleagues 
• Attendees of the Growth for Good series
• Wider Growth Platform team
• Metro Mayor’s team 
• LCR board members
• BIPC
• The Women’s Organisation 

By securing the right people for the conversation at hand, we were able to create a melting pot of ideas that helped Growth Platform to plan business support activity over the next year. 

Designing and delivering repeatable workshop sessions

To ensure we were having meaningful conversations and capturing ideas effectively, we created a repeatable structure that we delivered over three different sessions. 

Each session covered:

• Introductions to the Firestarters and Growth Platform teams
• What the Growth for Good series was and how we intend to build upon its success
• Key insights from the series
• Facilitated co-design – What can we do with those insights as a community?
• Key learnings from the day – What are some of the ideas we’ve generated?
• Next steps – What would be communicated next to session participants and when 

By repeating the same session three times we were able to deliver consistent experiences for all participants, regardless of which session they joined. The real magic in our events comes from the diverse and interesting people within our Firestarters network. By placing them at the heart of the conversation, we’re able to generate original ideas, hear diverse perspectives and open up conversations across sectors. 

Reporting with valuable insights and clear next steps

Once the sessions were complete, we created an insights report that helped to capture all of the ideas over the three sessions. Over 20 pages, we were able to help Growth Platform understand:

• The support the purpose-driven community wants
• How to deliver on their ideas and engage them further 
• A timeline of recommended activity and the most strategic times to deliver it

The report aligned with the Plan for Prosperity and helped them to think in a joined-up way about their activity as well as the Combined Authority’s vision for a fairer, stronger, cleaner city region.