Digital vs Real Life: How do we strike the balance when building a movement?

Kelly Harris, Brook Cymru’s Business Development and Participation Lead, talks about the development of Brook’s Participation Forums and the challenge of meeting different people’s needs around digital and real life participation.

Brook has been building a movement in the world of sexual health, relationships and wellbeing since 1964. We continue to go from strength to strength in providing opportunities for those who use our different services to have a voice in our work.

Participation work is a vital part of that. Over the last two years, we’ve extensively evaluated how we engage with different audiences so that we can be sure Brook’s work is truly reflective of what our people want. In doing so, we have proactively transformed our participation work to ensure it is meaningful, honest, fully-informed and responsive to the needs of people who use our services.

Re-evaluating how we work hasn’t been easy, and has required a long, hard look at our different services and how we engage with our audiences.

However, the biggest challenge in building a real and meaningful movement was doing it during a pandemic which meant we needed to rely on digital platforms to move the work forward.

Fast-forward two years to now, November 2022, and we have managed to establish three national Participation Forums made up of over 50 people from across the UK. We created our Forums by age groups based on feedback from young people and for safeguarding purposes. We hold four meetings per year with each forum via Zoom, although we provide other opportunities for Forum Members to get involved in Brook’s wider work, so we end up meeting more regularly.

We have discovered great benefits to using digital platforms in progressing our participation work. However, we’re also conscious of missing out on what ‘real life’ participation can bring us so we have adapted some of our work to make sure this engagement still happens.

We asked our Forum Members for their perspective about the positives and negatives of both online vs real life engagement and their insights matched with what our participation staff have found.

Working digitally has allowed for Brook to involve young people and adults from across the UK, which benefits our work as “knowledge is so accessible and vast…[we] can get ideas from a variety of places and people”, and has made it “easier to network, share ideas, create new projects/partnerships, make friends etc”. There are some practical aspects about people being able to manage their other personal commitments as “geography limits people being able to meet up in real life” due to travelling time and travel costs.

Digital also allows for people to engage in a way which makes them feel comfortable as “some people have more confidence behind a screen” but equally it is important to make sure the meetings remain engaging and well facilitated as online meetings “might not be as engaging as IRL…people might have more of a tendency to switch off” and it can be “hard to monitor engagement, i.e. people on calls who don’t put cameras/mics on”.

One of the biggest concerns for Brook has been the real issue of digital poverty which “can mean that some people miss out (those without internet or computers/phones)”. A practical approach we have taken when working digitally has been paying for mobile data for those who can’t afford/don’t have access to Wi-Fi.

To further address this, Brook has committed to creating Local Participation Groups which meet in person and allow us to maintain the real-life connection and prevent people from feeling excluded by digital barriers. “Welcoming spaces are created, where we all physically exist in the same place” which gives the opportunity to be able to “build up a better network of people as you get to know people and just chat” and gives the opportunity for people to naturally discuss “new topics which you might not have considered” without the issue of being on mute and missing the opportunity to naturally add things to a free-flowing conversation.

Finding the right balance between digital and real-life can be challenging, but it is really important to acknowledge that they both have strengths and weaknesses.

On a practical level for staff, we still have a duty to safeguarding those who participate, so we had to create some new digital safeguarding checks which we have rolled out across the whole organisation. This piece of work has made our work stronger and more robust whether it is digital or in real-life.

Overall, Brook’s Participation work over the last two years has been about building a positive movement that works for those engaged with our organisation to allow for real outcomes. For us, the balance of digital v real-life is working and we wouldn’t want to go back to it being only one way or the other, but we are fully committed to the importance of regularly evaluating how we work with our Forum Members to make sure they are happy and still find the work of interest – they will soon tell you if something isn’t working!