Make participant experiences positive
To ensure positive experiences for people with disability, it is important to consider not only the relevance and benefits of your event or project, but also any potential harm.
Consider consultation fatigue and the project’s relevance
Before consulting with people with disability or the disability community, conduct desktop research into the topic area – projects, insights, and recommendations – to understand if there are any existing recommendations or insights you can draw on. Even if your project and another are not related, a participant may still feel like they are repeating themselves to non-specific researchers. This experience can be tiring and tedious for participants and lead to consultation fatigue. Show your participants you respect their time by doing prior research.
- Try to find out if there are any upcoming, current, or recent projects that focus on your target cohort.
- Consider recommendations or insights from related research or projects (such as non-Australian projects or activity that isn’t focused on people with disability), even if they are not identical to your activity. Testing and validating existing recommendations and insights with people with disability can show you value their unique and specific experiences.
- Try to differentiate your research from similar projects by varying the research questions and/or the participant cohort.
- Remember that the experience of participating in multiple similar events may feel duplicative to participants.
- Use a variety of channels to recruit participants from a wide pool. Informal channels of communication can help reach people who may not be connected to formal disability representative organisations.
Provide benefits for participating
- Provide tangible benefits to participants to show them you value their participation. Participants want to know that the time, energy and expertise they have given to you was respected.
- Benefits could include payment, but could also include communicating to participants how their participation has helped to create benefit for them or their community.
Relevant pages
Plan: Identify and attract participants
Plan: Meet people’s accessibility needs
Follow up: Promote effective follow up
Acknowledge potential harm
Poor participant experiences may not only affect your current project. They can also affect future projects your organisation (or any organisation) wants to conduct with individuals or communities of people with disability.
Potential harm can occur when individuals or communities:
- are prevented from participating in the project, in full or in part
- feel there is no reciprocal benefit of their participation
- are in spaces where they feel unequal to others participating in the activity. For example, participants might be paired with members of a group with a history of discrimination, participants who are recipients of services might be grouped with providers of those services, or other participants might dominate discussions
- experience physical, psychological, or social harm, either during or after the engagement. For example, people might feel they have been disrespected or their time has been wasted, or people might experience retribution due to improper handling of information they disclosed
- are financially worse off after participating in your activity
- are asked to provide input to topics with existing, publicly available recommendations
- are repeatedly consulted on the same or similar topic areas, with no visible or tangible changes/outcomes
- feel the activity is not accessible to them
- feel the topic or content is sensitive or potentially triggering.