Melanie Butcher On Inclusive Co-Design & Engagement To Develop Strategies With Positive Impact

Melanie Butcher is the Director of Impact and Engagement at The Social Deck, a certified B-Corporation committed to helping organisations to reach and engage people in actions that have a positive impact on society and the environment.

She’s a passionate facilitator and specialises in ensuring engagement practices are equitable, inclusive and accessible. This includes designing and applying Human Centred Design and co-design approaches wherever possible to ensure the genuine input of stakeholders and affected community members in change projects.

Mel has recently been the lead designer and facilitator for national consultations on a broad range of issues and policies, including the National Declaration for Educational Goals of Young Australians, National Obesity Prevention Strategy and the National Disability Strategy. She has also led research, co-design and evaluation for a range of innovative social, health and environmental programs.

Melanie Butcher discusses the activities of The Social Deck and the lessons learnt whilst engaging with communities and developing national strategies and campaigns.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led you to working in the social enterprise sector?

[Melanie Butcher] - I have a bit of a strange background. I'm actually a geologist by training and I worked as a geologist for about 12 years. It actually was a great career to start off with, and I got to travel the world. I worked in North America, South America and in different locations throughout Australia. I think it was really good because it gave me the opportunity to develop a really broad perspective on the way that different organisations can add value to their business and the wider community in different cultural and social contexts. But in the end, I decided I wanted to do something that had more of a positive impact. As much as I loved and still love studying rocks, I wanted to make more of an impact on the world. My other passion is in communication, so I was always doing a little bit of writing on the side and that sort of thing.

I just decided around about nine years ago now to make a big career move, and then to facilitate this, I jumped into studying a graduate certificate in Social Impact at UNSW.

I was living in Orange at the time and commuted over to Sydney to do this course part time over a couple of years, and it was just amazing. It actually turned into an MBA in Social Impact, and that was through the Australian Graduate School of Management. It was really exciting to be doing something that I was really passionate about. I had these amazing teachers there at UNSW with the Centre for Social Impact, people like Cheryl Kernot who was one of my first teachers, Ingrid Burkett was there at the time, Gianni Zappala, Liz Skelton and Kerry Graham.

There were all of these amazing people in the social impact space, so I was really privileged to learn from those people. I also made an amazing network of friends during that time, people that were finding their passion together.

It was just a great start into thinking about that intersection between social impact, creating positive social change and also business and how businesses can help that. On the flip side, it also showed how people cannot stay in the hamster wheel of funding and maybe look at the social enterprise models for being able to create more impact through the social change projects that were happening. I developed a real passion for aligning that business with purpose during that time. Then at the same time, I started working with The Social Deck. That's my background to how I got to where I am.

Mel, that's a wonderful background that you have there and some amazing mentors to have met along the way. You touched on it at the end there, but that's now led you to working with The Social Deck, so for our listeners, could you please describe the activities of The Social Deck and how you are helping organisations to create their own positive impact?

My business partners, Kate and Steve actually founded The Social Deck in New York a couple of years before I joined. At the time, The Social Deck was formed because there was a social enterprise movement in about 2011 in New York, where they were at the time. They saw this gap where there were all these amazing social enterprises happening, but there was a need for helping social enterprises and non-profits in general to communicate the impact that they were having, and to just help with communications in general. That's where The Social Deck started, but when Kate and Steve came back from New York, they went back to some other jobs and we all started The Social Deck again at the start of 2014.

With the seed planted of continuing this idea of being able to do communication for good, which included things like working on innovative social marketing and behaviour change campaigns in health and other things, we were also doing stuff like an online magazine called Ideas Hoist, which was trying to elevate social entrepreneurship, start-ups and those who had a bit of a social purpose-built in.

That's where it started, this idea of business for good, and we've moved into the workspace of mostly consulting government clients on policy change and social change projects that we believe have a positive impact.

Our core work these days is really in community and stakeholder engagement on public policy, like The National Disability Strategy and the National Obesity Prevention Strategy. We do that engagement, but I guess what we do in terms of our impact is that we apply a lens across all of our work that it needs to have that positive impact and purpose. That there will be a positive outcome from the work that we’re doing. For us, that's really become about people, especially people who are maybe more marginalised or disadvantaged or who don't usually get the chance to speak, to make sure that our engagement process is really inclusive. To make sure that everybody can have an equitable voice to government when there's change happening, particularly change that affects them.

We still do quite a lot of work with smaller organisations as well; social enterprises and NGOs around strategy or even community-based behaviour change projects. We've done some around illegal dumping and reducing the risk of mosquito borne diseases and things like that.

We basically look for projects that we think will have a really positive impact. overall, we're about communicating to people and helping them to engage in the way that they want to in changes that are happening.

You've interacted with the sector on so many different levels Mel, which is fantastic. I think that maybe if we focus on that national level that you were talking about just then, you have facilitated the design and development of many of these strategies and campaigns. What would be some of the critical lessons you've learned from using a variety of approaches in the design and consultation phases of these campaigns?

The first thing I think is the engagement has to be genuine. Consultation and engagement shouldn't be a box ticking exercise. I think in all of the work that we do, we advocate to government or other clients about genuine engagement and most people are absolutely on board with that. I think that one of the key things is to try to generate trust, and sometimes that actually means letting go of some of the process.

For example, what we've found is that we actually work with a lot of smaller organisations often around advocacy in the spaces that we might be consulting with, because they have already built the trust with the communities that they know and that they advocate for and work with all the time.

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We've learned to let go of some of our process and to trust others to know how to engage with the people that they engage with. Other things are we don't always expect people to come to us to engage. Even if we think that the problem, strategies, or the opportunities are really relevant, people shouldn't be expected to come all the way into the city to engage all the time in one place. We try wherever possible to go to where it's easier for people to engage, sometimes to where people are, particularly for community-based projects. Overall, I think these are the principles that we work with.

We need to be strategic; we need to understand what types of engagement works for who. It's not a cookie cutter exercise. We need to change the way that we engage with people in terms of the way that they want to engage so that it's inclusive.

But also things like - we don’t call things 'co-design' if it's not actually co-design. I think it's really important to not just to manage people's expectations, but also to draw that line all the time. To be able to say if you're informing or consulting with people, but you're not willing to involve them in the solution and actually use their ideas in the solution, then you don't call it co-design. You call it consultation.

I think that's a very detailed approach that you have there, and it's very evident that it works in a lot of the activities of The Social Deck.

Melanie, what advice would you give to an entrepreneur seeking to engage the community within their operations and future decision-making processes?

That's a great question. The first thing I would say is don't be afraid of people. Not just users, but just generally people who might have any interaction with the product or service, or people who are your beneficiaries. You should get out there and really ask people, "what do you want? Why do you do what you do? What are your pain points? What do think of the opportunities?" If you have made something, you need to be open to feedback and to testing whatever you're making with a range of people too. Not just people like you, but a range of diverse people.

I think one of the things that I've learned is just to not be afraid to sometimes go out there on the street and be asking questions, being really curious about what people think. A lot of people are just keen to have a chat and you learn so much. I think another thing would be to try to bake it into the business model. That might be through a board of advisors or some reference group or champions in the community. Embrace as much diversity as possible into that, whether it’s gender diversity, racial diversity, LGBTIQA+ representation if that's appropriate, or people with disabilities or neuro-diverse people.

It's really important to be able to think strategically within a social enterprise, non-profit or a business around the people who will really help to challenge your assumptions, but also help contribute to making the right thing or developing the right service.

The other thing I would say just in terms of communications is don't use jargon. Language is the best way to communicate with people, and I think that the principles of universal design in terms of communication could be done better in terms of the way that people talk about things with users or the community.

It really seems that you're touching on that idea of authentic interactions and talking to people. Just really getting the best message to them, which is really beautiful. It's a really great approach to social enterprise.

It's also getting the best messages from them as well. One of the things that I find in a lot in our work, especially in this work that we do in strategic projects end to end where we're starting off with research and ending with evaluation, is that often people forget to ask the really hard questions at the start to really challenge those assumptions. Then of course, the further you get along, the harder you hold onto the things that you might've made, or maybe your own biases around that. It's not everyone of course, but I think it's important to genuinely engage and take on board feedback, asking a variety of questions at the start to make sure that you're making the right thing.

Challenging assumptions, that's really a fantastic message.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently that are creating a positive social change?

I am really inspired by the cooperative models and the networks that are out there. The Nundah Co-op I think is just an incredible organisation, I know they've won some awards recently.

The point is that it's a member organisation, it’s a co-op. The benefits flow to the people that the business is looking to generate capacity for and to empower. It's not just empowering them in terms of telling people that they're doing a great job, getting them to speak up or generating employment opportunities, but it is actually flowing back in a business sense.

I think there's lots of great organisations like that. What Robert and Emma-Kate are doing with The Food Connect Shed and what is happening on the Sunshine Coast with FAN, The Food and Agribusiness Network is really cool. There's lots of those networks where they operate on behalf of their members and everybody's lifting each other up. A lot of the proceeds are actually going back to members, or the benefits are going back to the network. I think those are really cool organisations. The other one I guess I'd love to give a shout out to is my friend Tasha who runs Talk Revolution. She's generating some really good stuff at the moment. She's developed curriculum matched resources for teachers and parents that are about real talks. They're presented by kids, for kids about the conversations that matter, things like periods, drugs, alcohol and sex. It’s really relevant to this moment.

Those are really key things to touch on for kids there.

The most important thing is it's actually developed by kids as well. I think that peer model is what we've seen work really well. That's a really cool social enterprise as well.

It's exactly what you were talking about before, including those people in that consultation or co-design process. It really champions what you were focusing on before, and those were some amazing projects and initiatives.

What books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

That's a good question. I hardly have time unfortunately these days, although I know people say you make time to read books. I also know it's the lamest excuse!

I 100% understand. It's so hard sometimes to get around to reading books, even if you love doing it.

Totally! I guess I tend to snap up words of wisdom a little bit more than I would read an entire book, so there's a couple of things that I would recommend.

Firstly, follow people that you admire who are really deeply thinking people on whatever your preferred social media platform is.

I use Twitter a bit but use whatever you use. Every day I get the Seth Godin snippets of wisdom which are really cool. There's these awesome essays by Paul Graham that I've read quite a lot of. You can Google him, he's a start-up VC person in the State], but really, he has lots of wisdom. Maria Popova does the Brain Pickings blog, and I just love that. I love seeing that sort of stuff, and it just really inspires me. In terms of resources, for my work and because I do a lot of design and engagement, I always go back to the IDEO Design Kit and Field Guide to Human Centred Design. The DIY Toolkit as well online is good.

Then I look at betterevaluation.org, as it's the best site ever for looking at measuring social impact and evaluation in my opinion. They would be amazing resources. In terms of books, this book really challenged me, and I really do like to have assumptions challenged so it might be because of this, but there was a book called Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing The World, and it was by a guy called Anand Giridharadas. I don't think it's a particularly new book, but the premise is basically that you can't solve problems with the same thinking that made them. There's lots of good things like impact investing, but this idea that using capitalist solutions, even though it's the driver of inequality, won’t tackle disadvantages and it's not going to work in the long-term.

It links to a lot of social issues that are swirling around at the moment, this idea that winners can't keep winning over everyone else, even if they have the best intentions. Even if they say ‘I've made a lot of money and I want to give back’, that is great, but people avoid questioning their own power, business practices and wealth.

I think at the moment there's lots of these thoughts around tackling gender inequality, harassment and abuse, where society's default is to think about what the victim can do about the problem, rather than what someone else needs to sacrifice to avoid that problem happening again and again. I just found it really amazing, and that's my recommendation for a book to read.

Thank you so much for making the time today to speak with us and to share your generous insights and time.