Scaling Up Leapfrog: improving a million creative conversations

Lead Research Organisation: Lancaster University
Department Name: Lancaster Inst for the Contemporary Arts

Abstract

We want 1 million people to directly benefit from new adaptations of Leapfrog tools by unlocking the potential for practitioners across the UK and beyond to work at new scales. We will build on the success of the Leapfrog project by working with new public and third sector partners to help them engage with large groups. This will range from community meetings with hundreds of people through to some interactions that will have over 100,000 people using an adapted Leapfrog tool in a Design Week. To do this we will use co-design to collaboratively create and adapt Leapfrog tools with our partners, giving them tailored resources to support their work, and producing shareable tools available freely worldwide.

Amongst the many challenges faced by the public sector at this time, there is a growing need to meaningfully involve more and more citizens, service users and communities in the difficult decisions that affect them. Scaling Up Leapfrog responds to this need by enabling our partners to directly take on the challenges that surround engaging hundreds of thousands of people in meaningful, creative dialogue. With our partners we will co-design Leapfrog tools to support engagement with 80-100 people at a time, a significant shift in scale from common engagement practice that generally engages ten or twenty people at a time. We will also collaborate with our partners to unlock new scales for parallel engagement, producing Leapfrog tools that help form connections between multiple events in a single initiative.

Our partners range from those in public health (Morecambe Bay Clinical Commissioning Group), to national charity networks (Food Power), international design networks (World Design Weeks Network) and museums (Victoria and Albert Museum). These partners each seek to enable their staff to perform effective, creative engagement with an increasing number of participants. For some of our partners this is driven by a desire to make a population more health aware and to develop a social movement to that end, engaging with the most disadvantaged people and helping their voices have an effect in decision-making or to help eradicate food poverty by drawing on the expertise of people living in food poverty. We also have 'reach partners' who are working with very large numbers of people (e.g. Milan Design Week had over 400,000 attendees in 2018), we will work with the heads of 10 design weeks to develop new tools to help them engage with their audiences en-mass. We will use co-design to collaboratively design and test ways of enabling these new scales of engagement for our partners, giving them direct value during the project, and on-going value as new practices and resources becoming part of their organisational vocabulary.

Our approach to the co-design of tools is exemplified in a stream of work from the current Leapfrog project (2015-2018) We co-designed with 20 librarians to help make this transition to mixed-service teams and spaces a more positive experience. Being led by them, together we developed a range of tools to help new teams form and function effectively. In Scaling up Leapfrog, one could imagine a tool being adapted from the Librarians 'New team tools' to help people explore the contents of a design week collaboratively; this could be incorporated into the tickets created for the design week. Its very important to note though, our experience is that the real insights come from actually co-designing with partners, the real outcomes of the co-design process are likely to be unexpected and all the more innovative for that.

The new practices, tools and resources that are produced through co-design with our project partners will also have relevance across a diverse range of organisations, sectors and contexts. All the tools produced by the project will be shared freely through the Leapfrog website (www.leapfrog.tools), building on a library of free, resources available (and used) worldwide.

Planned Impact

Every element of this project seeks real-world impact that enhances public sector engagement practice. The proposed work with Morecambe Bay Clinical Commissioning Group (MBCCG) and Food Power will lead to new tools and resources, tested, improved and embedded within these organisations, aligning directly with their organisational priorities and ambitions. This will enable the voice of some of the most disadvantaged groups to contribute actively to developing policy and interventions that will affect them directly.

Work with the Victoria and Albert Museum and World Design Weeks Network (WDWN) will produce tools and resources for use by practitioners in national and international networks, reaching hundreds of thousands of people in use (over 800,000 through work with the V&A, over 1,000,000 through work with WDWN). This will have a significant cumulative impact for example helping young people have a more inspirational experience in an engagement programme at a museum. For the WDWN we will help organisations bring design alive for a multitude of people, this could be something that helps attendees for the large design weeks get to grips with the huge scale of design weeks in Milan or Eindhoven but also it could include resources to help emerging design weeks such as Detroit to find their own voice with their attendees and introduce them to design. These four central organisational collaborations form the proposed project and are the product of highly active, engaged involvement of these partners in the development of this proposal.

The existing Leapfrog project has demonstrated the transformative potential of tool co-design for public and third sector engagement practice. Our evaluation of the current Leapfrog project (2015-2018) revealed persistent changes in practice for individuals engaged in co-design work, and for organisations collaborating with the project. For example, Lancashire County Council staff co-designed tools to support new team formation which have now become embedded in the organisation, available to all staff though internal procurement systems, integrated into training processes and an everyday element of practice within the Council. We anticipate similar benefits from the proposed activities for our partners, and have integrated activities to embed outcomes into all elements of project.

Each stream of activity within this project will produce collections (toolboxes) of adaptable tools, available freely through the Leapfrog website (www.leapfrog.tools) for at least 10 years from the end of project funding. The tools will be promoted by events run by both Leapfrog project staff and independently our project partners. These tools will be downloaded and used by practitioners directly touched by project activities, by practitioners within the existing Leapfrog network, and by practitioners around the world unknown to the project today. We anticipate continued demand for the new tools the project will produce, adding to those who have visited the Leapfrog website to date (over 60,000) and downloaded tools (over 2,000). Each download and subsequent use of a Leapfrog tool has the potential to touch hundreds of people, amplifying the impact and reach of the project and the research that underpins it.

The tools and resources will enable effective engagement practice with groups of 80-100 people in a single event, or helping practitioners link together multiple engagement events or activities, in a few cases at the scale of 100,000 people. This aligns with our partners' needs (exemplified by the intent of our project partner MBCCG to run preventative healthcare workshops with 300 teachers at a time), and represents a step change from the existing Leapfrog tools (generally suited to work with groups of 2-20 people). Based on extensive scoping work with partners, we and our partners have chosen the goal of seeing more than 1 million people benefit from the outcomes of this follow-on project by 2021.
 
Title Conversations at Scale 
Description A toolbox of 11 tools to enable conversations with a large number or diverse groups of people. The tools were co-designed with partners and their networks with Morecambe Bay Clinical Commissioning Group and Lancaster Community and Voluntary Solutions. 
Type Of Art Artefact (including digital) 
Year Produced 2019 
Impact No impacts yet. 
URL http://leapfrog.tools
 
Title Rethinking R&D in Museum Learning 
Description This toolbox was co-designed in a ten month process with the National and learning team with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It contains tools to help put impact on audiences at the heart of everyday research and development. It contains a skeleton tool card deck - remixable ideas for collecting and analysing R&D data then sharing insights with your team or others. It also contains a large map to help plan out a cycle of R&D and implementation. 
Type Of Art Artefact (including digital) 
Year Produced 2019 
Impact Quote from Elisaboth Galvin, Head of Learning and Digital Programmes at Victoria and Albert Museum says: In 2018, V&A Learning and National Programmes Department was looking at how to better integrate 'designerly' behaviours across the programmes, and encourage new ways of working to enact data-driven change to ensure that we are meeting the needs of our audiences. Through the work with ImaginationLanacaster, we were able to codesign toolkits and frameworks to better integrate R&D cycles in our work to ensure that we are audience-led and continually iterating our offer. By developing this framework, we are designing and developing programmes that are exciting, relevant and rooted in the V&A collections that are backed up by robust data. The toolkit contains three case studies of how the tools have been used to evaluate events at the V&A and how the insights were taken forwards. The team at Imagination are continuing to work with the V&A on co-design projects evolving from this collaboration. 
URL http://www.leapfrog.tools
 
Title Tools for Food Stories 
Description Tools for Food Stories is an outcome of the collaboration with Food Power project called 'Tools for Empowerment'. Working with individuals with lived experience of food poverty and food activists across Lancashire and Newcastle, we co-designed this toolbox of 8 tools to capture stories about food and food poverty which can be used for lobbying and campaigning or engaging or educational purposes with diverse communities. The toolbox can be freely downloaded and adapted for specific engagement contexts from www.leapfrog.tools 
Type Of Art Artefact (including digital) 
Year Produced 2019 
Impact The toolbox was shared at the Food Power Conference in June 2019. Since then the tools have been shared at over ten tool sharing workshops. These are often led by our partners or the individuals we co-designed them with. Penny has recently requested that we send her printouts of 200 of each tool so she can run her own tool sharing events independently which we have sent her the tools for. Penny and Ben have been to the United States to share these tools at a conference in North Carolina and also used them to engage food activists in New York to capture learning about food insecurity and how it can be applied back in the UK. Our partner at Food Power reports that taking part in the co-design process has empowered individuals to be better advocates for themselves, others and campaign for change to MP's etc. The toolbox has also helped Food Power projects who are running pilots to engage experts with lived experience of food poverty as our partner can direct them to the toolbox instead of having to go and work with them 1-1 as the toolbox is so easy to use and adapt. Crucially the people who co-designed the toolbox have taken ownership of the tools and it is being shared and used widely without minimal input from the Leapfrog team. We have reports of the toolbox being used widely with schools and by Healthwatch. Recently, the toolbox has been published on the Sustain web site which is the new Sustainable Food Cities website rather than on the Sustain site. Sustainable Food Cities is a national programme of nearly 60 Food Partnerships around the UK led by Sustain, The Soil Association and my organisation, Food Matters, working in partnership who say "The Tools are excellent and will, I'm sure, be very useful for SFC members". 
URL http://leapfrog.tools
 
Description This follow on project has achieved the key targets established at the beginning of the project.
1 Work with new partners to co-design a series of training resources facilitating the modification of Leapfrog tools to work at new, bigger scales.
2 Use these resources to collaboratively adapt Leapfrog tools in new, real world contexts, creating new versions of the tools that function effectively at large scales.
3 Apply these tools and resources nationally, enabling creative engagement by our project partners at new scale.
4 Share new, validated tools and resources nationally and internationally through a series of freely available toolboxes, complementing the existing resources created through the original Leapfrog project.
5 Evaluate the effectiveness of these new 'engagements at scale' tools. This will involve gathering baseline data with both participants in the co-design process and people who subsequently use the adapted tools and toolboxes.
We have worked with 4 partners to develop tools and resources that explore engagement at scale. All of these have resulted in new engagement tools published without cost at www.Leapfrog.tools.
Food Power: here we worked with experts through experience of food poverty to help them have a stronger lobbying voice. This includes helping groups in Blackburn and Newcastle co-design ways of helping people to start talking about food, then issues around food and finally food poverty in a safe, creative manner. We found our co-designers taking real ownership of these tools, presenting them at national and international events as well as using them in their own communities.
Morecambe Bay Clinical Commissioning Group: We worked with MBCCG to develop tools intended for use in large group events. We co-designed a series of tools for group working and collective action. Interestingly as part for the project our partners realised that running a successful event for 90 people was much harder than running 3 x 30 people events. This insight for them was useful but also feeds into our research.
Victoria and Albert Museum: We worked with the V&A London to help them think creatively about the implementation of their 14 point evaluation framework. The result is a series of tools looking at not only the implementation of creative evaluation tools but also the analysis of the data captured by these tools and finally tools to share the insights for the evaluation. This resulted in a collaborative, co-branded set of tools that will be published in the coming weeks.
World Design Weeks: With WDW we worked with the heads of some of the biggest design festivals around the world (including Milan, Tokyo, Dutch, San Francisco, South Africa) to explore how large, complex festivals could be evaluated in a creative, effective manner. The result was a set of tools that are in the process of being deployed around the world as well as being freely available for any festival or event to use.
Exploitation Route This research and understanding informed and will be further developed by the Expanding Excellence in England funded Beyond Imagination Project. This £13.2 million project lead by the PI of Leapfrog has significant investment in both community research and creative evaluation.
Sectors Creative Economy,Education,Government, Democracy and Justice
URL http://www.leapfrog.tools
 
Description Leapfrog and Extending Leapfrog have had impacts in the following areas; 1 Impacts on practitioners and delivery of professional services 2 Impacts on public policy, law and services 3 Impacts on learning, understanding, and participation 4 Economic Impacts and finally 5 Social Welfare. Through a series of 103 co-design events with 720 participants from 83 partner organisations ranging from Crofters in the Highlands of Scotland to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, to people with lived experience of food poverty to NHS Blackpool Victoria hospital staff, the Leapfrog (LF) team created 83 unique engagement tools and 13 toolboxes. These tools have been widely distributed through 95 tool sharing events to 292 community facing organisations and 3,802 people. In addition to this LF tools have been downloaded in 146 countries a total of 5,000 times and the LF website (www.Leapfrog.tools) has been viewed over 100,000 times. There is also strong evidence of the direct application of the tools, for example, Healthwatch in Blackburn have engaged with over 2,000 children and young people on the things that keep them happy, healthy and feeling good in order to shape local health care provision. Leapfrog is also an important component in the global food justice network with partners on 4 continents. 1 Impacts on practitioners and delivery of professional services: LF has been responsible for significant impacts in terms of both the professional practice of people who do public and user engagement every day as well as improving the quality and effectiveness of this engagement. Julie Bell Head of Libraries, Museums, Culture and Registrars Lancashire County Council notes how LF has changed practices nationally for example in Health Workers in Scotland working with cared for young people and also through national professional bodies such as CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) where she ran 2 LF workshops, in which she 'witnessed how people started to rethink the tools' as they were adopted into their practice. 3 examples of impact on professional practice operating at a local, regional and national levels. A) Local Practitioner Impact: Lou Andrews, and I'm a Youth Action Researcher working for CancerCare. Lou has been doing arts projects with young people using a wide range of visual arts materials for 20 years but 'Leapfrog has transformed my practice as a youth arts worker and as a community worker'. This transformation was initiated by a 'Tool-fest' a tool sharing event in July 2016 where we presented a tool developed by cared for young people called Sound Advice where a mobile phone was used to record advice to their younger selves. One of the biggest impacts for Lou of Leapfrog was 'taking me into using digital. It's broadened my horizons enormously I've entered into a whole new body of work that really captures the essence of what young people think. Young people are really confident with technology. They might not be as confident writing as they are speaking. I feel that by using a technology that they're confident with, we overcome a huge barrier'. Lou now uses LF tools in every project, from looking at the Peace Movement with Rylands School girls or using Sound Advice with 300 children in Barrowford Primary School. In the last 6 months Lou has used Leapfrog tools with over 500 children. Lou has reflected that LF goes beyond providing effective tools, it has impacted fundamentally on how she thinks about engagement 'I've gone beyond changing my own practice technologically and having a whole new range of skills now, into using those tools to help me not just facilitate issue based work but to plan it as well'. C) National Practitioner Impact: Ben Pearson (Empowerment Programme Officer, Church Action on Poverty working on the national food poverty project Food Power). Ben collaborated with LF in the co-design of new engagement tools by and for experts through experience of food poverty. This included working with school children in Blackburn and adults in Byker, Newcastle. He was aware of LF previously through engagement work in Healthwatch in the NW of England. LF changed the way Ben worked with participants, Leapfrog allowed for 'conversation to be more holistic and inclusive' and they 'allow people of different abilities to contribute... nobody feels excluded' S1. There were also more profound impacts on practice for Ben, Leapfrog 'made me think about the whole design of projects in a different way. It really embedded that kind of co-production ethos into my work and into the organisation's work' for example .'Even when we weren't using the Leapfrog tools the way in which we went about them was quite different, that we embedded people with lived experience right at the very start' S1 Leapfrog has also had an impact on Ben's interaction with the 69 alliances that are part of Food Power, each alliance has between 3-7 local groups each that work together to address food poverty. Through Leapfrog these alliances are more independent 'they haven't needed my support as intensively'. Leapfrog enabling better engagement: LF has improved the engagement practice of people who used the LF tools, Rebecca Addey: Paediatric Patient Experience Officer, Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust) says 'I've become more creative in the way I engage with young people and families' and 'the tools have given young patients more ownership with their experiences;(and) to have their voices heard and to be listened to by the right people' (S3). The tools have also increased the capacity of a groups to do more engagement and importantly to the outcomes of engagement this in decision making, 'volunteers have been able to take it and use it and increase the capacity and the amount of information we gather taking those findings to somebody who's making decisions at a strategic level, it's quite easy' (S1). This strategic impact is also evident in Lancaster City Council, as Mark Davies Director for Communities and Environment at Lancaster City Council says 'Leapfrog changed the way we think about working with the community the Council we hadn't really thought about how you properly engage with communities, [Leapfrog] made me step back a bit and think we're about a million miles away from the world that Leon's talking about' (S4). Rather than thinking that a survey was good engagement, Leapfrog 'provided the council a wider knowledge and expertise for effective consultation and engagement' (S5). The quality and innovation of the tools co-designed with young people was recognised, firstly through the British Youth Councils Youth on Board Innovation award, voted for by young people this acknowledged the innovative tool co-design work of 12 cared-for young people, created to help young people interact with the social services in a more positive, egalitarian manner (S6). Secondly in the Ofsted inspection of the Backburn Safeguarding provision in 2017 Leapfrog was recognised as best practice to be shared nationally on the Ofsted website. 2 Impacts on public policy and services: Leapfrog has had an impact on public policy and services, that is, an impact on the infrastructure and organisation of public sector bodies and how this is reflected in how they operate. Leapfrog has become embedded in 3 council organisations. A) In Blackburn with Darwin Unitary Authority, Leapfrog helped 'Public Health to transform the ways in which we engage with and involve citizens in planning service the tools have been adopted and adapted in a wide range of settings: from Children's Services where they have helped to transform the creative methods for ensuring that the voice of the child is embedded in service development planning'. Leapfrog also helped Blackburn Council in 'filling a significant gap in the ability of policy makers and strategists to develop policies'. B) In Lancashire County Council, Leapfrog collaborated with the Library Service at a time when half of the libraries in the county were scheduled to close. In developing these tools 'Leapfrog has both challenged and empowered my teams which has assisted them to be far more resilient' Julie Bell, Head of Libraries (S2). These tools, co-designed by librarians, are now embedded in the training and resources available across the County Council. The tools can be ordered and made by the County's printers and new staff are trained on the use of Leapfrog tools making them part of the fabric of engagement practice across Lancashire County Council. C) Leapfrog tools are also available on the intranet for Lancaster County Council and are 'the majority of Lancaster City Council's community consultation events' for but for Lancaster City Council the impact of Leapfrog is significantly more profound, it has resulted in a major reorganisation of the structure and approach to delivering services. Faced with a 60% reduction of the operating budget, rather than thinking 'cut, cut, cut' the council looked to Leapfrog and co-design to fill the gap, placing community engagement at the heart of a new strategy. They 'invested as a council, we've reprioritised, we've put money into staff who do engagement. We've looked at delivering services on a more area basis to invest more in helping give the community capacity or pulling the community...'. This investment has resulted in an improvement in green spaces despite the 60% reduction in funding (an economic impact described below). This surprising and significant impacts directly associated with the Leapfrog approach. 'Could you attribute the concept of this new team and that strategic change in direction to the involvement and learning from Leapfrog? Absolutely... Would you call that a strategic change? Yes. And a step-change as well' Mark Davies. Director for Communities and Environment at Lancaster City Council. 3 Impacts on learning, understanding, and participation Leapfrog co-designed 82 new tools with 720 people to promote innovative forms of engagement. These colourful, accessible, adaptable tools have been used many thousands of times in the UK and Internationally. For example, Blackburn Healthwatch used one tool in a 3-month period with 2,000 school children, an evaluation toolbox for the V&A museum will be used by their education and engagement team as they evaluate the 1,600 events they run annually with 420,0000 participants in their events annually. Through the V&A, work with the World design weeks organisation and ongoing use we are on course to have documented 1 million uses of Leapfrog tools by 2022. Beyond this, there is an unexpected impact for the people involved in the co-design aspect of the project where small groups come together to co-design engagement tools specifically to meet their needs. These tools are then shared more widely in a more generalised form. 'We have found that just by doing the co-design workshops groups have opened upit has challenged their thinking and given them a platform for further action'(S1). The empowering effects of the co-design is evident in both the pride and ownership participants take in their tools. This is especially significant for participants in the Food Power project who often face other life challenges compounded by a life where hunger and restricted access to food is a fact of life. 'Now people are using the tools, because it's not something that they've been given to use, it's something that they've been involved in producing, they have ownership. I think that is as a result of them feeling empowered during the process of co-designing the tools for food stories, that it changed their perspective on things'. This has seen participants present evidence to the House of Commons, travel to an international conference in the USA and be interviewed on Chanel 4 news. For the last of these Ben Pearson credits the Leapfrog 'Food Safari' tool for helping the school children involved articulate to Channel 4 news 'a bit more of a journey, a structure, of how the local food scene linked to individuals, linked to the community, liked to access, affordability, choice'. This is not an isolated example, 'Young people led their take over day and conducted their own evaluation upon their activities using Leapfrog tools'. said Gavin Redhead and in Liverpool 'Young people have been empowered to engage directly with managers, rather than having to go through engagement professionals'. 4 Economic Impact The economic (and resource) impact of Leapfrog on the public sector has been considerable. The adoption of a community-led approach supported by Leapfrog tools helping a dialogue between council officers, communities and 'friend's groups' has been instrumental in identifying and providing evidence for genuine needs in Lancaster City Council. 'This has then been used to successfully secure external funding grants. Through friends of groups we've obtained over £1m of additional investment in parks, plus immeasurable amounts of volunteer hours' Rejecting a 'big society' approach where communities are often abandoned, Lancaster City use Leapfrog tools to engage with friend's groups productively, maximising the mutual benefit of these (human and monetary) resources. This has had a dramatic effect, 'even though we've had a 60% decrease in resources through austerity across the board, our parks, open spaces and things like that are now in better condition than they were pre-austerity.. what we're kind of saying is that by looking at things completely differently we're getting more now than we were before'. This engagement with communities has also had the effect of dramatically reducing vandalism compared to activity that does not include a strong element of engagement 5 Impacts on the health and wellbeing of people LF is ultimately about design research helping people prosper through making the best contribution they can. Below are 2 examples of how an individual`s wellbeing and likely life course has been shaped by Leapfrog. The first of these involves the project to co-design with cared-for young people (children from 13-17 years old taken out of their families) developing tools to help their interaction with the social care system. Following on contact as part of Gavin Redhead's champions network show that 4 of these young people are now pursuing qualifications to go to university, having never considered this before, with each being the first prospective members in their family to go onto higher education. In the second example, a 6 year-old girl 'Alice' was orphaned and several members of her extended family made a claim to be her guardian. One solution to this was to have a big family meeting with 15 or so people including members form the social services and Alice listen to the discussion and choose a guardian. A social worker, aware of the Leapfrog tools, used a tool called 'Target Control' with the Alice one-to-one, helping her identify in her family who was close to her and who more distant and why. The relative pressing hardest for guardianship was not recognised by Alice in this process. Using the Leapfrog tool influenced who 6 year-old Alice lives with, changing her life course.
First Year Of Impact 2015
Sector Communities and Social Services/Policy,Creative Economy,Education,Healthcare,Leisure Activities, including Sports, Recreation and Tourism,Government, Democracy and Justice,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections
Impact Types Cultural,Societal,Economic,Policy & public services
 
Description Telling stories and shaping solutions: A toolkit for empowering people who have lived experience of food poverty
Geographic Reach National 
Policy Influence Type Citation in other policy documents
Impact This toolkit written by Leapfrog's collaborator Ben Pearson provides guidance and case studies on empowering people with lived experience of food poverty to make change happen and contains links to and case studies of the Tools for Food Stories toolkit co-designed with Leapfrog. There is currently a lack of voice for grassroots people, those who are experiencing food poverty and hunger, their peers and allies within their community, both within the sector and more widely within society. We believe individuals with direct experience at a grassroots level should play an active role in identifying and advocating for long term solutions to the issues they face. By doing this, projects, policy, support and interventions are better designed for the people they are designed to help. Put simply, it's about giving those at a grassroots level the power they are too often denied, to make change happen. The toolkit is being shared nationally through Sustain and their national alliances who recruit and work with experts with lived experience to create solutions for sustainable change. This toolkit covers: Why involve people with lived experience? Why do people want to get involved? Who are the people we want to empower? What are the challenges? What do we mean by empowerment? Recruiting people to become involved Minding our language Four core principles and case studies Co-production Building relationships Influencing and impact Building a social movement Advice for people with lived experience who get involved Practical consideration Toolkit written by Ben Pearson, Church Action on Poverty, with Maddie Guerlain and Simon Shaw, Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming.
URL https://www.sustainweb.org/publications/telling_stories_and_shaping_solutions/
 
Description V&A Museum in London ad
Geographic Reach National 
Policy Influence Type Influenced training of practitioners or researchers
Impact The tools co-design with the V&A in London are designed to put impact on audiences and what people take from their experience at the heart of their everyday research and development. The Leapfrog toolbox takes practitioners through setting R&D aims, planning data collection, planning data analysis and implementing and sharing insights and how to iterate and link cycles based on findings. 4 case studies of how the V&A have implemented the tools are included within the toolbox guidelines when the tools are downloaded. The impact to date shows that the tools have been effective to date in generating quality data which had an impact on how they now welcome and direct D/deaf families to the museum. Another project which was taking a user-centred approach to gallery development used the tools to recruit young people in co-designing the space they want in a meaningful way. Their co-design approach to gallery development has provided a wealth of information to the project team and learning from this project has gone on to inform the Photography Codesign project and the V&A East Advisory panel. There are other case studies of impact to date included within the toolbox.
URL http://www.leapfrog.tools
 
Description Beyond Imagination: Providing fresh perspectives on real world issues and facilitating innovation. E3. Expanding Excellence in England.
Amount £1,030,000 (GBP)
Funding ID ACP ID A103346 
Organisation United Kingdom Research and Innovation 
Department Research England
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start 08/2019 
End 07/2022
 
Description Co-design for Evaluation and Impact with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London 
Organisation Victoria and Albert Museum
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Public 
PI Contribution Leapfrog worked with senior staff at the V&A in the National and learning team to develop a series of co-design workshops that explored how the new Impact Framework could be implanted in a practical way at the V&A with tools to allow staff to embed evaluation and impact activities into the thousands of engagement activities the team deliver. Leapfrog designed the facilitation and delivered a series of 3 co-design workshops at the v&A in London. Over time co-designing, prototyping, testing and adapting a toolbox of 22 tools that can be used to evaluate engagement and impact. The third workshop introduced how the tools could be embedded into a R&D cycle so data gathered and insights gained can be actioned to base decisions on, design future projects and appropriate actions depending on the topic and findings. This result in a collection of 22 tools which are available as a toolbox for Evaluation and Impact on the Leapfrog web site.
Collaborator Contribution Senior staff at the V&A worked with leapfrog to develop the focus of our co-design collaboration with the focus of engagement at scale. The V&A recruited staff for the workshop and marketed the workshop to the relevant people and teams. They supported and encouraged staff to try out and adapt tool prototypes resulting from the co-design workshops. The final R&D stage was one that we hadn't expected and came about as a result of the V&A finding how useful the tools were when embedded into their everyday practice.
Impact Quote from Elisaboth Galvin, Head of Learning and Digital Programmes at Victoria and Albert Museum says: In 2018, V&A Learning and National Programmes Department was looking at how to better integrate 'designerly' behaviours across the programmes, and encourage new ways of working to enact data-driven change to ensure that we are meeting the needs of our audiences. Through the work with ImaginationLanacaster, we were able to codesign toolkits and frameworks to better integrate R&D cycles in our work to ensure that we are audience-led and continually iterating our offer. By developing this framework, we are designing and developing programmes that are exciting, relevant and rooted in the V&A collections that are backed up by robust data. The toolkit contains three case studies of how the tools have been used to evaluate events at the V&A and how the insights were taken forwards. The team at Imagination are continuing to work with the V&A on research projects evolving from this collaboration.
Start Year 2019
 
Description Leapfrog Tools for Empowerment 
Organisation Food Nation
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Charity/Non Profit 
PI Contribution Our partner Food Power is a national 4 year £4 million pound Big Lottery funded programme managed by Church Action on Poverty and Sustain aiming to tackle the root causes of food poverty through people powered change. In 'Tools for Empowerment' Leapfrog worked closely with Food Power's Empowerment officer who supports over sixty local food alliances across the UK to build capacity, with local empowerment at its core. Leapfrog collaborated with the Empowerment Officer to design and facilitate the co-design workshops and resulting tools and toolbox. We also shared the tools at several sharing events and conferences.
Collaborator Contribution Recruiting and empowering individuals with lived experience of food poverty is central to Food Power's strategy of advocating for long term sustainable solutions. Our partner recruited young people and food activists across Lancashire and individuals with lived experience of food poverty on the Bkyer Estate in Newcastle (though social enterprise Food Nation) to co-design tools which would help to structure and capture conversations about food and food poverty in a positive, non-confrontational way.
Impact The outcome of the co-design process is a toolbox of 8 tools and resources to engage young people and adults in conversations around food and food poverty, both those with lived experience and keen activists. The toolbox called 'Tools for Food Stories' can be downloaded from www.leapfrog.tools The tools have been shared at several conferences both in the UK and the United States by Leapfrog and our partners and people with lived experience of food poverty. One of the tools the food safari tool was featured on the Channel four news on a feature about food insecurity which interviewed one of the young co-designers. The impact of taking part in the co-design process and feeling ownership of the tools has empowered some of the young activists and people with lived experience to confidently campaign for change as well as run their own tool sharing events. We are currently developing a new funding bid with Food Power building on this research which explores activism. The tools produced have also saved time and resources for the Empowerment Officer as people in the national Food Power pilots are using them to engage experts by lived experience in their areas. We are now starting to gather case studies of how the tools have been used by activists and young people. Food Power after seeing the power of using a co-design approach have started using this in many other projects and with young people, adapting the Leapfrog tools to suit their specific engagement needs. The Empowerment Officer after seeing the positive impact co-design can have is now adapting a co-design approach to many other projects and often adapting Leapfrog tools to engage people. For example, he had commissioned a film called 'Edgelands' to create a hard hitting film about young people living in poverty. Food Power (with some support from Leapfrog) worked with young people to adapt the Local Food Card Decks through a co-design workshop into a new deck of cards to create a set of resources to be used alongside the film in schools to engage young people in conversations around the topics in the film such as domestic violence, drugs, poverty etc. This has been very well received and we have received feedback from young people who have used these tools which has really helped them to think about and discuss the difficult topics in the film.
Start Year 2019
 
Description Leapfrog Tools for Empowerment 
Organisation Sustain (food and farming alliance)
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Charity/Non Profit 
PI Contribution Our partner Food Power is a national 4 year £4 million pound Big Lottery funded programme managed by Church Action on Poverty and Sustain aiming to tackle the root causes of food poverty through people powered change. In 'Tools for Empowerment' Leapfrog worked closely with Food Power's Empowerment officer who supports over sixty local food alliances across the UK to build capacity, with local empowerment at its core. Leapfrog collaborated with the Empowerment Officer to design and facilitate the co-design workshops and resulting tools and toolbox. We also shared the tools at several sharing events and conferences.
Collaborator Contribution Recruiting and empowering individuals with lived experience of food poverty is central to Food Power's strategy of advocating for long term sustainable solutions. Our partner recruited young people and food activists across Lancashire and individuals with lived experience of food poverty on the Bkyer Estate in Newcastle (though social enterprise Food Nation) to co-design tools which would help to structure and capture conversations about food and food poverty in a positive, non-confrontational way.
Impact The outcome of the co-design process is a toolbox of 8 tools and resources to engage young people and adults in conversations around food and food poverty, both those with lived experience and keen activists. The toolbox called 'Tools for Food Stories' can be downloaded from www.leapfrog.tools The tools have been shared at several conferences both in the UK and the United States by Leapfrog and our partners and people with lived experience of food poverty. One of the tools the food safari tool was featured on the Channel four news on a feature about food insecurity which interviewed one of the young co-designers. The impact of taking part in the co-design process and feeling ownership of the tools has empowered some of the young activists and people with lived experience to confidently campaign for change as well as run their own tool sharing events. We are currently developing a new funding bid with Food Power building on this research which explores activism. The tools produced have also saved time and resources for the Empowerment Officer as people in the national Food Power pilots are using them to engage experts by lived experience in their areas. We are now starting to gather case studies of how the tools have been used by activists and young people. Food Power after seeing the power of using a co-design approach have started using this in many other projects and with young people, adapting the Leapfrog tools to suit their specific engagement needs. The Empowerment Officer after seeing the positive impact co-design can have is now adapting a co-design approach to many other projects and often adapting Leapfrog tools to engage people. For example, he had commissioned a film called 'Edgelands' to create a hard hitting film about young people living in poverty. Food Power (with some support from Leapfrog) worked with young people to adapt the Local Food Card Decks through a co-design workshop into a new deck of cards to create a set of resources to be used alongside the film in schools to engage young people in conversations around the topics in the film such as domestic violence, drugs, poverty etc. This has been very well received and we have received feedback from young people who have used these tools which has really helped them to think about and discuss the difficult topics in the film.
Start Year 2019
 
Description Scaling Up Leapfrog Tools. 
Organisation Lancaster District CVS
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Charity/Non Profit 
PI Contribution Leapfrog led on the development and facilitation of a series of 3 co-design workshops to enable more effective and innovative engagement with large groups of people. Leapfrog also professionally designed the tools and instructions that the co-designers came up and made these available on Leapfrog's web site.
Collaborator Contribution Morecambe Bay Clinical Commissioning Group and Lancaster CVS helped us define and shape this co-design process to respond to their engagement needs. Both partners also recruited co-design participants from their organisation and the networks they work with including the police, voluntary organisations and the NHS. Participants attended 3 co-design workshops at Lancaster University for half a day co-designing tools along with instructions and examples of use for the new tools.
Impact Multidisciplinary collaboration. The co-design team included the Police, NHS, doctors, a priest, charities, public sector officers, community volunteers and a counselling service. The outcome of the project was a toolbox now freely available to download from www.leapfrog.tools called 'Conversations at Scale'. A toolbox consisting of 11 unique Tools co-designed to enable conversations with a large number, or diverse groups of people. The co-design team attended a tool sharing event to which they invited wider networks of people. They are using the tools in their everyday practise. Leapfrog's Design Manager also ran a tool sharing event with Cumbria CVS.
Start Year 2019
 
Description Scaling Up Leapfrog Tools. 
Organisation NHS Morecambe Bay Clinical Commissioning Group
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Hospitals 
PI Contribution Leapfrog led on the development and facilitation of a series of 3 co-design workshops to enable more effective and innovative engagement with large groups of people. Leapfrog also professionally designed the tools and instructions that the co-designers came up and made these available on Leapfrog's web site.
Collaborator Contribution Morecambe Bay Clinical Commissioning Group and Lancaster CVS helped us define and shape this co-design process to respond to their engagement needs. Both partners also recruited co-design participants from their organisation and the networks they work with including the police, voluntary organisations and the NHS. Participants attended 3 co-design workshops at Lancaster University for half a day co-designing tools along with instructions and examples of use for the new tools.
Impact Multidisciplinary collaboration. The co-design team included the Police, NHS, doctors, a priest, charities, public sector officers, community volunteers and a counselling service. The outcome of the project was a toolbox now freely available to download from www.leapfrog.tools called 'Conversations at Scale'. A toolbox consisting of 11 unique Tools co-designed to enable conversations with a large number, or diverse groups of people. The co-design team attended a tool sharing event to which they invited wider networks of people. They are using the tools in their everyday practise. Leapfrog's Design Manager also ran a tool sharing event with Cumbria CVS.
Start Year 2019
 
Description World Design Weeks Engagement and Evaluation Toolbox 
Organisation World Design Weeks
Sector Charity/Non Profit 
PI Contribution Leapfrog conducted online surveys and follow up interviews with members of the WDW Network to research how they currently engage with people attending their World Design Weeks around the world to evaluate the experience and impact of their Design Week festivals. We used this information to design the first co-design workshop in Milan at Easter 2019. The outcomes of this workshop were taken in a second co-design workshop at Gdynia Design Days in Poland in Summer. Again this was taken to the final workshop at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven in October 2019 where the tool prototypes were shared and improved before being shared on www.leapfrog.tools
Collaborator Contribution Our partners contributed to the defining the focus and scope of the co-design process for mutual benefit to World Design Weeks members and Leapfrog. Each of the 3 co-design workshops was attended by up to 30 people from international WDW members and relationships between certain partners who expressed a real interest in the work outside of the co-design workshops.
Impact A World Design Weeks toolbox resulted from this collaboration - a set of tools that are in the process of being deployed around the world as well as being freely available for any festival or event to use. We are continuing to work with partners from Dutch Design Week and Gdynia Design Days developing research projects for mutual benefit.
Start Year 2019
 
Description Co-designing tools to capture stories about food, Darwen, Lancashire 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Local
Primary Audience Schools
Results and Impact 10 young people were invited by our partner Food Power as food activists or young people who live in food insecurity ago attend a workshop at Darwen Enterprise Studio School to explore how existing Leapfrog tools could be adapted to have conversations about food and food poverty. After exploring what makes a powerful and memorable story the group adapted and tested Leapfrog tools. These were then developed by the Leapfrog team for a wider group of young people to try out before a 2nd co-design workshop in Preston.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
URL http://leapfrog.tools/blog/co-designing-tools-to-capture-and-tell-stories-about-food/
 
Description Co-designing tools to capture stories about food, Preston, Lancashire 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Schools
Results and Impact A second co-design workshop which tried out prototypes of the tools for capturing food stories was organised in collaboration with Food Power held with a wider group of 20 young people and young adults from Manchester in Preston, Lancashire. The group tested and refined the tools so far before a 3rd co-design workshop took place with a group of adults with lived experience of food poverty in Newcastle which some of the young people that attended this workshop travelled to Newcastle to explains their ideas for the tools so far and participate in further co-design of the tools.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
URL http://leapfrog.tools/blog/co-designing-tools-to-capture-and-tell-stories-about-food/
 
Description Developing the World Design Weeks Evaluation and Impact Toolkit at Dutch Design Week 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact In this final workshop in the World Design Weeks collaboration members of World Design Weeks and Dutch Design Week came together to test and refine the tools developed by Leapfrog to date. Gdynia Design Days also fed back on their experience of implementing Leapfrog tools for evaluation into their festival during Summer which was very positive. By the end of the workshop final tool ideas were taken away by Leapfrog to form the World Design Weeks Toolkit for Impact and Evaluation.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
 
Description Evaluation & Impact Co-Design with V&A Learning and National Programmes 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Beginning in February 2019, Leapfrog researchers worked with the V&A Learning and National Programmes team to explore a new way of evaluating and enhancing their work - a radical shift from capturing who attended events to capturing the impact of the team's work on their audience.

In our first workshop together, the Leapfrog team collaborated with V&A staff to interrogate their new framework for capturing the impact of their work. Together we mapped their work to 12 categories of learning, ranging from Critical Thinking through to Ludic and Embodied knowledge. Building on these insights we co-designed over 30 concepts for new tools to creatively collect evaluation data that could reveal the learning of audience members.

The result are the 'skeleton' tool ideas to be published in a forthcoming toolbox. These are not concrete solutions to data collection but instead starting points for new ideas specialised to the particular context and circumstances of the many programmes the Learning and National Programmes team pursue.

Further workshops are planned for late Spring and Autumn 2019.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
URL http://leapfrog.tools/blog/evaluation-impact-co-design-with-va-learning-and-national-programmes/
 
Description Exploring Evaluation Pathways with V&A Learning and National Programmes 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact In the second workshop of our collaboration with the V&A Learning and National Programmes team we looked in detail at the real-world evaluation processes and pathways used by the team. These were visualised collaboratively, augmented with 'skeleton' tools co-designed together previous, creating a rich picture of how the team currently capture the impact of their work, and how this could be enhanced further in the future through R&D.

Building on our previous collaborative workshop, we identified four basic strategies for capturing impact through evaluation:

Baseline & follow-up - Multiple measurements showing change.
Self-reflection - Asking someone to think back on what has changed.
Signals of change - A unique piece of data proving a change.
Expert observation - An expert observing and documenting change.
The 'skeleton' tools we've co-designed together reflect our joint finding that good R&D requires more than effective methods and processes, it needs teams to creatively engage with the opportunities that research brings, and together develop new ways of working. By creating skeleton tools that are not complete solutions, we can help teams to imagine, plan and share new practice - collaborating to find the best way for particular projects, and building up shared knowledge of how best to approach new challenges in a creative, data-driven and iterative way.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
URL http://leapfrog.tools/blog/exploring-evaluation-pathways-with-va-learning-and-national-programmes/
 
Description Gdynia Design Days 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact As a part of a collaboration between ImaginationLancaster and the World Design Foundation, Leon Cruickshank and David Perez facilitated a creative evaluation workshop with 15 participants of the Gdynia Design Days (GDD) in the city of Gdynia, Poland. During the workshop, they tested a framework developed in the last Milan Design Week (MDW). The framework focuses on the creation of creative methods to collect data from large events such as design festivals.

Participants commented that the workshop helped them to think about evaluation in a different way. The creative but structured approach of the session helped them to think about the feedback received during evaluation practices and to take actions about them.

The outcomes of these workshops will be shared during the next Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
URL http://leapfrog.tools/blog/gdynia-design-days/
 
Description Leapfrog Food Food Safari tool featured on Channel 4 News 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Media (as a channel to the public)
Results and Impact In the 'Tools for Empowerment' project we have been co-designing tools to capture and tell tools about food and food poverty. During this project the young co-designers wanted to explore local food in Darwen. Leapfrog worked with Food Power with input from young people to design a new tool to empower people to explore food. After much discussion we designed the tool to have a menu of 12 mini research challenges and a big map of Darwen inside. On the day the young people divided into 3 groups each looking at a certain area of Darwen and (accompanied by Leapfrog and Food Power's Empowerment Officer Ben Pearson) walked around Darwen interviewing shop keepers and shoppers and researching what food was available in their town. They loved the fun challenge of buying the heaviest bag of sweets for a pound and the £2 Healthy Food Challenge which showed how difficult it was to buy cheap healthy food. Feedback from the group was they felt empowered by the tool as they could choose which activities to do. A Channel 4 news cameraman filmed parts of the food safari and the Social Affairs Editor Jackie Long interviewed members of Blackburn with Darwen's Food Partnership Tia and Corey who understand food poverty and are determined to do something about it through campaigning. This was featured on the Channel 4 news as young ambassadors including Tia and Corey handed in their #Right2Food Charter at 10 Downing Street with Dame Emma Thompson. The clip on C4 web site is linked from the blog link below.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
URL http://leapfrog.tools/blog/leapfrog-food-safari-in-darwen-featured-on-the-channel-4-news/
 
Description Leapfrog and Word Design Weeks Workshop in Milan 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact 30 representatives of the World DesignWeeks network attended a workshop at the Dutch Embassy in Milan to begin the process of co-designing tools to evaluate the experience and impact of attending WDW festivals around the world. The group developed 19 evaluation tool ideas, using the skeleton proforma. These ideas are meant to be used as new approaches for evaluation practices. Working with workshop participants Leapfrog went on to develop some of the key ideas from the workshop into more formal
tool 'skeletons' suitable for wider application. These were shared and tested at a follow on workshop in Gdynia, Poland. Collaborating with the Gdynia Design
Days team the Gdynia Design Days team implemented several of the ideas developed in the Milan workshop in the evaluation of the Gdynia Design Days.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
 
Description Leapfrog celebration event 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact 30 people attended a final Leapfrog Celebration event at ImaginationLancaster. This was an informal event where we invited participants to share their stories of either taking part in a co-design process with leapfrog, and/or using Leapfrog tools. People shared amazing, insightful stories of how they had changed through the co-design process and the impact using the tools has had on individuals and organisations. Leapfrog later contacted some people to do follow up impact interviews after the event. Impact outcomes reported in the policy, practise and influence section of Research Fish.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
 
Description Nostalgia, Saturday Stew and life on Byker in Newcastle 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact Over two previous workshops Leapfrog supported young activists and teenage experts by experience of food poverty in Lancashire to co-design tools to capture stories about food and food poverty. This third workshop took place at Food Nation, a North East Social Enterprise passionate about food and health delivering cooking skills, school food education & catering. Four experts by experience of food poverty from Byker in Newcastle took part, along with Nicola and Vicki from Food Nation. By the end of the workshop the group had adapted and improved the tools the young people had co-designed so far and developed ideas for new tools such as a zine tool to help people share their own food story and bust myths, a recipe building tool and a shopping/cooking tips tool. Leapfrog left with assurances of developing all the tools and coming back to Newcastle with the new versions to continue working together.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
URL http://leapfrog.tools/blog/nostalgia-saturday-stew-and-life-on-byker-in-newcastle/
 
Description Refining the Food Stories tools in Newcastle 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact Inbetween the first and second co-design workshop in Newcastle the Leapfrog team had worked over email with some of the individuals with lived experience of food poverty to refine the tools. In this second workshop Leapfrog presented prototypes of all the tools so far and worked to finalise them with the group. The group also looked at the toolbox as a whole and decided which of the final tools should be included. They also worked on different examples of use for each tool for leapfrog to then include in the guidelines that are downloaded with each tool. The 'Tools for Food Stories' toolbox was uploaded to www.leapfrog.tools before its launch at the Food Power Conference in June 2019.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
 
Description Rethinking R&D with the V&A Learning and National Programmes 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Leapfrog's collaboration V&A Learning and National Programmes continued with a third workshop in 2019, shifting focus from evaluation approaches to consider complete cycles of R&D within the team. We found that evaluating events can lead to one-off questions that do little more than give you a thumbs up or down on the venue and timings. Connecting together the data and insights from evaluative work is the key to at iterative R&D approach - finding ways to build up understanding of an audience and the impact the team's work has on them.

Together we tested a new co-designed tool to enabling teams to map, compare and iterate the cycles of R&D they conduct. The cycle begins be defining aims, then planning data collection and analysis before concluding by considering how the insights draw from the cycle will be implemented and shared within and beyond an organisation. The cycle structure is complemented by the 'skeleton' tools, helpful as starting points for planning discussions and reflections for each stage of the cycle.

The result of Leapfrog's work with V&A Learning and National Programmes is not only the tools we've co-designed together, but an idea for how any team can transform their approach to understanding their audience. In a year of working with Leapfrog, the Learning and National Programmes team was able to better integrate R&D cycles in their work to ensure that they are audience-led and continually iterating their offer, designing and developing programmes that are exciting, relevant and rooted in the V&A collections and backed up by robust data.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
URL http://leapfrog.tools/blog/rethinking-rd-with-the-va-learning-and-national-programmes/
 
Description Scaling Up Leapfrog tools. A collaboration with Morecambe Bay Clinical Commissioning Group and Lancaster CVS 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Collaborating with partners in the public, community and voluntary sector has highlighted a need for tools that work at scale with large groups of people. Scaling Up Leapfrog is a series of 3 workshops to enable more effective and innovative engagement with large groups of people by co-designing new adaptations of the original Leapfrog tools for use at scale, or completely new tools. In this first workshop at Lancaster University over 20 participants from Morecambe Bay Clinical Commissioning Group, Lancaster CVS, the Police, a primary school and charities across Lancaster shared their experiences of engaging with large groups to help us understand the challenges of working at scale. Towards the end of the workshop the group were introduced to a selection of Leapfrog tools which could be adapted to meet the engagement challenges defined by the group. In the second workshop the group will explore in detail how the Leapfrog tools can be adapted to work at scale.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
URL http://leapfrog.tools/blog/scaling-up-leapfrog-tools-a-collaboration-with-morecambe-bay-clinical-com...
 
Description Scaling Up Leapfrog. Tool opportunities emerge with MBCCG, Lancaster CVS and partners 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Between the first and second workshop one of the engagement challenges groups worked with Leapfrog's designer David to develop a tool idea they had come up with. At the start of the second workshop Andy Knox, Director of Population Health and Engagement at Morecambe Bay Clinical Commissioning Group explained the initial idea and sketch for the tool and how this was turned into the tool through discussions with Leapfrog's designer. The groups were asked to revisit the engagement challenge they had chosen to focus on last time and try to identify any opportunities of creating a tool to address a particular issue. The rest of the session was spent working on the tool designs in detail. Some highly imaginative ideas emerged for completely new tools and tools that were based on existing Leapfrog tools or complemented them. owards the end of the session the group pinned all the tool ideas onto whiteboards. They were invited to write comments on the tools as to which ones they would like Leapfrog to produce. The groups presented the final selection of tools and how they saw the tool working for feedback. Leapfrog agreed that David would work on as many tools as possible before the next workshop and email the draft designs for each tool to the groups for feedback. The final workshop in the series will refine and improve the final tools so they work in any given context.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
URL http://leapfrog.tools/blog/scaling-up-leapfrog-tool-opportunities-emerge/
 
Description Sharing Leapfrog Tools at the Cumbria CVS Network Meeting 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Leapfrog's Design Manager was invited to share tools developed during Leapfrog's follow on project at a County Volunteering Network Meeting organised by Cumbria CVS attended by a diverse range of organisations across Cumbria who engage and manage volunteers for their organisations. The Leapfrog session explored how the tools could be adapted and used to engage with volunteers and for evaluation and impact activities. The tools were well received and Leapfrog received follow up emails with requests for future activity.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
 
Description Sharing Tools for Food Stories at the Food Power Conference 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Leapfrog attended the Food Power Conference in Newcastle in June 2019. Along with the individuals with lived experience of food poverty who had co-designed the tools we ran a session where delegates could come and try out the tools and take them away for free. We had lots of interest and received many requests for physical copies of the Talking Food Card Deck and Local Food Cards which Leapfrog's Design Manager later posted out to people. We also made contact with other Food Alliances nationally who contacted our partner at Food Power for advice on how they could use the tools to effectively engage and recruit individuals with lived experience to their pilots.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
 
Description Sharing Tools for Food Stories at the Food Power Conference, June 2019 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact The Leapfrog team attended the Food Power Conference in Newcastle in June 2019 along with a group of young people and the experts with lived experience who had co-designed the tools. We ran a practical session where all the tools were on display and encouraged people to try out the tools. Many people were interested and requested copies of the Card Deck tools to be posted to them after the conference. We have had many requests and follow ups for card decks since this event.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
 
Description This tool is good for... (MBCCG and Lancaster CVS and Partners) 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact This final co-design workshop took the co-design team (plus five people working in community and voluntary sectors who had never seen the tools before) through a process to refine and improve the final tools so they work in any given context for engagement at scale. At the start of the workshop the tool owners were asked to create a title, scenarios and instructions for each tool which proposed what the tool is good for, how it could be used practically and describe a specific example of use. After testing the tools and their instructions out the group left detailed feedback on how the tool/instructions could be improved and presented this to the whole group. The final tools and instructions which were turned into one-page guidelines explaining what the tool was good for and 3 suggestions for how each tool could be adapted for use in a different scenario. Once finalised these guidelines will be downloaded along with each tool within the 'Conversations at Scale' toolbox.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
URL http://leapfrog.tools/blog/this-tool-is-good-for/
 
Description Tools for Food Stories, Lancaster to the US, via Scarborough - Part 1 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Guest blog by Food Power's Empowerment Officer documenting a tool sharing workshop in Scarborough, Yorkshire where he and the co-designers shared the Tools for Food Stories at a residential weekend for campaigning and lobbying.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
URL http://leapfrog.tools/blog/tools-for-food-stories-lancaster-to-the-us-via-scarborough/
 
Description Tools for Food Stories, Lancaster to the US, via Scarborough - Part 2 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Food Power's Empowerment Officer and experts by lived experience Heather and Penny travelled to North Carolina to talk about the Tools for Empowerment project and share the tools. They also visited Food Alliances in New York where they shared the tools and used them to gather learning about food insecurity and to document their trip.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019