Case Study: Tuna Blue Uses Innovative Facilitation Tools to Engage Stakeholders

Tuna Blue Facilitation supports groups to make their best decisions together by providing tailored facilitation processes paired with innovative digital technology.

Group Map Case Study – Tuna Blue Facilitation

Who is Tuna Blue?

Tuna Blue Facilitation supports groups to make their best decisions together by providing tailored facilitation processes paired with innovative digital technology. It’s an approach they call Long Haul Facilitation and it’s been refined in 1,300+ workshops with Government, community, and corporate groups in a diverse range of sectors. Always ready for the long haul, Will and Bevan at Tuna Blue have worked across Australia and the Asia Pacific to help groups get the buy-in and engagement they deserve.

 

1. What was the event, meeting, or objective you were using GroupMap to resolve?

Stakeholder review of the Model of Care for Palliative Care in Western Australia.

 

2. What were the details of the event in terms of size, name, and location? Is there a link we can refer to?

Over 100 passionate stakeholders (primary and specialist care, allied health, consumers, etc.) at a one-day forum in Perth, WA plus a further 13 regional and remote representatives via Webinar later in the month.

 

3. What was the main challenge you wanted to resolve?

How to gain really focused and pragmatic input on changes to the Models of Care from a diverse range of expert stakeholders in a way that allowed everyone to have a voice but reached some pretty clear consensus before 4 pm.

 

4. In what way/s did you use GroupMap?

We created a number of maps for the different workshop sessions throughout the day:

  • A ‘Burning Issues’ session straight upfront, within 3 mins of the forum beginning.
  • A service delivery ‘Gaps and Solutions’ session with the solutions specifically linked to particular gaps through the use of the comment function.
  • A ‘world café’ style session focused on the 5 priority areas for review within the Models of Care, and
  • A shared 10 year Vision session.
 

5. What was the response from the audience?

We worked in collaborative mode and the participants loved the ability to discuss and enter their views in small groups plus build on other groups’ input. Most of all though, they were astonished that a level of consensus could be reached with 100 people present and that they could leave at 4 pm with a good idea of the overall strategic direction and a clear head. The sponsor closed the forum by saying ‘after running things this way, I don’t think we can ever go back to butchers’ paper and texts, this absolutely changes how engage’.

 

6. What outcomes/output did you achieve from using GroupMap?

With the wealth of input from the GroupMap sessions and plenaries, we developed a detailed Outcomes Report for the client to guide their review of the Models of Care with the smaller Steering Group. At a deeper level, the stakeholder group was engaged and felt a greater sense of ownership over the changes to the Models of Care that will affect their daily work and their patients.

 

7. Is there anything else you want to say to people considering using GroupMap for themselves?

We always stress to participants that GroupMap is the technology but the discussion between people is the really catalytic part, where change will occur. So make sure you’ve designed some robust facilitation processes to coincide with GroupMap and you’ll be sweet!

Read more about Tuna Blue’s mission statement here!

“GroupMap has fundamentally changed the way we do business. As a facilitation consultancy that spent the last 20 years on butchers’ paper, GroupMap has met a real need for ourselves and our clients. Plus it’s made us review and refresh the way we facilitate workshops.”

Will Bessen, Tuna Blue Facilitation

Tips for Online Stakeholder Engagement

Recently, Andrew Huffer, of Andrew Huffer Associates, shared three fast tips for online stakeholder engagement.

He has over 25 years of experience in working with organizations, businesses, managers, and communities at a state, national and international level.

Andrew is a Facilitation, Community Engagement & Team Development Specialist, who can help you and your team members be 100% clear on ‘What’s Next’.

Andrew designs and delivers specialist engagement processes, with a focus on facilitating open decision making processes and skill development of clients. He has delivered presentations and workshops at a number of states, national and international conferences. We’re pleased that GroupMap scored a mention in Andrew’s blog post as an “online engagement tool for people to provide their input individually in real-time during an online stakeholder engagement process.” Thanks, Andrew for the shoutout.

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Andrew’s top three tips

Andrew has been doing plenty of online stakeholder engagement and has learned a few valuable things that he shared in his blog post, titled “Three fast tips for online stakeholder engagement.”

Tip 1: Keep participants above the line

Andrew commented in his post that engagement should be all about “encouraging them to give ideas that are future-focused; thinking about where the opportunities are in relation to the issue and what’s possible.” He calls this keeping them above the line so that their comments and thinking remain constructive, relevant to the future and solutions based.

GroupMap Collaboration Tool in Action

Tip 2: Equity in input

We love this tip from Andrew because this is what we aim to provide with GroupMap: “[give] people…the chance for that more intimate conversation where they get the chance to be heard. This occurs at all levels from equal speaking time, to equal air time for ideas and include a diverse range of voices.

Tip 3: Have workshop templates ready to go

Another awesome tip is to get all your templates ready for the online engagement workshop that you are running so that “… you to get the data from the workshop ….. and get it out to your participants as quickly as possible.”

Of course, this is something that can you easily do via GroupMap’s readily available or custom templates along with a reporting functionality that allows you to download all workshop discussions, voting, and comments at a click of a button!

GroupMap templates

To read Andrew’s full online stakeholder engagement tips head to this blog post.