Some strange things have been going on this year…
Our training workshops have been going ahead when we’re not in the room.
Partners are running recruitment campaigns on their own.
Numbers are mysteriously being added to our reporting spreadsheets.
In short, Let’s Talk Climate has been running (almost) without us.
This is in stark contrast to this time last year when our inboxes were full of emails from partners, we had an Eventbrite tab permanently open, and we spent our evenings in Zoom rooms.
Don’t get us wrong, we love working with our partners and any time spent in the company of (say) Women’s Institute members is a delight – but last summer we realised that if we wanted Let’s Talk Climate to grow, then we needed to loosen our grip on the reins. So we spent the autumn with our heads down doing all we could to make that happen.
We made big, scary changes, ones we didn’t know would work. We brought new people into our little team and we invested cash into helping the programme stand on its own two feet. Then we stood back from what we’d built and watched to see if it would work.
And…it’s still standing 🙂
Here’s a run down of five of those big, scary changes and why we made them.
1. We hired three Let’s Talk Climate facilitators
In Cycles 1 and 2 of the training we were only able to work with four partners at once and our heads were constantly bumping against the ceiling of our capacity. In the beginning, we stayed close to all aspects of running Let’s Talk Climate because there was so much for us to learn. We led the Workshops, managed recruitment, and trained Challenge hosts. We planned delivery timetables, wrote bespoke promotional emails, and liaised with partners on a daily basis. All this was invaluable and a vital stage in the development process that we’re glad we didn’t skip. There’s no substitute for seeing a problem up close – like an exercise not quite working in the Workshop – and being forced to fix it.
But for Cycle 3 we knew we had to demonstrate that Let’s Talk Climate had the potential to grow, and to do this we had to prove to ourselves it could run without us. And that’s why we started the hunt for new facilitators last September. Our vision for this role was people who would not only lead training but would also be the ‘point-person’ for our partners, supporting them with planning, recruitment and admin as needed.
We were overwhelmed by the response and received 106 applications of incredible quality. In the end we hired the brilliant Simone, Luisa and Dan. This decision has been a game changer – we’re working with eleven partners this year! Now, we hold a Kick-off meeting with a partner during which we’ll introduce them to their facilitator and between them they plan and run the programme with very little input from us. Not only that, the terrific trio are also helping us to learn and develop even more. What a team!
2. We commissioned new training videos
Our early workshops all featured live talks by Alex – talks we’d crafted over time to help convey to people why we think climate conversations are important, what we think they can achieve and how people might start having them in their community.
We’d dipped our toe into the idea of non-live talks, for example, by sending recordings to trainees who missed sessions, but once we knew we’d be handing over hosting duties to our facilitators, we were on the clock to replace the talks with videos that could be shared during the Workshops instead.
We started with transcripts from the live talks and cross referenced them with feedback we’d received from trainees about what had resonated with them the most. Key themes quickly emerged, for example, the quote from the writer Amanda Ripley that ‘People need to be heard before they will listen’ struck a chord with many people, so we knew it needed to make the final cut.
The day we came across animator and director, Gemma Green Hope, was a red letter day. We asked if she’d help us bring to life the words in our scripts, and boy did she understand the assignment! So now Alex’s live talks have evolved into five brilliant videos which have been crafted using the deep knowledge we gained from all those hours researching the original talks and sharing our learning through the Workshops. This is another example of how going slow in the beginning and taking the time to understand what people need to hear from usw has helped us to speed up now we’re ready to grow.
3. We ditched the Pitch
We initially designed our training in three stages:
– The Pitch – an hour online about why climate conversations are so important
– The Workshop – 2 hours online about how to get climate conversations started
– The Challenge – an hour/week for 6 weeks putting learning to the test in small groups
The Pitch session had two connected roles: to motivate people to want to have climate conversations and to act as a filter for the Workshop, so only those who were interested in learning conversation skills came along,
The approach worked on both fronts but it also had its drawbacks. Firstly, it increased the admin burden of the programme, for example, the extra event promotion, booking pages, and reminder emails, and secondly, some trainees were frustrated that they couldn’t dive into conversation skills straight away.
On balance, we decided it was best to ditch The Pitch and replace it with a fab new video (linked to above). This video is now sent by partners to their members as supporters as part of their recruitment drive for the Workshop. Our hope is that it will do the job of communicating why climate conversations are important and set expectations for what people can expect from the training, while helping us to streamline the programme and give trainees a chance to get stuck in from the off.
Our gut feeling is that this was the right decision though some feedback suggests we could do a bit more to help answer the question about why climate conversations are important before people join the Workshop as not everyone is watching the video before they sign up. More great learning for us!
4. We redesigned the Workshop
Our Workshop feedback from trainees has always been excellent (and shoutout to our former colleague Kate who designed it!) We ask everyone to complete an evaluation form at the end of the session and the overall response rate in Cycle 2 was 69%. This gave us confidence that the results were pretty representative. A small, but consistent minority of people told us they struggled with the final exercise in which we put people into pairs and ask them to roleplay a climate conversation. Others were also asking for live videos of climate conversations taking place so they could see them in action.
We went back and forth on whether to replace the roleplay task. Was it enough that 1 in 10 people mentioned it unprompted on their evaluation? Eventually we decided that yes it was, so then we had to work out how to achieve the same learning outcome by a different method that didn’t put people on the spot, but did involve conversations.
Our answer was to create scripts of climate conversations for small groups to ‘act out’ and discuss together – with each script showcasing a different approach by the conversation initiator. This has reduced the pressure on trainees and has helped to deepen their learning from the earlier part of the session. We’ve had some very positive, unprompted feedback so far, so it’s a solution we’ll stick with for now!
5. We put our partners in control
Our effort to support partners as much as possible and learn as much as we can about the programme sits in tension with partners having autonomy over how they run Let’s Talk Climate for their members and supporters.
For example, in Cycles 1 and 2, we took responsibility for uploading all the Pitch and Workshop events onto Eventbrite, meaning that partners were dependent on us for live booking data. A day or so of lag on this kind of info makes it harder to plan promotional activity on social media or in newsletters etc so was definitely not ideal.
Another thing that jammed up the machine was the amount of promotional copy we were writing bespoke for each partner to support them with recruitment – it was incredibly useful to test different messages across diverse audiences, but it was also slow as we were trying to service four partners at once.
What’s more, we were worried about overwhelming partners with admin tasks – like emails to trainees and personalising training Workbooks – so we ended up drip feeding them information. In our efforts to be helpful we were actually making their lives a lot harder.
Thankfully our partners were honest with us about the headaches we were causing them and this gave us permission to hand over some responsibility. In practical terms, this has led to the development of our Action Planner – it’s the bible for every partner and outlines the entire process, who needs to do what by when, and links to every template document they’ll need along the way. Now partners set their delivery dates, do promo their way, take bookings for their own events, and crack on with all the admin without us asking them to do a thing.
All this has helped us to get rid of bottlenecks, take the pressure off the team, and (we hope) give partners a more joyful experience. No doubt they’ll have useful feedback for us in our debrief session at the end of the programme, but the new process seems to be going very smoothly so far 🙂
We hope this gives you an insight into what it means to us to be a learning organisation. We’ve let go of the idea that everything we do needs to be perfect first time, and instead we focus on how much we’re able to learn, especially from our mistakes! Being honest with our partners about our shortcomings and being open to feedback from them and our trainees has allowed us to embrace our glorious failures and convert them into wins.
Thanks to everyone who has helped to shape Let’s Talk Climate thus far – there’s always more to do and we hope we can continue doing it together.