Engaging people throughout your project helps you arrive at solutions that balance the needs of all involved. Overlap can help you connect with stakeholders who have unique perspectives on a problem and need to be part of creating solutions. 

Whether you hope to engage with customers, patients, residents, students, donors, partners, board members, or others—we can help you craft and execute an engagement strategy that garners real insight and leads to actionable solutions. 

By applying a human-centred design approach to engagement, we open up a range of innovative and leading practices for involving stakeholders through all stages of a project—including understanding initial needs and problems, generating ideas together, and prototyping and testing new concepts. 

Design methods enable us to involve stakeholders as collaborators—leveraging stakeholders’ experience and creativity, and building buy-in as we go. Drawing on the discipline of design, the deliverables we generate from engagement are purpose-built for synthesizing insights about human needs and presenting them in a way that prioritizes action.

Sample Engagement Methods

• Interviews
• Stakeholder Labs (In-person & virtual)
• Surveys & polling (Online surveys, Mentimeter, dot voting)
• Street Teams (On-site short-burst interviews)
• Community Events & Forums
• Pop-up Stations & Museum-Like Exhibits
• Engagement Committees (Community members co-leading engagement) 
• Social Media Engagement
• Engagement Initiative Branding and Communications
• Diary Studies/Journals, Drawing Activities, Photo Journals (Photovoice)
• Observation, Ethnography, Guided Tours/Walk-Throughs
• Collaborative Visioning Sessions
• Design Summits, Charrettes, Design Sprints, Hackathons
• Foresight/Futures Workshops
• Ideation Workshops, Prototyping Workshops
• Testing/Validation Events & Interviews