Co-Creation Workshops: Building Campaigns with Communities
Posted by Marketing & PR on 25 Mar 2025
When it comes to creating campaigns that truly make a difference, collaboration is essential. That’s where co-creation workshops come in. These workshops bring together organisations, community members and stakeholders to develop ideas, solve problems and create meaningful campaigns that reflect the needs of the people they aim to serve.
At Perfect Circle, we believe that the best projects are those built with, not just for, communities. Here’s how co-creation workshops help achieve that.
What is a Co-Creation Workshop?
A co-creation workshop is a collaborative session where different voices come together to generate ideas, share insights and develop strategies. Unlike traditional campaign planning, which often happens behind closed doors, co-creation ensures that communities are actively involved in shaping the initiatives that affect them.
By engaging key stakeholders from the start, these workshops help uncover real challenges, identify opportunities and build trust between organisations and the communities they serve.
Why Co-Creation Matters
The main reason many campaigns fail is because they don’t truly understand the needs of the people they are trying to reach. Co-creation workshops can help by:
● Ensuring relevance: The best ideas come from those with first-hand experience. Community members can highlight real concerns and suggest practical solutions.
● Building trust: Involving people in the process fosters transparency and trust, making them more likely to support and engage with the campaign.
● Encouraging creativity: Bringing together different perspectives sparks innovation, leading to fresh ideas that might not emerge in a traditional planning setting.
● Boosting impact: A campaign designed with community input is more likely to resonate, drive action and create meaningful change.
What Happens in a Co-Creation Workshop?
Every workshop is different, but a typical session follows a structured approach to encourage open discussion and idea-sharing:
Setting the Scene: Participants are introduced to the project and its goals. This stage is about creating an open, inclusive environment where everyone feels valued.
Understanding the Issues: Discussions explore the challenges that need to be addressed. Storytelling, surveys and case studies help bring different experiences to light.
Brainstorming Solutions: With the challenges understood, the group works together to generate ideas. Interactive activities, such as mind-mapping and role-playing, help unlock creative thinking.
Refining Ideas: The best ideas are explored in more detail. Participants work on refining key messages, visuals and strategies to ensure they align with community needs.
Action Planning: The workshop wraps up with a clear plan outlining the next steps, responsibilities and timelines.
The Benefits of Co-Creation
For organisations, co-creation workshops ensure campaigns are built on real insights rather than assumptions. For communities, they provide a voice in shaping the projects that impact them. The result? Campaigns that feel authentic, relevant and genuinely drive change.
At Perfect Circle, we champion collaboration in everything we do. Whether it’s designing sustainable infrastructure or launching new community initiatives, we know that working together leads to better outcomes.
Our Expertise
We’ve been creating highly successful social marketing campaigns for our customers for over two decades. We love our work and use the latest marketing communication tools and customer insight techniques, such as ethnographic research and co-creation workshops.
This allows us to develop and integrate marketing concepts with other approaches to influence behaviour that benefits individuals and whole communities – for the social good.
Within our team, we have leading nationally recognised academic professionals within Psychology, Mental Health and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy that advise what messages and mediums will deliver the best response when we scope out a communications campaign or deliver any targeted communications.
This provides our clients with the reassurance and confidence of knowing that their communication objectives are underpinned by recognised academic behavioural theory, executed with award-winning creative design and using the latest Marketing Automation communication tools, whether it’s on a local, regional or national project.
Perfect Circle has delivered social change for clients like schools, local government, not-for-profit organisations, the health sector and niche commercial businesses, and we’re really proud of what we’ve done so far.
If you’d like our help on your next Behaviour Change Marketing or Social Marketing campaign, we’d love to hear from you. Please visit our contact page and get in touch.
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