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Involvement is not consultation. Involvement requires more active engagement of disabled stakeholders than consultation.
Consultation finds out what people think about an idea or plan. Involvement is a deeper process and means active and continuous engagement over a period of time. Any involvement will need to use accessible mechanisms and must be focused, proportionate, influential and transparent.
Involvement should be planned, structured and significant. It needs to happen at the start of your planning process to have an impact. This means asking people to contribute to the process, rather than being asked at the end of a process to evaluate it.
How you involve people will depend on the scale and type of work you are undertaking. The involvement of disabled people in planning a government department's three-year communications strategy is going to be very different from the involvement in planning a small-scale awareness raising campaign.
Disabled people need to be involved in planning, research, delivery and evaluation. The way that you do this will vary in different parts of the communications process.
For practical tips, visit the top tips section of this guidance.
Page last reviewed: 11 August 2008