A Charter in motion: bringing principles to life with creative communications

The wonderful thing about creativity is it can come from many places and people, and quite serendipitously, like a lightbulb moment. It was June 2025, when I heard a notification ping and I opened an email from Gillian, my colleague at McPin.

“Going forward, I am planning on developing the Charter into an interactive PI&E training tool and have had a novel idea about what this might look like.”

Gillian, Senior Public Involvement in Research Coordinator

What followed were words and phrases that piqued my interest as a digital communications professional: Interactive activity, ‘Spin the wheel’, getting people talking, learning together. 

At the time I was not sure how I could bring this Spin the Charter to life. The Public Involvement & Engagement (PI&E) Charter was originally developed for the NIHR School for Public Health Research Public Mental Health (PMH programme). The Charter sets out best practice for fully embedding PI&E into research and was co-created and launched in 2024. I’ll refer to NIHR School for Public Health Research as SPHR in this blog.

I had already been working with Gillian and the Charter. The Charter Owl infographic was designed by Andy Cowan, Research Assistant at PHAB, Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, and was the starting point for an audio-visual animation with a voiceover. I knew the content well and had thoroughly enjoyed working with Gillian and the SPHR comms team to deliver this work.

I would have to look beyond animation to create the interactive tool, as a core component was randomisation. I decided to use the online app ‘Wheel of names’ to build out the ‘spin the wheel’ concept, and together Gillian and I refined it so it could be used in training sessions. After piloting, the spin the wheel training got some great feedback. It would be an effective and fun way to educate people on best practices for PI&E.

With enthusiasm around the tool, the next question was how could the ‘Spin the wheel’ have a life of its own? How could we reach a wider audience and not be reliant on in-person training?

I worked closely with Gillian and incorporated feedback from the pilot groups (See timeline diagram). We devised an online recorded training workshop with activities that would be available for anyone interested in PI&E. In between each activity the wheel is spun (pre-recorded) to guide the participant to the next section. The training was designed and presented by Gillian, highlighting her expertise in the PI&E space and emulating in-person training. I worked to edit the video and slides together, taking feedback from Gillian, other members of McPin and the NIHR.

The result is an example of a chain of creative comms, which has its origins in the blue SPHR Charter owl, which evolved into an interactive tool that became the backbone for the training.

What did we learn?

Be open to new ideas and resist putting up blocks too early

Initially I thought that creating the tool would not be feasible and would require some level of coding. When working in communications, it can be tempting to default to a muscle-memory approach: if something doesn’t fit neatly into an interview, podcast, blog, infographic, or social media post, we may be too quick to cast doubt on it. With an open mind, we found a solution, plus existing free educational applications to help solve technical challenges.

Build on strong foundations

Boosting engagement with the “Spin the wheel” was underpinned by having strong content, the Charter principles. The charter co-created with thoughtful development and had value to a range of audiences.

Think about the life of a project beyond developing the core outputs

Hosting content digitally provides an opportunity for longevity. With projects there is often the exciting phase of getting together, working through research and involvement, and then creating a key dissemination output. In this case the Charter was a key output. However, with a bit of vision and creativity, expertise can be crystalised into digital outputs where members of the public and researchers can continue to engage with the work in multiple formats.

Delivering the training as a self-directed online workshop extends the reach beyond what could be achieved with in-person training alone. Developing training is an effective way to create space for reflection and highlight how the Charter has been applied – embedding reflections from Hannah Robinson, Lizzie Mitchell and Joe Hulin on how they have applied the Charter, bringing the value of the work to life.

Involve the communications team early

There is real value in embedding Comms, so they have a good understanding of your project as it develops and what you are trying to achieve. It was through my earlier work with Gillian, through doing the animation work for the Charter principles that I gained a working familiarity with the project. This made it much easier to design solutions and make suggestions when it came to the Spin the Charter and training design.

If your project does not have a dedicated communications expert, try to assign communications responsibilities early. See what communications expertise exists within your team, within patient and public involvement groups or from project partners.