Let’s rewind to March 2020. Our U.S.-based team was one day from boarding a flight to Nairobi, Kenya to conduct co-creation workshops with family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH) professionals to identify barriers limiting the flow of knowledge between programs, countries, and regions—and opportunities to transform the way our FP/RH community approaches knowledge management—when the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic caused everything to shut down. After months of designing and planning, we found ourselves in a place with these workshops that we could not have anticipated. Were we going to postpone and wait for things to open up? Or were we going to attempt to conduct the four co-creation workshops virtually? We decided on the latter, which lead us on a journey of learning, constant iteration, and ultimately success.
While it was easy to mourn the loss of “what could have been” with the highly anticipated in-person workshops, Knowledge SUCCESS saw this as an opportunity to champion empathetic workshop design and be an early adopter of virtual co-creation. Empathetic workshop design was essential—we knew that in order to conduct our in-person workshop in a virtual space, we needed to make some significant modifications to meet the realities and needs of our participants. A few main things came into play:
- Internet connectivity.
- Scheduling.
- Virtual design thinking tools.
- Facilitation.
Internet Connectivity
Internet connectivity was a real challenge. Many of our workshop participants in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and the United States, like myself and my co-facilitators, were finding themselves in brand-new work environments, mostly from home, which meant that internet connectivity was not always available; when it was, there was no guarantee of its quality. Because we were determined not to let readily available internet be a criterion for participation, thus affecting our participant pool, Knowledge SUCCESS provided internet credit to participants so that they could join each synchronous co-creation session. Additionally, we leveraged design thinking tools that could be used synchronously and asynchronously, as well as WhatsApp for quick and easy communication.