Who are users?

People who benefit from the work of voluntary organisations can be described as clients, consumers, customers, members, participants, patients, residents, and service users.

User involvement

User involvement has become a key phrase in recent years. It's widely accepted that service users should be actively involved in decisions which affect them, rather than passive recipients. However, the extent to which users are involved and the methods of involving users varies depending on the type of organisation. Two distinct approaches can be identified: consumerist and democratic.

Consumerist

A consumerist approach implies that individuals should be able to choose from a range of services. The idea is that services will be of high quality and responsive to needs because if they are not, users will select a competitor.

Key to a consumerist approach is regularly monitoring and evaluating services. For example if you are in charge of a drop-in centre, you could conduct a survey to establish a detailed profile of your users: sex, ethnic group, age, disability, employment status or numbers of dependants. This would provide firm evidence on who is using the centre.

A simple evaluation form will provide information about what they think of the services. You could also use a survey to collect comparable information on people in the local community who are not using the centre.

A number of other methods can be used to gauge users' views:

• Consultation meetings - see the making consultation work checklist.
• Regular user forums.
• Suggestion boxes.
• Complaints procedures.
• Evaluation forms.
• Exit interviews.
• Informal contact between staff or managers and users.

Democratic

The democratic approach is based on the idea that the whole purpose of voluntary organisations is to empower their users through the services and campaigns. By definition the users will be involved in making decisions about the future direction of the organisation, rather than simply commenting on a particular service.

The democratic approach assumes that people have the right to take part in the government of their state or organisation, either by being represented or participating directly. See the getting democratic case study.

Characteristics of the different approaches

Increasing user involvement

The practical problems of developing user involvement may be considerable and take time and resources. You are unlikely to find any 'off-the-shelf' solutions. The self-evaluation activity will help you reflect on your organisation and develop ideas.

If you want to increase the involvement of users in the democratic control of your organisation, you may need to make changes to your structures. Then take the following steps to further increase the amount of user involvement:

• Put user involvement on the organisation's formal and informal agendas for debate at all levels.
• Ensure the leadership of the organisation has a vision of a future with greater user participation.
• Conduct a regular survey of users' views.
• Persuade staff and volunteers to experiment with a range of user involvement initiatives to get things moving, rather than waiting for the perfect plan to be drawn up.
• Make sure there are opportunities for face-to-face contact between users and managers and trustees.
• Be sure to create opportunities for users to have their say, either by arranging meeting times or a room or a page of a newsletter - see the sounding out your users activity.
• Establish a champion of user involvement whose role is to lead and facilitate developments: they will need to be influential and committed.
• Remind people that they should not expect the process of change to be quick.

Sharing power

Increasing users involvement could lead to sharing power. Partnerships are generally thought of as being between organisations, but it is worth thinking about how you can develop a power-sharing structure within an organisation, either formally or informally.

Consider what opportunities there are - do users, trustees and staff ever work together? If not, can you engineer more contact between them - with formal meetings or simply by re-arranging the office?

There are clearly issues if organisations go as far as to invite users to be trustees, given that trustees are required to act with no personal interest. Various charities have been allowed by the Charity Commissioners to include users on governing bodies, though only in small numbers and on condition that they should not participate in decisions that directly affect them.