South East Water took the bold step of becoming the first UK water company to produce their own 25 Year Plan for the environment.
Recognising an important part of this would be making sure they considered the wider environmental impacts from their own operations, as well as involving stakeholders throughout the process, they commissioned Jo to help them create their plan.
Emma Goddard, Environmental Manager with South East Water recalls the enthusiasm and support Jo brought to designing their stakeholder workshop, “Jo gave us ideas on how to run the day and re-worked a lot of our materials, she really went the extra mile to make it a success. I’d highly recommend her. She embraced the environmental side of the work with great enthusiasm and knew the subject matter from the outset. She’s very perceptive, she asked us challenging questions and pushed us to be very precise about what we wanted to get out of the experience so Jo could formulate what was needed. Jo kept us on track with our messaging, ensuring we were not too scientific, so a broad audience would understand and better engage with us.”
As lockdown hit, Jo swiftly adapted what would have been face-to-face engagement into online, virtual engagement, recommending a number of activities, which at the time were new to the business. “Jo seemed ahead of the curve here and was well-versed with the methods right from the outset of lockdown. This (virtual delivery) led to a better demographic of stakeholders participating, and we gained so many different perspectives. Jo was able to get so much more out of the delegates. We got more feedback from stakeholders than we would have if they were in the room. Virtual engagement gave everybody a voice. This was a first, no one else had ever co-created a 25-year environmental plan.”
Emma explained how Jo was a key part of the team when it then came to creating the draft plan. “Jo rewrote some of the plan and the summary document to make them more easily accessible to everyone. She encouraged us to share a draft plan with all our half a million customers by email so we could ask for their thoughts, we’d never done this before!”
Jo helped the organisation push the boundaries and supported them to join things up more, create more case studies, go back to basics to help their audience understand the issues they have and bring things to life.
Summing up her experience, Emma described how easy she found Jo to work with, “She has a very different way of thinking in a very positive way, always engaging, really bubbly and very professional. I have every confidence when Jo is delivering that nothing will go wrong, all will be fine because she would always have a back-up plan if needed. Jo is very much a solutions-focused person.”
