Recruitment Letter
People who expressed an interest in joining our Lived Experience Advisory Panel (LEAP) were sent a letter (document) which described the AMBER project and the role the LEAP was to play in it.
We tried to write this in plain English, with a friendly tone and to answer the most common questions people had. (You can judge for yourself how well we did!).
LEAP Recruitment Letter
Application form
People were then invited to complete an online application form.
We tried to avoid direct questions about ethinicity, sexual orientation etc in this form. Instead we stated that we were looking for a diverse group, and gave people the option to tell us (or not) as they wished.
LEAP Application Form
Online chat
We then selected our ‘long-list’ and invited them to join us online for a 15 minute chat. We were very clear that this wasn’t an interview. We just wanted to ‘meet’ the person and get to know them a little. We tried to make the tone as informal as possible and to keep the meetings short (although several over-ran our scheduled 15 minutes, because we were enjoying the chat!).
It also gave applicants the opportuntity to ask us questions.
Invitation to join
From there we selected our LEAP members and invited them to join us.
And we were very pleased that they all accepted our invitation.
Wider Mailing list
We are currently setting up a wider mailing list, so that those who could not join us on the LEAP this time, still have a way to contribute to the project. Our intention is that this email list will be a way for us to recieve light touch inputs from a larger number of people (e.g. a quick poll or a 1-3 sentence answer). This will complement the in-depth discussions that will be held within our LEAP sessions.
