Dealing with emotionally challenging situations in public engagement practice: Developing Emotional Touchpoints for PEPs

Working in public engagement is often a collaborative effort and involves getting under the skin of two or more different communities, cultures and mindsets. Working in this way is rewarding and interesting but can be stressful and difficult in a way that is less usual for other professional services roles in academia as support networks are not as established as those in other roles.

At Edinburgh Napier University we’ve been thinking about this for some time and considering if established tools and approaches used in other sectors that might be helpful for PEPs Our School of Health and Social Care is home to experts in nursing, midwifery, social work, occupational health and physiotherapy. They, are their students, are constantly having to deal with emotionally challenging situations in their work and studies and they’ve been developing practical strategies to deal with this. One of these is to use emotional touchpoints to support students through emotionally challenging situations, as described in this article. 

Emotional Touchpoints are a powerful way of helping people share experiences (touchpoints) through the selection of emotional words that enables them to describe how they feel. This is typically facilitated using a set of cards, like a card game, in which the cards contain touchpoints (experiences) and emotional words.  This approach has helped people to articulate how they feel about their experience and helped people understand and respond to emotional challenges related to healthcare workplace experiences, e.g. communicating bad news with patients.

These challenges are similar to those faced by people who work in a range of different sectors and this project specifically focuses on public engagement in universities (Public Engagement Professionals, or PEPs). PEPs often work with vulnerable communities and individuals and frequently work in isolation, with increasing emotional demands from both universities and the communities we work with. This is a concern, which has existed for some time, and is increasingly recognised as an issue which needs further consideration. A session at Engage 2024 from The University of Bath demonstrated the unique challenges of ‘relational working’ for public engagement professionals (PEPs), based on wider research into relational practice in participatory research, led by Jude Fransman and Tigist Grieve.

In 2019 Dawn Smith and Stephen Smith delivered a workshop at the Engage conference piloting the use of Emotional Touchpoints with PEPs. It was a short session but gave us enough time to gauge the interest from PEPs in the approach, and the feedback from participants was extremely positive. We are now looking to develop this further and with your help, are hoping to create a bank of Emotional Touchpoints which relate directly to public engagement, reflecting our work and the distinct challenges we face. 

We will be running two interactive half-day workshops with PEPs in which we’ll co-design a new set of Emotional Touchpoints. We’re looking for PEPs who work with different partners, particularly those in vulnerable communities or demographics, and have experienced emotionally challenging situations which may have been difficult to deal with. During the workshops we’ll ask you to reflect on examples of some of the situations with other PEPs and consider how we might articulate or categorise these. 

The workshops will be facilitated by Mandy Gentleman (Nursing academic and University Lead for Academic Integrity, Edinburgh Napier University) and Dr Stephen Smith (Associate Professor of Nursing and Lead for Public Engagement, School of Health and Social Care at Edinburgh Napier University) who have championed the use of Emotional Touchpoints with healthcare professionals and students in clinical settings and Dawn Smith (Public Engagement Manager at Edinburgh Napier University) who has worked as a PEP since 2014. Please note that these workshops are not intended to substitute mental health support. 

Tuesday 8 July (10am to 2pm) in central Bristol 

Wednesday 16 July (10am to 2pm) in central Manchester

At this stage, we are focusing on the needs of PEPs (people who support public engagement work in professional services roles at universities and research institutes or who work in the area as a freelancer). We are keen to reflect the diversity of the PEP community, so are asking you to complete a short online Expression of Interest form if you’re interested. The deadline is Monday 12 May, and we’ll aim to let you know if you’ve been successful or not no later than the week commencing 26 May. 

We’d like to include the thoughts and ideas from across the PEP community. You can find out more information about the project and take part in the design process on the padlet.

Please email publicengagement@napier.ac.uk with any questions about the project and workshops.