Uncovering unheard voices: challenges in recruiting vulnerable populations in service design

Join the session to hear the Service Design and Research team from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) talk about challenges they faced recruiting vulnerable populations for their design research project.

You will learn the importance of relationship building and leveraging networks for recruitment, preparing and creating an optimal research environment, while having a chance to discuss the various lessons learned by this team in its pursuit of those clients who are often missed.

Since the pandemic, the IRCC team has shifted to recruiting and interviewing design participants remotely, permitting a wider geographic range of potential participants around Canada and the globe. At the same time, the ability to recruit the most vulnerable clients has not necessarily been as easily improved.

In this session, they'll use a case study to talk about the specifics of recruiting for an Immigration department, and how a blending of their standard approach, along with a new virtual approach, may well yield better outcomes for future work.

They'll open the floor up at the end for any questions and discuss how other teams/organisations attending the conference recruit vulnerable populations.

Participant Takeaways:
Learn what IRCC and other teams/organisations who are participating in the SDinGov conference are doing to recruit vulnerable population and include their voices in the research.

This session includes: 

• Interaction/discussion.

Themes:
Inclusion, immigration, international, recruitment.