Consultancy
How we work with providers
Better evidence. Better decisions. Better services.
Lived Experience-Led Consultancy
LEAD provides lived experience-led evaluation, monitoring and service design for organisations and funders seeking meaningful evidence of what is working, for whom, and what needs to change.We combine lived and living experience with professional research, evaluation, service design, co-production, and participation expertise to generate evidence that can inform commissioning, service improvement, funding decisions and future delivery
We also work alongside organisations that want to better understand how to develop and support Lived and Living Experience within their organisation. This could look like policy review, organisational psychosocial health reviews or workforce design.
Service Design
From community insight to investment decisions
Good service design gives commissioners better evidence for deciding what to fund, how to deliver it and where investment will have the greatest impact.
We bring lived experience into needs assessment and service design to understand unmet need, access barriers, service journeys and the outcomes that matter to communities — creating a stronger basis for commissioning and investment decisions.
We can support:
- Needs assessments and population insight
- Service and user-journey mapping
- Community and stakeholder research
- Co-design and service redesign
- Accessibility and inclusion reviews
- Options appraisal and service modelling
- Prototyping and testing
- Implementation planning
- Outcome and impact measurement
- Service improvement and learning
Through our LEAD Provider Directory, we can bring together people with relevant lived and living experience alongside professional expertise in research, evaluation, service design, organisational psychology and participation.
The result: services designed around evidenced need, with clearer outcomes, stronger community relevance and better evidence to inform investment and value-for-money decisions.
Monitoring
Demonstrating real-world impact
Turn data into actionable learning, measurable improvement and evidence of impact.
We develop practical monitoring and evaluation approaches that bring together outcomes, data and lived experience to show what is happening, who is benefiting, where gaps remain and what needs to change.
The result: monitoring that shows more than activity — it helps demonstrate outcomes, understand impact and inform what happens next.
Evaluation
Evaluation that demonstrates impact
Commissioners need evidence of what works, for whom, at what cost, and what should happen next.
Lived experience strengthens evaluation by identifying outcomes, barriers and priorities that conventional measures can miss.
Ezaydi et al. (2023) found that stronger lived-experience involvement was associated with service-level improvements including accessibility, referrals and service-user satisfaction, while highlighting limited evidence of longer-term impact.
Molloy et al. (2025) found that involving people with lived experience in developing outcome measures can improve their relevance and acceptability.
Näslund et al. (2022) identified a specific gap in lived-experience involvement in service monitoring and evaluation.
We combine lived experience, robust evaluation methods and professional expertise to generate evidence that supports commissioning decisions, demonstrates impact and informs future investment.