Samaritans.
Persuasion and Reassurance - Upskilling in-house facilitators and sales team.
“Thanks for the training session that you held for us last Friday. The whole team really enjoyed it and felt like they had really benefitted from the session.”
Strategic Network Rail programme manager - Samaritans.
Beginning.The Samaritans provide the essential service of patient, non-judgemental people at the end of a line to talk to, 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week, in their mission to make sure fewer people die by suicide. They also reach out to organisations, running workshops in prisons, schools, the military and businesses.
We were asked to come and help the team, who both promote and deliver the rail industry suicide prevention programme. Our approach would help them to talk about the difficult subject to the rail industry in a way that ensured they would set time aside for a workshop and would develop how the team could deliver the workshop engagingly.
Middle.
Staff took part in a storytelling workshop that gave them the content to sensitively promote the workshops by finding ways to talk openly and honestly about the difficult aspects of the sessions and by clearly describing the immediate and future benefits gained by participants taking part in the Samaritans’ training.
End.
The informal and safe learning atmosphere we created and the way the session was delivered, demonstrated facilitation techniques that participants added to their tool kits. They gained a story bank, created by those present, which could be selected from to best suit each audience, to reassure and persuade them with the benefits of the Samaritans’ training for them, the rail industry and the public. The storytelling skills they used in the workshop could be taken away to apply to their overall communication; to ensure they chose the right detail and can relate to their audiences so need and purpose is aligned and understood.
