Newcastle Carers: A Lesson in Co-Design with Sail Creative

I recently sat down with Mandy, founder of Newcastle-based studio Sail Creative, to talk about co-design – the practice of handing creative control back to the people a campaign is actually meant to reach. We focused on her 18-month project with Newcastle Carers, a charity supporting anyone looking after a family member, partner or friend, where the brief was to reach young adult carers aged 18 to 24 who hadn’t yet identified with that role.

If you take anything from this conversation, let it be these few things: that the real work often sits in the relationships and the workshops rather than the final product; that being comfortable with the unexpected, and resisting the urge to reverse-engineer outcomes, is what makes co-design work; that involving people throughout creates advocates, not just an audience; and that this way of working delivers on impact and commercial results at the same time. Here’s how the conversation went.

Tell us a bit about yourself, about Sail Creative, and how the Newcastle Carers project came about.

I’m Mandy, founder of Sail Creative. I set it up three years ago in Newcastle to do work that genuinely makes change, in collaboration with the organisations making that change – public engagement, charities, arts and culture, or startups disrupting a sector. I’m a designer by trade, and earlier in my career I was often handed a brief without ever meeting the client or the audience. So much gets assumed about people that way – their demographics, their psychographics, what they supposedly want. Working in this engagement-focused, co-creation way, we know there’s a better way to create work that’s meaningful and relevant rather than just adding to the noise.

Newcastle Carers support anyone looking after a family member, partner or friend, and we were brought in to work specifically with young adult carers aged 18 to 24. We got the project because we went in authentically and pitched the young carers themselves. We said: we’ve got the design skills to create a great-looking campaign, but we don’t have the experience of being a carer, so your voices are crucial to this. It was a big investment for the charity, funded by the NHS, so it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a splash.

What was the main objective of the campaign?

To reach young adult carers who were under the radar and not yet identified. Around one in twelve young adults will be in a caring role, but they might not identify with it – to them it’s just an obligation, looking after their mam or a family member. A big part of the project was educating professionals like doctors and teachers on the signs that someone might be caring for someone at home, so they can put support in place. That might be financial help, support around household responsibilities, or simply time out to meet people in the same position who they can relate to and get peer support from. Eighteen is a big enough time of life as it is, with a lot of decisions to make – these young people are carrying that extra responsibility on top.

That co-design approach feels like a departure from the traditional design model. Was it something Newcastle Carers expected, or was it new to them?

A bit of both. They’re an incredible organisation that genuinely puts young carers at the heart of everything – the young carers actually interviewed us, so they were clearly already thinking this had to be a co-creation project. But I think we were the only ones who went in and said we can be flexible and agile, that we’d run group workshops but also meet people one-to-one if they didn’t feel confident speaking up in a group. We went in openly and we really cared about the issue, and that stood in our favour. They knew they wanted it to be co-designed; they just didn’t know how that would work. Our job was to reassure them we could make it a success while being honest that we didn’t have the answers yet.

It sounds like the relationship-building and the workshops were the real work, with the creative almost a by-product. How did you recruit and promote the workshops?

We always go to the groups that already exist. If you put something on in one location you only reach a certain demographic, often because of accessibility – you can’t assume people have the money or the means to travel. Newcastle Carers was perfect because they already met once a week on a Thursday, so we worked around their schedule, when most of them would be at the centre. There were a few occasions where they came to our studio instead, because we wanted to stick things up on the walls and get their opinion, and to show them a bit of our world and the creative industry. That was a great experience for them too.

What did the workshop content look like?

There was a knowledge and education piece in the first few sessions – talks about what makes a good billboard, the structure of a message in that medium, and the role of photography, illustration and typography. We showed examples and had really informal discussions about how each one made them feel, whether it was the tone or the colours. We made sure there was some structure but kept it open, and each workshop was bespoke, following on from whatever came out of the last one, so it felt like a clear journey rather than dropping them into something completely new each time.

We didn’t go in with a full-on workshop at the start. The first one was just a warm-up – making collages from creative magazines based on things they liked, with no objective at all. It was simply there to start building trust. We were also conscious that everyone in the group was heard and that there was equality across it, because you always get one person who’s vocal and others who are quieter. Meeting some people one-to-one, alongside the group activities, made sure of that. We did eight workshops in total, and you could tell at the beginning who the quiet ones were – by the end they were fully involved and asking to come and shadow us for a week.

How did you gather their stories sensitively?

We did questionnaires and sat with people one-to-one to go through them, because they’d faced some real challenges in their lives and it was important the billboards reflected that without being too heavy-hitting or bringing up any trauma. It sounds complex when you spell it out, but a lot of it is just that human instinct – being caring and empathetic.

The campaign feels optimistic and inclusive. Tell me about the creative choices behind it.

It was important that the young carers’ identities came through, rather than just labelling them as carers. The photography is about them in situations doing things they actually enjoy – they’re regular 18 to 24 year olds who like going to the cinema and who also happen to look after someone. We didn’t want to lead with “I care for my mam”, because that isn’t how young people identify themselves or what they’d say first. We were careful with language too – they’d never say “I care for”, they’d say “I look after my mam”. The roles on the billboards reflect that: music listener, advice giver, cake maker, taxi driver – the everyday things that come with the responsibility.

The hashtag, #wecaretoo, instantly speaks to that age group as well. For the actors and models we used people from Middlesbrough and a rural community, through an agency that gives opportunities to people who might not otherwise have high aspirations. We selected a handful, then the young adult carer team chose the ones they felt were most relatable and picked the shoot locations themselves, so everything meant something locally and felt authentic to that audience.

If you’d taken a more traditional, top-down approach, how do you think the outcome would have differed?

It’s a radical approach because it goes against the norm – we went in without any fixed creative ideas, which is very different to how you work commercially. The biggest difference would have been the impact on the young people themselves. They were involved through the whole thing, and this year we’ve carried it on with them, turning the same concepts into animations. I was at an event in Newcastle with over a hundred professionals – teachers, schools, youth groups – arranged by the young adult carers, where about twelve of them stood up and spoke, often very personally, about their lives. They launched the animations themselves that day. We were just sat in the audience. It wasn’t us saying “we made these”; it was them owning it.

You simply wouldn’t get that impact with a top-down model. You’ve now got advocates who know how important their voices are and how much they can change things from their own experience. Some have gone on to create their own groups, which has continued without us even being there. Some went on local radio, some on BBC News to share their story. It was a domino effect, and they’ve grown more and more confident – getting up to do public speaking in front of the NHS is daunting for anyone.

What would you say to creatives, or to organisations, to get them on board with working this way?

The big one is to be open to the unexpected and not reverse-engineer your projects to fit outputs you’ve already decided on. That’s the main barrier, particularly in the public and third sector, because funders often want outputs and objectives locked in before you’ve had any audience conversation. So my advice is to be comfortable with the unexpected, have the conversation, and listen. There’s a lot of psychology, human behaviour, culture and communication wrapped up in this, and the more you push yourself to understand the areas that link to design, the better – it’s not just about being a good designer.

A lot of the time it’s simply about starting. Leading a workshop can feel daunting, but the word “workshop” gets put on a pedestal – it’s really just a conversation. You do need to be confident around people, and there’s a big element of safeguarding, especially with sensitive or confidential topics like caring. You can’t just swan in and run a workshop expecting to get something from it, because it might bring up really difficult memories. We speak to people who work in those areas to support us with any questions, and that awareness is essential.

If I’m a charity watching this, should I do the co-design groundwork myself first, or find a specialist studio?

Get to know a studio or agency that works this way. It’s almost a mix between a design agency that creates visual work and one that does audience insight – they could be two separate businesses, but the interesting part is how they influence each other. Start to be aware of who’s doing this kind of work, build relationships, have a coffee, and make sure you’re working with someone who puts purpose first rather than just shouting about the beautiful work they do. Look at what they say on their socials and personal LinkedIn – is it about social change? Find that authenticity. And look at their past work, case studies and results, because the important thing here is that this way of working has big impact for the people you’re with and delivers commercially too. You’re not disregarding the goal of increasing referrals and brand awareness; that comes with the audience-engaged work.

How do you measure the impact – and how does a client measure it?

We’re creating an impact report that I hope to produce every year, covering who we’ve worked with, the impact it’s had, and quotes from the audiences and clients we’ve worked with – including how they’ve tracked referrals from a campaign. That can be as simple as a unique webpage link for each campaign so they can track visitors, or analytics on the animations, which are on YouTube, so over six months to a year we’ll get a good indication of views. A lot of it then comes down to the company having an internal system to ask where referrals came from. It’s not the first thing you’d ask someone ringing up in distress, so you build it into the onboarding process instead.

It also helps to work with suppliers who track their own impact. The billboard campaign used Newcastle-based suppliers who track impressions, so Newcastle Carers know the billboards had around 1.5 million impressions. Charities work to a theory of change and have to prove their impact to secure funding, and that’s ultimately their responsibility to own – but we can help create a system so they can track it, ask the right questions, and find the right suppliers to support it. That’s the most exciting part of what we do: working in such an open way, with no outcomes fixed before we’ve had the conversations.

Summary

Mandy’s work with Newcastle Carers is a clear case for co-design as more than a buzzword. By going in honestly – admitting they had the design skills but not the lived experience – Sail Creative earned the trust to let the campaign emerge from the young carers themselves, rather than imposing a top-down concept. The groundwork was relational: existing groups rather than new venues, jargon stripped out, a no-pressure first session to build trust, and a careful mix of group and one-to-one activity so every voice counted.

The result was a billboard campaign that reflected real identities – everyday roles, local faces, the language people actually use – and reached 1.5 million impressions. But the more lasting outcome was the people themselves: young carers who became confident advocates, launched their own animations, started their own groups and spoke on radio and BBC News. The thread running through it all is patience and openness – resisting the urge to reverse-engineer outcomes, treating workshops as conversations, taking safeguarding seriously, and trusting that strong social impact and strong commercial results come hand in hand.