The wall in the photograph
There is a photograph of a garden wall in West Hertfordshire, planting along the top of it, the kind of local, unshowy picture you put on a website to say “we are from here” without having to say it.
I picked it for the home page. Kevin saw it and laughed. Why? Because it was his wall. His actual house, his actual garden, sitting on the front of an organisation that, a few weeks earlier, did not exist.
That is what coproduction does when it works. It builds the thing so close to the people it belongs to that their own life ends up inside it, sometimes by accident. And for guidance, we didn’t use the image, because I don’t want people knowing where Kevin lives!
Back to the start, where there was nothing
Social Finance was standing up a brand-new community interest company in West Hertfordshire: the West Herts Neighbourhood Integrator. Kevin Hallahan, a learning disabilities nurse by trade, was its executive director.
What he had was a one-pager and a broad church of stakeholders. An NHS hospital trust. Macmillan. A hospitals charity. A room full of VCFSE organisations.
What he did not have was a brand, a single agreed sentence, or a website.
His own word for it, later, was “nebulous.” Something that started as a cloud.
A cloud is hard to sign off. Kevin said as much at the time: “some delays in getting sign off inevitable given the broad church of stakeholders.” When a dozen partners each hold a piece of what the thing is, the danger is not that they argue. The danger is mush. The new organisation ends up sounding like all of them and none of them, hedged down to nothing, and somehow arrogant in the way only the uncertain ever are.
So we did not write it for them and hand it over. We built it with them.
What coproduction actually looked like
It looked like consulting the partner organisations and then putting what they said into a document, a coproduction overview, that showed how each decision got made. Not a flourish. A receipt. When the NHS asked how the site aligned with partner brands and who the audience was, there was an answer, and the answer pointed straight back to the people who had shaped it.
It looked like building on a live staging site instead of a mockup. “This is not a mockup. It’s real on the staging site.” You are not nodding along to a picture of a future website. You are standing inside it, today, and we change it together while you watch.
It looked like reading the copy aloud, page by page, on the same call. A brand-new organisation needs a voice that carries authority without sounding like it already has every answer. You do not find that voice in a Word document. You find it by saying the words out loud to the person whose name sits at the bottom of them, and watching their face.
And it looked like a garden wall that turned out to be Kevin’s.
The point of all of it
A broad church is not brought along by a finished article landed on the table. It is brought along by watching its own fingerprints change something it can see.
The partner logos went up because the partners had already agreed them. The words held because the people who would have to defend them had said them aloud first. By the time it reached the board and the chair, there was nothing left to ambush, because nothing had been done to anyone. It had been done with them.
The cloud became a thing. On time, and ready to launch.
Kevin’s verdict, in his own words:
“It’s been a real pleasure working with Lewis and Underpin Consultants. Their professional, pragmatic and person-centred approach to delivery made the process of developing the brand and identity of something that started nebulous a seamless journey. The product produced was delivered on time, beyond expectations. The journey was coproduced, which was invaluable in developing the narrative and storytelling of the website and the business. I would recommend Lewis and Underpin to colleagues and others seeking their broad range of support and services.”
Kevin Hallahan, Executive Director, West Herts Neighbourhood Integrator CIC
He called the coproduced journey “invaluable in developing the narrative and storytelling of the website and the business.” Which is the part most people get backwards. They treat coproduction as the nice-to-have, the consultation you bolt on to be seen to have asked. For an organisation that starts life as a cloud, it is not the nice-to-have. It is the only way the story ever gets solid enough to tell.
The engagement
Client: Social Finance, for the West Herts Neighbourhood Integrator CIC.
One half of a two-CIC build. The other organisation, the Lincolnshire Social Outcomes Partnership, was delivered in parallel and is a separate case study.
Scope: brand and visual identity, positioning and full website copy, and a six-page WordPress website, all built from scratch.
Method: a coproduction pathway with partners (NHS / West Herts Teaching Hospitals, Macmillan Cancer Support, West Herts Hospitals Charity and VCFSE organisations); a coproduction overview documenting how decisions were reached; built live on a staging site rather than presented as a mockup; copy polished aloud together, page by page; the brand built to be accessible from the outset rather than retrofitted.
Audience: VCFSE organisations and investors.
Status: brand, copy and website approved by the executive director and reviewed with partners; ready to launch, June 2026.
