Developed by the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE), this guide provides helpful guidance and tips about how to evaluate the effectiveness of your support programme(s) for public and community engagement. It will help you evaluate what is working well and where improvements can be made, as well as assessing the impact of your work.
It includes step-by-step guidance on how to evaluate the impact of your public engagement support programme and to monitor ‘culture change’ in your institution. It offers helpful tools and models to help you plan and evaluate success; the difference between outputs, outcomes and impacts and how to measure them; examples of aims and objectives you can use to plan your evaluation; and how to evidence the value of your programme.
There are also several examples of the ways people have used evaluation to measure the impact of their work to support more effective and meaningful engagement.
How it works
This guidance is intended to support those who are evaluating longer-term engagement and culture change support programmes and strategies.
The guide can be used to inform your approach and make important decisions on where to focus your attention. We have suggested some key aims that this guide can be used to achieve:
To create a culture within a Higher Education Institution (HEI) where excellent public engagement with research is embedded.
- Reward and recognise staff and students for their public engagement work.
- Create effective approaches to encourage and support staff at all levels to become involved.
The guide can be used as part of your wider engagement strategy development along with our ‘Developing a strategy for your change programme’ guide.
The resource will help KE professionals to evaluate how well their support programmes for staff are working. Though aimed at Public and Community Engagement professionals, the ‘theory of change’ approach that it describes could be adapted for use in other areas of external engagement.
