Evaluating your public engagement (PE) activities is crucial in enabling you to demonstrate their impact. It is a process of collecting information and evidence in order to reflect upon your work. It can be particularly helpful when doing a long term project as it can help you learn from an experience and improve for the future.
It can be very easy to underestimate the time, effort and resources involved in evaluation. You may find you need to allocate a particular person to oversee it or, if working on a larger project, budget for external help. Allowing for evaluation within a research grant application is important. Considering evaluation in the initial planning stages of public engagement activities will make you more likely to collect useable data and evidence.
The type of evaluation you use is very much dependent on your target audience, engagement activity and what you would like to find out about its impact.
If you would like to find out generally about your project then traditional methods such as questionnaires, surveys, google forms and visitors books can be really effective. However, if you would like to get a broader feel of an impact or have a specific question to answer you may like to consider other approaches such as:
Use whatever media would suit you and your participants best; be it pen and paper, computers or ping pong balls. Don’t be afraid to get inventive, and think up an evaluation technique that is unique to your project!
When doing surveys or creating questionnaires there are some key things to consider;
If you would like more comprehensive guidance on how best to go about creating and doing surveys you may find this questionnaire recipe book helpful. It has a step by step process of how to do surveys from starting aims all the way to analysis. Or if you would would like some example questions to use as a starting point please look at this question bank (PDF , 334kb).
A very useful source of help is the national centre for public engagement web pages. They have a dedicated PE evaluation section which can be a great place to start if you‘re thinking about or need to do some evaluation.
If you would like more practical guidelines on evaluation and how to do it you may find the Manchester evaluation planning guide useful, as a relatively short document. For a broader view of evaluation with additional information such as its benefits you may like to read the Manchester beacon PE evaluation guide or the RCUK evaluation guide.
For information about how to go about public engagement activities please see our public engagement page.