Tools and suggestions for evaluating a citizen engagement project.
These tools can be used when thinking about what sort of PEOPLE you’re trying to engage or persuade to become more engaged and towards the end of whatever you’re doing – whether it’s a one day workshop or an extended project.
In itself, evaluation is a major activity . It is an important part of any engagement project, allowing you to workout how effective you have been and what you might want to improve if you did it again.
In the 50+ Citizen Engagement Project, we focussed on:
You can find these evaluations in the pilot reports.
Often evaluations are more concerned with practical issues, numbers attending etc, however this can often neglect what actually happened when the project was being done.
For example, if someone else wants to repeat what is claimed to be a successful project, they need to know the details of who-did-what-and-when and so on. If there are no "warts & all" record of what happened then good work doesn’t get improved and bad ideas get repeated.
There are limits to what can be recorded. There needs to be a balance between what you do and achieve and what you need to record. But there are simple good practices for example keeping and circulating good meeting notes.
Our Pilot Reports do two things. Firstly, they provide enough information for anyone wanting to repeat our work. Secondly, they offer a template for the recording of engagement.
Here is a PDF template we used for recording details of the people involved in our pilots.