Beginner’s guide to evaluating Public Engagement

Make the most of your engagement

Take the first steps to keep track and demonstrate the value of your Public Engagement activities and improve your practice in a structured way

What difference are you making for your audiences and yourself through your engagement activities? This session provides an overview of the evaluation process and the reasons why evaluation is important for a high-quality engagement practice. It will guide you through the When, Why and How to evaluate successfully, and how to set up a simple evaluation framework that helps you answer your questions. You will get an introduction to different qualitative and quantitative methods, and what you can do with the data you gather. After this session, you will be able to bring evaluation into your own activities to monitor and evidence outcomes.

Following this session, you will be able to:

• understand the role, value and limitations of evaluation

• determine what you want to evaluate and why in a simple evaluation framework

• apply appropriate evaluation methods for engagement activities

• make use of the information gathered in an appropriate and useful way