Surveys are useful for gathering demographic information, perceptions, satisfaction levels, self‑reported outcomes, and understanding equity of experience across a wide sample. They are scalable and offer quantifiable data that can be compared across groups or timepoints, but they are also vulnerable to survey fatigue, self‑reporting bias, and can take time to analyse. 

Ethical considerations include securing informed consent, ensuring accessibility in language and format, protecting anonymity, avoiding coercion to participate, and being mindful of the burden placed on community partners.

Qualitative feedback captures lived experience and provides nuanced insight through open comments and reflections. This data offers rich context that supports the understanding meaning and emotional resonance, yet interpretation is subjective and coding can be labour‑intensive. 

Ethical practice requires anonymisation, clear consent for reuse, and avoiding publication of identifiable quotes without explicit permission from contributors.

This method assesses the usefulness and resonance of outputs such as reports, exhibitions, digital tools, or podcasts. It allows easy tracking of reach through digital metrics, though high engagement does not necessarily indicate meaningful impact, and interaction data such as click‑throughs may not equate to benefit. 

Ethical considerations include transparency about how interaction data is captured, responsible interpretation of metrics, and avoiding claims unsupported by evidence of actual outcomes.

Participant reflections help surface process learning, highlight practitioner perspectives, and generate insights into how an intervention was delivered. They can illuminate what worked well and what barriers or enablers were experienced, though insider bias is possible and reflections may under‑report challenges. 

Ensuring psychological safety, securing confidentiality, and making participation voluntary are essential ethical considerations.

Drawing on local or national datasets (such as crime rates, FE participation, science capital measures, or employment statistics) can connect interventions with wider contextual trends. These indicators are objective and can strengthen evidence‑building, but attribution is difficult because many factors influence change, and data may exclude certain groups or misrepresent communities. 

Ethical use requires understanding how data was collected, acknowledging limitations, avoiding over‑claiming causality, and considering who is represented or overlooked.

Narrative methods can show depth, meaning, and context around participants’ experiences, offering rich data that can be analysed for themes. However, they are time‑consuming to collect and interpret, and anonymisation can be challenging when contextual details make contributors identifiable. 

Ethical considerations include securing consent for recording and reuse, ensuring contributors understand how their words may be shared, and taking care when removing identifying detail.
 

Network mapping helps visualise the breadth and interconnection of partnerships, revealing relationships, influence, and flow across a civic ecosystem. It can be strategically insightful and highlight collaboration patterns, though collecting and structuring the data can be time‑intensive. 

Ethical considerations include seeking explicit consent to name individuals or organisations, acknowledging that size or position of nodes can imply power dynamics, and taking care not to expose sensitive relationships.

STAR (or similar) outcomes mapping supports groups to co‑create outcomes that clearly link activities to intended or experienced changes. It is useful for generating shared understanding across diverse participants, though it can oversimplify complex change processes and must be managed to ensure equitable contribution. 

Ethical considerations centre on avoiding tokenistic involvement and ensuring that participants’ perspectives are genuinely incorporated and respected.

SROI seeks to monetise social outcomes using financial proxies to express the economic value generated by an intervention. It can communicate value clearly to decision‑makers, but proxy choices are often contested and may risk prioritising financial outcomes over intangible relational or cultural impacts. 

Ethical challenges include avoiding the alienation of participants who feel their experiences are being reduced to monetary terms and ensuring transparency about assumptions and valuation methods.

The 12 pillars approach, developed by CityREDI, structures economic impact assessment across multiple dimensions, including areas often overlooked, such as social contributions, partnerships, or innovation. It can broaden understanding beyond traditional economic measures, although it may still fail to capture the full breadth of civic and social value. 

Ethical considerations involve avoiding “civic washing” by implying that financial outputs equate to civic outcomes, and being clear about what is (and is not) being measured.

Ripple Effect Mapping visualises secondary and downstream outcomes over time, helping to surface unintended or emergent impacts. It is participatory and can reveal complex patterns of change, though sessions can easily become over‑complicated and require careful facilitation. 

Ethical practice includes securing group consent, ensuring participants feel psychologically safe to challenge or add to the map, and managing power dynamics within group settings.