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Supporting evaluation

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  1. Overview
  2. Top tips
  3. Useful resources

Evaluation is a key skill in the public engagement professional's armoury

updated on 11 Oct 2023
2 minutes read

Overview

Evaluation is a real friend to the public engagement professional, and understanding its value and its use is a really important skill. Working as an engagement professional, you will need to focus your attention on three key aspects of evaluation:  

  • Supporting researchers to evaluate their public engagement work.
  • Developing effective evaluation of engagement programmes that you support or deliver.
  • Exploring the effectiveness of your support programme.

Here are some starting points to develop your skills in this area.

Top tips

Keep in mind why evaluation is so important

  • It can help your planning, ensuring that you think carefully about what you are aiming to achieve, and how you will achieve it.
  • It can support your learning by providing a way to pilot approaches and explore if and how they work, and how they could be improved. It also helps you avoid making big mistakes.
  • It can help you assess whether you are achieving what your aims.
  • It can help you evidence the value of your work to others.

To be effective it is important to:

Use evaluation strategically.

It is useful to target your evaluative effort, and to be as efficient as possible. For example, it is no use gathering large amounts of evaluation data if you don’t have time to analyse and use it.

Not be afraid of what evaluation might tell you.

While we all long to be really impactful in our work – we need to be realistic too. While it is hard to discover things aren’t working, such a discovery is much better than investing more and more time into an ineffective approach and assuming all is well.

Understand who you are evaluating for, and ensure that you are one of the intended audiences.

Working as an engagement professional, you will need to focus your attention on three key aspects of evaluation:  

  • Supporting researchers to evaluate their public engagement work.
  • Developing effective evaluation of engagement programmes that you support or deliver.
  • Exploring the effectiveness of your support programme.

Useful resources

What next?