How to Make Evaluation Practical

As a professional field of endeavour, public engagement is relatively new. In the past, it has not been a priority to collect and disseminate evidence on the impact and efficacy of engagement initiatives, but that is changing. By combining qualitative evidence with quantitative data we can determine to what extent  an initiative was successful, if it had the impact we wanted and how it could be improved upon. There is so much that can be measured that a key challenge is making the evaluation as practical as possible.

Often, when we think about  evaluation, the number of questions we have multiply rapidly as we brainstorm what we want to find out and discover. As we go through the process, the list of items that we want to measure and examine outgrows the time and resources available.