Evaluating national engagement
The project is current being rescoped
Previously
Government departments and others are already engaging with the public and with stakeholders, and using innovative ways to do so. However, the useful lessons emerging from this work are often not disseminated widely across government. One of the main strands of new work in the Department of Constitutional Affairs on democratic engagement is about learning from experience by evaluating national engagement initiatives.
Evaluation approaches can vary. In this case, we are focusing very much on using evaluation as a practical tool for both ‘recording’ and ‘learning from’ engagement experience across government, so that lessons can be shared more widely and can feed into the design of future engagement exercises.
We know there is already experience of evaluating national public engagement exercises in various government departments, and we are now looking to build on that and to share good evaluation practice more widely.
We are therefore looking for:
- any examples of existing evaluations of national engagement exercises (people to talk to, copies of reports etc), so we can build on that knowledge;
- any existing guidance and frameworks being used for evaluating engagement;
- a small number of current or planned evaluations that we can work alongside to learn from their experience; we can offer consultancy support and advice where needed (e.g. on experience from elsewhere on evaluating engagement).
This is a great opportunity to promote existing good evaluation work by people in government, to audiences within and outside government, in a field which is still very new. We hope at the end of this short piece of work to have developed a basic ‘framework’ for evaluating national engagement initiatives that can be offered across government, based directly on current experience and needs within government, to help those in government think about evaluation at an early stage.
If you would like to be involved in this work in any way, please send an email to evaluation@engaginggov.net, with the subject Evaluating engagement. Please include your name, organisation / department, telephone number and email address.
Diane Warburton and Richard Wilson Involve