Making a Difference: A guide to evaluating .public participation in.central government - Involve

About the Guide

• Introduction
• 1 How can evaluation help?
• 2 Public engagement in public policy-making
• 3 Thinking about objectives
• 4 When to start evaluation
• 5 Measuring success
• 6 Doing the evaluation: What should it cover?
• 7 Doing the evaluation: How to do it
• 8 After the evaluation
• Annex 1: Glossary
• Annex 2: Costs and benefits of engagement
• Annex 3: Your Health, Your Care, Your Say – a case example of evaluation
• Annex 4: Principles of good practice
• Annex 5: Guides to engagement

About the authors and funders

For questions or feedback
please contact the Involve team on:
evaluation@involve.org.uk
or 020 7632 0120

Download the full Evaluation Guide as a pdf document

Doing the evaluation

What should it cover?

1 / 2

Previous / Next

Inputs (costs), e.g.

• monetary costs (e.g. staff time, expenses, event costs, publicity)
• non-monetary costs (e.g. time contributed by participants, unpaid staff time, training time)
• risks (e.g. to reputation, uncertainty, stress, conflict, loss of control).

Outputs (products and activities), e.g.

• participatory events such as workshops (e.g. numbers attending, feedback)
• information events such as exhibitions (e.g. numbers attending, feedback)
• questionnaires (e.g. numbers and results)
• newsletters and other printed materials (e.g. numbers circulated, feedback)
• interviews undertaken (and results).

Outcomes (benefits / impacts), e.g.

• changes in policy (e.g. different ideas incorporated)
• changes in people (e.g. new skills, greater confidence, increased networks, greater willingness to participate in future)
• changes to organisations (e.g. changed structures, different priorities)
• wider social changes, such as
  • new groups or organisations set up
  • greater public support for programme
  • better public services (e.g. because needs met more effectively)
  • greater social cohesion (e.g. because people get to know and trust each other)
  • better governance (e.g. greater accountability of government, better information flow, more engagement)
  • continued learning (e.g. learning from the process, people go on to do other qualifications).

As well as going through the full checklist of potential issues to cover, you may want to identify some more general points, such as:

• what are the main lessons learnt from the whole thing, and why?
• what should you never do again, and why?
• what was the best / most successful aspect of the whole thing, and why?
• what is the most significant change / biggest impact the process has had, and why?

When planning the data collection, it works best to explicitly ask these types of general questions rather than infer findings on these issues from more specific data.

1 / 2