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

Introduction

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Public engagement is now a central element in public policy-making. Activities range from major events such as the Your Health, Your Care, Your Say initiative for public involvement in the health and social care White Paper, which gained over 40,000 responses, to a citizens' jury on nanotechnology which involved just 12.

Whatever the scale of the engagement, effective planning requires thinking through the following:

Purpose + process + context = outcome

The success of the initiative will depend on these three elements:

• the purpose (what is it for? what do you want to achieve?)
• the process (how should it be done - scale, resources, timescales, who to involve, methods?)
• the context within which it is taking place (what else is going on? is there any history that needs to be taken into account?)

All leading to a successful outcome, if the whole initiative is planned well.

Evaluation can help in planning and managing a successful engagement initiative. There will be many other considerations in planning good public engagement, and there are many guides to help (see Annex 5). However, this document provides some specific ideas for using evaluation to:

• set objectives for engagement
• monitor progress and measure achievements
• identify lessons and help improve practice

Evaluation is a relatively new element of public engagement but is seen as increasingly vital as engagement becomes more widespread and larger in scale. Therefore the need to assess the effectiveness of different approaches, to increase accountability and to learn from experience becomes more important.

Evaluation does not have to involve a major research exercise (although this may sometimes be desirable or even necessary). At its most basic, an evaluation should help answer three simple questions:

• Has the initiative succeeded? (e.g. met targets, met objectives, resulted in other achievements)
• Has the process worked? (e.g. what happened, what worked well and less well, and lessons for future participatory activities)
• What impact has the process had? (e.g. on participants, on the quality of policy, on policy makers or on others involved)

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