Do’s:
- Ask yourself: Who are your public engagement activities targeting? At what point are they on your engagement continuum? Consider the agenda of your target audience. What changes or progress do you want to see from them? For instance, do you want the youth involved to move from receiving your emails to actually participating in your events, or even to organize events themselves? Return to your theory of change and the original project design and adjust accordingly.
- Close the loop with your participants and others by reporting evaluation back to them.
Don’ts:
- Don’t assume each of your audiences should be engaged in the same way. Your previous reflection on your theory of change will help identify at what point each of your target audiences are and how to maintain that engagement or move them along the engagement continuum.
Practitioner perspective:
“We realized that to be able to monitor and evaluate people’s level of commitment, and their change in commitment over time, we needed to decipher the different levels at which people can engage with our work. The exercise began with determining our audience, the actions they take, and sketching it out within a six-level pyramid framework. We later changed the pyramid framework into an engagement spectrum.”
–Public engagement specialist for a large NGO
