Evaluating your project
Why evaluate?
Community engagement is at the heart of police reform. The success of neighbourhood policing will depend to a large degree on how successfully the police service engages with communities. There is an incentive for forces and authorities to demonstrate, in a clear and robust way, that they are engaging successfully.
Community engagement is now measured by the Police Performance Assessment Framework. The relevant Statutory Performance Indicator (SPI) is around public confidence - how good a job the public believe the local police do. There are also 'key diagnostic indicators', which contextualise performance against the SPI. Two of these indicators concern whether people feel that the police in their local area:
- understand the issues that affect the community; and
- are dealing with the things that affect the community.
These indicators obviously do not cover breadth of community engagement. Senior managers will want to be aware of them though, when planning a strategy, or a programme of engagement.
Evaluating your community engagement strategy
Forces and authorities may develop an engagement strategy, or programme of engagement, as a result of a 'Best Value', or other review. Building in evaluation and monitoring can help ensure that a strategy is implemented properly. An evaluation framework, with specific performance measures, can also help ensure that stakeholders perceive the relevance of a community engagement initiative and its intended contribution to the work of the organisation as a whole.
Evaluating your community engagement initiative
There are also numerous advantages in evaluating individual community engagement initiatives. Evaluation can help determine whether:
-
the initiative could be improved in any way;
- the cost of an initiative has been worth it;
-
the initiative should be sustained;
-
the initiative may be transferable to another area;
-
there were any unintended consequences or benefits.
A properly undertaken evaluation can provide stakeholders with a more robust assessment of the success (or otherwise) of their initiative. It can also help ensure that stakeholders receive due recognition for a successful project.
Learning from consultation work in CheshireThe Cheshire Police Authority ran a competition for young people, in order to get their suggestions on how to overcome the concerns that some of the wider public have about young people. A postcard was produced with two ways of entering the competition: answers on the postcard and a freepost return; and answers to an email address. Approximately 7,500 postcards were distributed via the annual county show and through two of the school liaison officers. Cinema tickets and CD vouchers were on offer for the most innovative ideas. The majority of the 110 replies were received by postcard. There was a technical problem with the email response mechanism and only 4 replies were received by email. An overwhelmingly majority of respondents were of the view that young people needed facilities if they were to ‘keep off the streets'. Many responses were along the lines of – ‘Give us somewhere to go and we'll be out of your way.' Quite a number of responses were requests for specific facilities to be available. It also emerged that young people did not understand the role of the police. The responses were shared with partner agencies as well as with the Force. Lessons learnt: Although 110 responses which has given useful information were received, the rate was lower than hoped for. On reviewing the project, the following learning points were identified:
|
 |
 |