Implementing your project
Challenges: analysis and reporting
For each community engagement event and project you run, you will need to think about how you will capture the outcomes, analyse them and report them.
To capture what happens at an event you could:
- Record responses on a flip chart
- Have someone take notes
- Use techniques where participants record their responses, for example, writing thoughts on post-it notes
- Use a tape recorder
Analysing a single community engagement event is relatively straight forward. It is much more of a challenge when you have a number of events, which together form a project.
The biggest difficulty is trying to be objective about what happened. One way to try keep subjective bias to a minimum is to ask the other facilitators (if you used other people) to write up their thoughts about the main themes from the event. These can then be compared to see if there is agreement. If the accounts differ, bring your team together to discuss the differences and try and reach a consensus.
Reporting can take many different forms. Rather than assuming that there should be a particular form for a report, check with the people you are writing it for. What they would find most helpful? You may need to produce more than one version of the report - for example, one for participants and one for senior management. For more information see the page on dissemination in the Finalising your approach section.
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