There are five steps to effective engagement. These are:
Be clear about your purpose for engagement. This will help you to identify the appropriate audience and engagement activities
There are many purposes for carrying out engagement.
Six main categories of purpose have been described by Duncan and Manners (2023). These categories are presented below, adapted to apply to all engagement types.
In many cases an engagement project will have more than one of these purposes.
This is one purpose for public engagement. It may take the form of a school visit, a museum visit, an exhibition or talk open to the public.
Attendance of the LU Quantum Technology Centre at the Summer School Exhibition at the Royal Society is a good example of reaching a broad audience that included school children, but also decision-makers and funders.
Lancaster University hosts a series of public lectures each year. The lectures feature experts from Lancaster University and beyond to present and discuss various topics, with the aim of being accessible, thought-provoking and educational.
Past public lecturers include:
Information about upcoming public lectures and recordings of previous ones are available on the Public Lecture webpage.
This can be when an external organisation or individual is driving the activity. Enterprise engagement activities that are generating income for the University such as contract research and consultancy are examples - we are responding to requests from external organisations based on their needs.
Steve Young, Professor of Accounting talks abut his consultancy work in this video and how this allows him to apply his expertise to respond to addressing some of the challenges within external organisations.
This could be involving people or external partners in a research project.
The Bee the Difference research project is a good example. This aimed to improve outcomes for future young survivors of terror. The research project was designed by nine young Manchester survivors in collaboration with the UK disaster response charity, the National Emergencies Trust, led by Dr Cath Hill, a Lancaster University researcher.
A good example of patient and public involvement (PPI) in research is the Library of Lived experience. Co-designed workshops were held with those who have personal or professional experience of mental health issues, living libraries or peer support. This resulted in the development of a framework to support others setting up Libraries of Lived Experience, including an implementation guide, community of practice and theory-informed evaluation framework.
Working in partnership to solve problems, drawing on each other’s expertise.
A Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) is a good example. In these partnerships businesses connect to the expertise in Lancaster University. A recent undergraduate or postgraduate is recruited by the business and may work on a project that refines existing or designs new products, opens new markets, helps the business run more efficiently and improve marketing or manufacturing systems. Expert guidance and knowledge are provided by academic members of staff, with the university and business working together to apply knowledge to a real-life challenge.
The Atkinson Vos case study outlines the benefits of a KTP to the business and the University.
This is engagement that involves actively listening to the views, concerns and insights from the public, community and patients.
The Lancashire and South Cumbria New Hospitals Programme (NHP) is a significant regional transformation project. There is a need to engage with the public on this project, and recognition that there was a gap in the engagement of those that were routinely underrepresented. A collaborative research project between the NHP and Lancaster University looked at how to engage with underrepresented people in the region. This aimed to identify good practice engagement and produce a framework for future engagement practice. The research project worked with underrepresented people to learn from them best practice for engagement and test out the ideas within the framework.
Some engagement seeks to change behaviour or attitudes.
Policy engagement would often come into this purpose, with expert input from researchers helping to bring a changed perspective on a matter.
The Marketplace and I is a disability-focused, art-based research project undertaken by Dr Leighanne Higgins and Dr Killian O’Leary. Participants developed artworks that represented their commercial experiences. Alongside this accessibility training workshops for businesses and other organisations were offered. This helped to change attitudes towards disabled people and change behaviour in planning, developing and implementing accessible strategies.
Litcraft is another example of changing behaviour. It uses gameplay with the intention of encouraging reluctant readers to read by bringing books to life. For more information read the Litcraft case study.
When defining your purpose, it is important to think about your Level of Engagement - how much influence and involvement will those that you engage with have on your research or project? This will have a bearing on the type of engagement activities you decide to carry out.
The ladder of engagement opposite, illustrates the different levels of engagement, with examples below:
Dr Maria Walach when giving her public lecture on Decoding the Northern Lights has inspired members of the public and she may have been given some insight and new perspectives based on the audience’s questions. Maria is speaking to her audience.
In the My Mainway project local residents of a housing estate in Lancaster were consulted on how their estate should be developed for the future. In this case the level of engagement was higher - local residents' views and ideas were listened to and are expected to inform the future plans for the area.
In the Library of Lived Experience project collaboration of those with lived experience of mental health issues was through co-designed workshops. Ultimately the project aimed to empower communities by giving them a framework to support them in setting up their own libraries.
Once you are clear on your purpose and the level of engagement then you can set out the objectives that you want to achieve. Depending on the type of engagement activity you may have short, medium, and long-term objectives.
Your objectives will be informed by thinking about:
Outputs – this is what has been made, created or done.
Outcomes – this is what has changed as a result of your outputs.
Impact – this is the longer-term cumulative change that has occurred as a result of the outcome.
This video, put together for Lancaster University by Jamie Gallagher, Engagement Consultant, provides an excellent introduction to these terms and how they are used in an engagement context. Please note: video only available to LU staff
Your objectives should include your intended outputs and outcomes.
You will need to think carefully about the impact and how this is going to be measured as given its longer-term nature and often resulting from cumulative change it is inherently more difficult to measure, but arguably the most important. The Research Impact team are at hand to offer advice.
Clearly define your objectives and how they will be measured at the beginning of your project. Your evaluation can then be fully integrated into your project and is not simply an add-on activity at the end. And remember to make your objectives SMART objectives.
You will need to think about who you want to engage with.
Consider if you wish to reach out broadly to the public or if you want to target a particular group of people or organisations.
As a starting point if you want to engage with the public you may wish to segment your audience, for example, by:
You may be reaching out to people in particular organisations such as businesses, community groups, third sector, social enterprises, and local government.
You may already have in mind who you wish to engage with, or you may be starting from scratch. For example, you may know that you want to engage with local authorities, but not know who to contact or how to discuss your research with a business. There is rich experience of engagement with the public and different organisation types at Lancaster University, which can help and support you in making the right contacts. Visit the support section of the portal for more information.
Once those that you are going to engage with are identified it is important to deepen your understanding of them, this will help to inform the best way of engagement. For example:
This will allow you to make initial contact on an informed footing.
The next stage is to plan your engagement activities.
By defining your purpose and objectives and defining your audience it is likely that the type/s of engagement activities that you are going to use will become clear.
Here are some typical engagement activities:
The list is not exhaustive, and you are encouraged to be creative and innovate!
To carry out these activities effectively, you will be drawing on a range of skills. Some of these and where to go in the portal for further support are highlighted below:
Evaluation is how you will know if your objectives have been met. In the objective section consideration was given to outputs, outcomes and impact. You may wish to review this section again before reading further.
Why evaluate?
Evaluation helps you answer important questions about your work, such as:
As well as knowing whether your objectives have been met and helping inform your practice, evaluation is often required by funders to demonstrate return on investment (ROI). Importantly, it can be used to evidence research impact – such as for the Research Excellence Framework exercise.
If you have set out your objectives clearly and thought about these in terms of output, outcomes and impact, carrying out the evaluation should be more straightforward.
Within your engagement planning you should have already considered how you were going to measure the objectives.
Here are a few tips for improving the evaluation design:
When designing and implementing evaluation it is important to consider what type of evidence you need.
There are two broad types of evaluation that produce different kinds of evidence:
Output evaluation – this evaluation generates evidence to explain and assess the effectiveness of your activity/initiative. It is broadly concerned with the process of doing and is often measured qualitatively through feedback forms and other indicators of effective delivery.
You may do this type of evaluation immediately after a workshop for example, by giving delegates a feedback form. This may ask various questions about the workshop:
Outcome and Impact evaluation – this type of evidence focusses on the change arising from your engagement delivery. Outcome is more focused on the shorter-term change whereas impact is measuring the longer-term, cumulative change. Evidence of impact is often drawn from longitudinal evaluations and endeavours to demonstrate correlation/causality.
In most cases you will want to deploy a mixture of output, outcome and impact evaluation types and it is worth considering what the best approach might be to each. Can you acquire output evaluation through using Mentimeter or a Graffiti Board (a shared writing space e.g. a large sheet of paper or whiteboard to record comment and questions) activity and focus on outcome in the survey/feedback? What are the key measures that illustrate success in delivery versus longer-term impact?
Some evaluation methods you could use:
The Little Book of Creative Evaluation produced by academics and researchers at Lancaster University has ideas on evaluation approaches that promote engagement, participation, inclusivity and creativity.
IT support on using survey software such as MS Form and Qualtrics is available through Digital Skills training, offered by the ISS team.
It is important to record engagement activities for a number of reasons:
There are two main systems for recording engagement activity - Pure and KEEP. Which one you use depends on your role. High quality and comprehensive information in these two systems relies on staff uploading/using the systems, as appropriate.
More information on Pure and KEEPThere are significant benefits to carrying out engagement activities. The vast majority of these are very positive experiences for all those involved. However, there can be risks and some of these are highlighted.
It is best to identify the potential risks of your engagement project at the planning stage. You can then put checks and mitigations in place to manage the risks. If unexpected consequences do occur, e.g. adverse attention from media engagement, support is available from the University.
More information on risk, reputation and responsibility