Description

Our approach to evaluation culture is to get everyone involved. We will do the same in this session, engaging conference participants using tools that we have found effective in our own practice. We will discuss concrete approaches to embedding evaluative cultures, presenting our experiences and the challenges we have faced in implanting evaluation culture from within an organisation. We encourage others to share methods that have worked for them, as well as obstacles.

Imperial is a world–leading university for science, technology, engineering, medicine and business (STEMB), with a wide portfolio of outreach and public engagement work. As in-house evaluators in this setting, we will share tools we have used to build trust, relevance, and agency into an evaluation culture that values and benefits from different perspectives.

We will cover a range of scenarios and starting points, from working with colleagues who are confident using surveys but don’t feel a sense of ownership of their evaluation to others who aren’t sold on the value of evaluation at all. We will discuss how we have approached each of these as professional evaluators and the tools that have helped us build these cultures.

One of the key methods that has helped unify our evaluative approaches is the co-creation of shared outcomes. These outcomes provided essential buy-in from stakeholders and developed a shared language and sense of purpose, anchoring the benefits and need for evaluation beyond data collection. We will touch on how our shared outcomes helped us navigate organisational changes and set us up to protect programmes and communicate our shared purpose across an organisation of over 8,000 members of staff and 22,000 students.

With a show-don’t-tell approach, we will demonstrate some of the simple tools we have found effective to encourage engagement, generating discussion around challenges and opportunities of building evaluation culture. We will candidly share challenges we have faced with data availability, as well as over collection of data that is not used to its full potential.

Central to this session will be engaging conference participants in discussions of what has worked well (and not so well), using some of the tools we have implemented with colleagues at Imperial. We will create a safe space to grapple with challenges, discuss opportunities, and scaffold key take-aways for conference participants.