Measuring Your Success
Evaluation involves determining whether an initiative or activity meets its goals. Your court will need to determine if evaluation is something you will conduct internally, or out-source to an independent evaluator. A professional evaluator may add value if sophisticated evaluation methods and analysis are needed. However, courts with suitable resources can conduct evaluation activities on their own. Regardless of how evaluation is done, as public engagement by courts has become more common, so has the importance of integrating and conducting evaluation activities.
Process vs. Outcome Evaluations
Generally, there are two approaches that are commonly employed in evaluation. A process evaluation seeks to evaluate an ongoing process and identify ways to improve it. An outcomes evaluation identifies results of the process after it is completed. Both types of evaluation of your public engagement activities have many benefits.
- Assess progress towards meeting engagement objectives
- Determine whether and what target audiences and stakeholders are involved in the process
- Identify barriers to achieving desired engagement objectives
- Identify possible solutions to improve ongoing engagement processes
- Determine whether engagement objectives were accomplished
- Document successes or shortcomings from engagement activities
- Provide evidence to show beneficial impacts
- Demonstrate legitimacy of engagement
Process evaluations will ideally maximize the possibility that your court’s engagement process will work as intended. An outcome evaluation should demonstrate whether actual goals were met. Community members, stakeholders, partnering entities, court actors and policymakers, the media, and other audiences will often expect some form of evaluation and follow through after an engagement.
Identifying Evaluation Metrics
Your evaluation plan should be tied to your engagement goals. First, consider the broad goals of public engagement: Influencing the public, improving the courts, building and strengthening relationships, and engagement as value. Your court’s focus may fall under one, some, or all these areas. To determine progress towards these conceptual goals, they need to be operationalized into measurable data that can be gathered. A simple model to consider and use to identify data points for your evaluation is to organize them into 3 categories: e) Engagement participants, 2) engagement quality, and 3) engagement impacts.
This public engagement pilot project initiative used a pre and post -engagement survey across all six sites to evaluate their projects. Specific survey questions were designed to gather and measure data about engagement impacts, quality, and participants.
As a result of your evaluation process, your court should be in a position to demonstrate impact and effectiveness of your engagement project. If your evaluation results indicate that goals were not sufficiently met, or could be improved, courts can augment and improve their future engagement projects with lessons learned. Regardless of the outcomes, proper evaluation has an important role in the continuous improvement and long-term progress of your public engagement initiatives.