Providing feedback and evaluating engagement

Providing feedback

It is important to provide all participants in a community-engagement activity with feedback on information generated by the engagement process, on how it is being used and the timelines of any follow-up activities.

When engaging people with a disability, it may be helpful to allow time for participants to ensure the information they provided through engagement activities was accurately received, understood and reflected in summary documents. This checking process helps to build trusting relationships with stakeholders and ensures government decision making is based on accurate and reliable information.

Some of the most common methods of providing feedback include:

• personalised letters, telephone calls and followup visits
• newsletters, flyers, pamphlets, articles in network mail-outs and reports
• follow-up presentations and meetings
• uploading information to websites and email lists and
• media announcements.

It is important to ensure the method(s) selected to provide feedback is accessible to the people engaged. More than one follow-up process may be required.

Ideally feedback should be provided to all participants within three weeks of an active round of engagement concluding.

Evaluating community engagement processes

Evaluation is a key component of improving community engagement practice and delivering highquality, responsive government services. Evaluation can focus on particular engagement strategies or processes, for example, a workshop, or on an overall engagement program.

Where possible, people with a disability and other representatives of the disability sector should be involved in the design and implementation of an evaluation strategy. This will increase the likelihood that the evaluation considers the full range of important questions, uses accessible and appropriate data-collection techniques and interprets data in a contextually sensitive manner. Involving people with a disability, their families and carers and the broader disability sector in evaluation processes is also likely to support relationship and capacity-building goals for both the disability sector and government.

Evaluation, like community engagement, asks participants to give up their personal and/or professional time. Providing stakeholders with access to either a summary of the evaluation process and findings, or to the full evaluation report can be a useful way of concluding an engagement process and acknowledging people’s contributions. It also demonstrates respect for the contributions made by participants and can help build trusting relationships by demonstrating transparency and a commitment to improvement.

The Department of Communities has produced Engaging Queenslanders: Evaluating community engagement (available at www.getinvolved.qld.gov.au) to assist agencies to design and implement effective evaluation processes which match the scope and objectives of the engagement activity.

As with the engagement process itself, it is important to ensure evaluation processes protect participants’ privacy. This is particularly important if participants fear negative comments may adversely affect their future access to services. An important principle is to only collect personal information when essential to the evaluation question. The Queensland Government’s privacy policy covers all activities undertaken by state government agencies and is available at www.justice.qld.gov.au/dept/privacy.htm

The National Health and Medical Research Centre also provides advice about research involving people with an intellectual disability and people in dependent or unequal relationships. This information can be accessed at www.nhmrc.gov.au/publications/ humans.htm