Engaging Communities Through Issues Forums

Documentation can be done by:

● Taking pictures to help illustrate the agenda, processes, and the interactions. Photos of the speakers, small groups, flip charts, etc. Photos from actual forums are used in this guide. ● Notes from facilitated sessions to share in condensed form ● Notes about things to follow up on and people to follow up with ● Notes to write your own story about the event or for reporting: interactions you saw, things that surprised you, things you wished had occurred

At the End of the Forum or as Part of the Strategic Doing™ Process

A qualitative measurement at the end of the forum provides a list of actions that participants plan to take. Having participants turn in information about actions they will be taking individually and collectively through the Strategic Doing™ process, will help you keep track of potential actions taken. Follow-up can then be conducted to determine what actually occurred.

Post Forum

Three months following the forum, administer a survey to gather insight into the actions taken by participants; you can ask for personal actions as well as if anything has changed within their organization/community because of their attendance. Additionally, interviews can be conducted with key stakeholders and the participants leading the Strategic Doing™ workgroups to gather data regarding the actions that occurred because of the forum. This survey is included in Appendix 14. Harwood (2021) notes that community engagement leads to changes, intended and unintended, that ripple across communities. The change cascades and creates chain reactions and produces unforeseen outcomes. Capturing those outcomes can encourage people to work together to achieve desired outcomes. Using the data, you collect with your evaluation strategy will help to inform the big and little changes that occur. In some cases, your forum will be the beginning of a ripple; you may not ever know how far it goes out in the community, but on-going data collection can measure the effects.

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