Section 6. Participatory Evaluation

Experienced community builders know that involving stakeholders—the people directly connected to and affected by their projects—is essential. Their knowledge, lived experience, and perspectives can help shape, adjust, and improve the work so that it responds to community priorities and the needs of the people the initiative is intended to support. This is particularly important in evaluation.

As we have previously discussed, community-based participatory research can be used to describe a community, assess community issues, strengths, and needs, identify and select promising practices, and conduct evaluation. We consider participatory evaluation important enough to give it a section of its own and to show how it fits into the larger participatory research process.

It is a good idea to build meaningful stakeholder participation into a project from the beginning. One of the best ways to determine an appropriate direction for your work is to involve stakeholders in identifying community priorities, strengths, needs, and opportunities for meaningful impact. Likewise, one of the best ways to understand how a project affects people is to include those who participate in, experience, or are directly affected by its information, services, or advocacy in the evaluation process.

People directly involved in a project—including participants, staff, volunteers, community members, and partners—often have important insight into what is actually happening. Previously, we have discussed how you can involve community members in conducting research and choosing issues and priorities to address. This section focuses on involving stakeholders throughout the project, including in its evaluation, and on how that participation can strengthen the work and its outcomes.

What is participatory evaluation?

When many people think of evaluation, they imagine something that happens at the end of a project and determines whether it was successful. In practice, evaluation is most useful when it is integrated into a project from the beginning. Participatory evaluation involves stakeholders—particularly people directly affected by the project or involved in carrying it out—in developing an understanding of how the project is working and using that understanding to improve the work.

Participatory evaluation is more than simply asking stakeholders to take part. It creates opportunities for shared decision-making among community members, participants, staff, evaluators, and other partners throughout a project. People directly affected by the work contribute their lived experience, priorities, and expertise alongside professional and organizational knowledge. Together, participants can shape evaluation questions, interpret findings, and use what they learn to improve the project in ways that reflect community-defined needs and goals.

This approach to planning and evaluation depends on mutual trust, respect, transparency, and accountability. These relationships develop over time and are strengthened when organizations begin by learning about the community's history, culture, priorities, strengths, and existing knowledge. Respecting people's expertise and recognizing the value of different forms of knowledge can help build lasting trust and meaningful participation across a wide range of cultural, geographic, and socioeconomic contexts.

Another important part of a participatory process is making sure everyone involved has the information, preparation, resources, and support needed to participate fully. Some stakeholders may be unfamiliar with evaluation or research processes. Others may need support collaborating across different backgrounds or understanding how evaluation findings can be used. We will discuss stakeholder involvement, trust-building, accessible training, and other forms of support throughout this section.

The purpose of evaluation is not simply to determine what happened, but to use what is learned to strengthen the project and inform future action.

To accomplish this, evaluation should examine at least three areas:

• Process. The process of a project includes the planning, coordination, and logistical activities needed to establish and carry it out. Did we conduct an appropriate assessment beforehand to understand community priorities, strengths, and needs? Did we use what we learned to shape the project? Did we follow the intended timeline and organizational structure? Did we meaningfully involve the people we intended to involve? Did we have or obtain the necessary resources? Were staff, volunteers, and community partners adequately prepared and supported? Did we have the community partnerships and support we expected? Did we document our work accurately and in a timely way? Did we monitor and evaluate the work as planned?
• Implementation. Project implementation refers to the actual work of carrying out the project. Did we do what we intended to do? Did we reach and engage the people and communities we intended to reach? Did we use the approaches we planned to use? Was the level of activity what we expected—for example, did we provide the intended number of hours, events, services, or opportunities? What exactly did we provide or carry out? Did we make planned or unplanned changes, and what led to those changes?
• Outcomes. A project's outcomes are the changes or results associated with the work. Did the project contribute to the outcomes we hoped for? Were there other expected or unexpected effects? Who experienced benefits, challenges, or no meaningful change? Were there differences in outcomes among groups? What factors may have contributed to the results? What could we change to make the work more effective, equitable, or responsive?

Many people who write about participatory evaluation combine the first two areas into process evaluation and add another area—impact evaluation—alongside outcome evaluation. Impact evaluation considers longer-term changes associated with a project, including what happens after a particular program or initiative has ended.

For example, a community-based agricultural or public health initiative might focus on sharing skills and resources that local participants can continue using and adapting after the formal project ends. If an evaluation five or ten years later finds that the practices remain useful, have been adapted to local circumstances, and have spread through community networks, that may indicate sustained and meaningful impact.

To examine these areas effectively, evaluation should begin alongside assessment and planning rather than being added only after implementation.

In a participatory evaluation, stakeholders should be involved in:

• Naming and framing the issue, opportunity, or goal to be addressed
• Developing a theory of practice or logic model for how the desired change may occur
• Identifying the questions to ask about the project and the most appropriate ways to answer them

What is the goal, for example, of a program to improve school meals? It might be to increase access to fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and other nutrient-dense foods; improve students' satisfaction with meals; strengthen food literacy; increase participation in school meal programs; or support students' overall health and well-being.

The evaluation questions should reflect those goals. Measures might include what foods are offered, what students choose to eat, food waste, student feedback, meal participation, and relevant indicators of health and well-being. Looking at multiple outcomes provides a fuller understanding of the program's effects and avoids defining success primarily in terms of students' body weight.

• Collecting information about the project
• Interpreting and making sense of that information
• Deciding what to celebrate, continue, adjust, or change based on what is learned

Why would—and why wouldn't—you use participatory evaluation?

Why use participatory evaluation? The short answer is that it can be one of the most effective ways to understand what communities need and value, how a project is working, and what should change over time. It can also strengthen relationships, skills, shared decision-making, and community capacity in ways that more conventional evaluation approaches may not.

Some of the major advantages of participatory evaluation include:

• It can provide a fuller understanding of community priorities and a project's effects. When stakeholders are involved from the beginning in determining what should be evaluated, why it matters, and what the project should focus on, the work is more likely to reflect community priorities and the evaluation is more likely to capture outcomes that matter to the people affected.
• It can provide information that might otherwise be missed. When evaluation depends partly on community knowledge and experience, people may feel more comfortable sharing information with trusted peers, community partners, or evaluators who understand the local context.
• It helps explain what is and is not working from the perspective of people directly involved. Participants, staff, volunteers, and community partners can provide insight into which parts of a project are useful, which create barriers, and which may need to change.
• It can help explain why something does or does not work. People directly affected by a project can often identify practical, cultural, organizational, or structural reasons why a particular approach is effective for some people and less effective for others.
• It can contribute to a more effective and responsive project. Ongoing feedback from people directly involved helps projects identify emerging needs, recognize unintended effects, and make timely adjustments.
• It supports stakeholder agency and shared decision-making. Participatory evaluation creates opportunities for people who may historically have been excluded from formal decision-making processes to help determine how a project is understood, evaluated, and improved.
• It can center perspectives that institutions and decision-makers have not always included. Some communities experience barriers to participation in organizational, governmental, or research decision-making. Participatory evaluation can create more meaningful opportunities for people to contribute their knowledge, priorities, and perspectives and to influence decisions that affect them.
• It can strengthen skills that are useful in employment, education, civic participation, and other areas of life. Participatory evaluation may provide opportunities to develop research, communication, collaboration, critical-thinking, problem-solving, facilitation, data interpretation, and project-management skills.
• It can strengthen confidence while recognizing participants' existing knowledge and abilities. Being treated as a valued partner, contributing expertise, and seeing one's ideas influence real decisions can reinforce people's confidence in their ability to contribute to community change.
• It can strengthen people's ability to influence decisions that affect their lives and communities. Participating in a collaborative evaluation can provide experience navigating organizations, analyzing information, communicating recommendations, and taking collective action.
• It encourages shared ownership of the project. When people have meaningful opportunities to shape a project and its evaluation, they are more likely to see the work as a collaborative effort rather than something developed and imposed by others.
• It can encourage creativity. Bringing together people with different experiences, knowledge, and perspectives can generate new ideas and help challenge assumptions about familiar issues.
• It encourages collaboration. Participatory evaluation works best when participants recognize that different people bring different forms of knowledge, experience, and expertise. Collaboration of this kind can strengthen the evaluation while also building relationships that support future community efforts.
• It fits within a broader participatory approach. When assessment and project planning have already involved community members, participants, staff, and other partners, it makes sense for evaluation to follow the same collaborative approach. Planning for evaluation as part of the overall project can strengthen both the work and the evaluation process.

Participatory evaluation also involves challenges. Whether those challenges outweigh the benefits depends on the circumstances, resources, goals, timeline, and community context. Understanding potential barriers can help you decide whether a participatory approach is appropriate and how to design it effectively.

Potential challenges of participatory evaluation include:

• It can take more time than a conventional evaluation process. Meaningful participation requires time for relationship-building, discussion, collaborative decision-making, training, accessibility, and coordination. Bringing together people with different schedules, perspectives, and experiences can require more time than an evaluation conducted primarily by professional evaluators.
• It requires trust among participants. Historical inequities, prior negative experiences with institutions, differences in power, cultural differences, or unresolved conflicts can affect how comfortable people feel participating. Trust develops through transparency, accountability, follow-through, respect, and meaningful opportunities to influence decisions.
• You need to include a broad range of perspectives, not only established leaders. A participatory process can reproduce existing power structures if organizations consult only with people who already hold formal or informal leadership roles. Leaders may provide important perspectives, but they should not automatically be assumed to represent everyone in a community.

Involving only established leaders can exclude important experiences and perspectives, particularly those of people who have had fewer opportunities to participate in formal decision-making. Recruitment should therefore seek a broad range of participants, including people with different experiences, backgrounds, roles, and relationships to the project. This may require additional outreach and relationship-building, but it can make the evaluation more representative, credible, and useful.

• Participants may need accessible training, tools, and ongoing support. People come to participatory evaluation with different levels of experience with research, meetings, data collection, and analysis. Training and support should build on the knowledge participants already have and provide practical opportunities to develop additional skills.
• You need shared commitment from participants. Because participatory evaluators may take on significant responsibilities, people should understand the expectations, have meaningful input into their roles, and receive the resources and support needed to participate.
• Participants may face practical barriers that affect their ability to participate consistently. Work schedules, caregiving responsibilities, health needs, transportation, financial constraints, seasonal employment, and other circumstances can affect when and how people are able to participate. Participatory evaluation should anticipate these barriers rather than treating them as individual shortcomings. Flexible scheduling, transportation assistance, childcare, accessible meeting options, compensation for participants' time, and other forms of support can make participation more equitable and sustainable.
• You may need flexible and accessible ways to collect, document, and communicate information. Participants may have different literacy preferences, languages, communication styles, accessibility needs, or levels of familiarity with evaluation. Written reports may work well for some participants, while others may prefer verbal discussion, visual methods, audio, video, diagrams, mapping, storytelling, or other formats.
• Funders and policymakers may have different expectations about evaluation. Some may prefer external evaluations or particular research designs and may be unfamiliar with participatory approaches. Clear communication about the purpose, methods, rigor, benefits, and limitations of participatory evaluation can help build understanding and support.

Some of these challenges can also create opportunities. Training may strengthen transferable skills. Developing accessible ways to communicate information may improve the evaluation for everyone. Building trust can strengthen relationships beyond the evaluation itself. Helping funders and policymakers understand participatory approaches may also influence how future community work is supported. Even so, meaningful participation requires time and resources, and those realities should be considered when planning an evaluation.

When might you use participatory evaluation?

Participatory evaluation may be especially useful:

• When your project is already committed to a participatory approach. Evaluation can then be designed collaboratively as part of the broader project.
• When meaningful participation and useful results are more important than completing the evaluation as quickly as possible. Participatory evaluation requires time for collaboration, but that investment can lead to richer information and stronger community relationships.
• When funders and organizational partners support participatory approaches. Some funders may require external evaluation, while others may welcome participatory methods. Early communication can help clarify expectations and identify opportunities to combine different evaluation approaches when appropriate.
• When community members have important knowledge that external evaluators or project staff may not have. Historical, political, social, cultural, environmental, and interpersonal factors can influence how a project operates and how its outcomes should be interpreted. Community participants can help evaluators understand these contexts.
• When trust and relationships affect whether people are willing to share information. Community members may be more comfortable discussing experiences with people they know and trust, particularly when topics are sensitive or when institutions have previously failed to listen or follow through.
• When strengthening participant agency, leadership, or transferable skills is part of the project's goals. In these situations, the evaluation process itself can contribute to the broader purpose of the project.
• When you want to strengthen relationships and collaboration within a community. Participatory evaluation can create opportunities for people who may not regularly work together to exchange perspectives, build trust, and develop relationships that may support other community efforts.

Who should be involved in participatory evaluation?

We have referred throughout this section to stakeholders—people and groups who are affected by, involved in, responsible for, or able to influence the project being evaluated. Who those stakeholders are will vary depending on the project's focus, funding, activities, setting, and intended outcomes.

Groups that are often involved include:

• Participants and community members. These are people the project is intended to support or whose lives may be directly affected by it. They might include people living with a particular health condition, members of a particular community, recent immigrants, residents of a neighborhood, people participating in employment programs, or people affected by a community-wide initiative. Their experiences and perspectives are essential to understanding how the project is working.
• Frontline staff and volunteers. These are the people who carry out much of the project's day-to-day work. They may be professionals, people with specialized knowledge, community health workers, peer leaders, mentors, teachers, advocates, organizers, or volunteers. Because they interact closely with participants and implementation processes, they often have valuable insight into how the project functions in practice.
• Administrators and coordinators. These are people who oversee the project or particular aspects of it. They can provide insight into planning, operations, resources, partnerships, decision-making, and organizational constraints.
• External evaluators, when involved. External evaluators may provide methodological expertise, facilitate collaborative processes, support data analysis, or help organizations meet evaluation requirements.
• Community leaders, officials, and organizational partners. Their support may be important to the success of a project, and participation can create opportunities for greater understanding of community priorities and perspectives.
• Others whose lives or work are affected by the project. This group will vary substantially depending on the project and may include people whose employment, property, services, environment, access to resources, or daily experiences may be affected by the project's activities or outcomes.

For example, an environmental initiative or neighborhood plan might affect how local property owners, residents, businesses, community organizations, and other stakeholders use or experience a particular area.

How do you conduct a participatory evaluation?

Participatory evaluation can include aspects of project design as well as evaluation. What you evaluate depends on what the community and project partners want to understand and accomplish. Identifying evaluation questions helps determine what information will be collected and what aspects of the project will receive attention. When those questions emerge from an assessment process in which stakeholders have meaningfully participated, evaluation becomes part of a broader community-based participatory research process.

A participatory evaluation generally involves two interconnected stages. One involves identifying, recruiting, preparing, and supporting stakeholders who will participate in the evaluation. The other involves planning and carrying out the project and its evaluation. This second stage includes six steps:

• Naming and framing the issue, opportunity, or goal
• Developing a theory of practice or logic model
• Deciding what questions to ask and how to gather the information needed to answer them
• Collecting information
• Analyzing and interpreting the information
• Using what is learned to celebrate progress and adjust or improve the project

We will examine both stages in more detail.

Finding and preparing stakeholders to participate as evaluators

Recruiting participants for a participatory evaluation often requires intentional outreach and relationship-building. People may already have many demands on their time, may be unfamiliar with evaluation, or may be unsure whether their participation will genuinely influence decisions.

This is where trust-building becomes especially important. Community members may have good reasons to be cautious about outside organizations or institutions, particularly if previous engagement efforts were extractive, promises were not honored, or community input was collected but not acted upon. Building trust requires transparency, consistency, accountability, and follow-through. Organizations may need to demonstrate over time that participation will be meaningful and that community perspectives will influence decisions.

Once relationships have been established, participants may need different forms of preparation and support depending on their prior experience. Training should build on the skills, knowledge, and lived experience people already bring while providing any additional tools needed to participate confidently in the evaluation.

If the evaluation is part of a broader participatory effort, you may need to decide whether the same people who conducted assessments or helped plan the project should also participate in evaluation. There are advantages and disadvantages to either approach. An existing team may already understand the project, have experience working together, and be familiar with research methods.

At the same time, people who helped design or implement a project may have strong hopes for its success. That perspective can provide valuable insight, but it can also influence how findings are interpreted. Clear evaluation processes, reflection on potential bias, multiple perspectives, and transparent decision-making can help address this concern.

Capacity and workload are also important considerations. Evaluation may require additional time from people who have already contributed substantially to assessment and planning. Some may want to continue, while others may prefer to step back. Bringing in additional participants can distribute the workload and broaden the perspectives represented.

The best approach will depend on the people involved, the community context, available resources, recruitment capacity, and the commitments participants have already made.

Recruit participant evaluators

Recruitment can take many forms. In some situations, a broad invitation may be appropriate. In others, it may make sense to reach out to specific individuals, community organizations, participants, staff, or trusted community connectors. You might also ask community members to identify people whose experiences and perspectives should be represented.

Some basic guidelines for recruitment include:

• Use communication channels and approaches that reach the people you hope to involve
• Make the purpose and expectations as clear as possible
• Use clear, accessible language and provide information in the languages used by participants
• Share recruitment information in places and spaces the intended participants already use
• Reach out personally when appropriate, including through trusted community members and organizations
• Explain what people may gain from participation as well as how their participation may contribute to the project and community
• Make clear that participants are being invited because their knowledge, experiences, and perspectives are valuable
• Be transparent about the time, responsibilities, decision-making authority, and expectations involved
• Work with participants to identify roles and responsibilities that are realistic for them
• Provide or arrange practical supports—such as childcare, transportation, technology access, interpretation, accessibility accommodations, or compensation—when possible
• Ask participants to recommend others whose perspectives should be included

Potential participant evaluators—particularly community members whose participation is not part of their paid employment—should understand the expected commitment before agreeing to participate. The length of an evaluation will vary depending on the project, but some evaluations may continue for many months or longer. Planning should recognize that people's availability may change over time.

Discuss with participants what support they will need in order to participate meaningfully. This may include transportation, childcare, interpretation, accessible meeting formats, technology, flexible scheduling, or compensation for their time and expertise. Meetings should be scheduled in ways that reduce unnecessary barriers. When staff participation is required as part of their employment, evaluation responsibilities should be incorporated into their paid workload rather than treated as additional unpaid labor.

Aim to create an evaluation team that represents a range of stakeholder experiences and perspectives. Recruiting only established leaders may leave out people whose experiences differ from those of formal representatives. Broad participation can strengthen the quality of the evaluation while also creating opportunities for more people to develop leadership and decision-making experience.

Prepare and support participant evaluators

Participants may need different kinds of preparation depending on their experiences, roles, and familiarity with evaluation. Some may benefit from an introduction to participatory evaluation, meeting facilitation, research ethics, interviewing, observation, data interpretation, or other skills. Training should be accessible, practical, and responsive to participants' needs rather than based on assumptions about what they do or do not know.

Training can be organized in many ways. It might take place in short sessions over several weeks or months, during a concentrated workshop or retreat, through mentoring and coaching, or through a combination of approaches. The format should reflect participants' schedules, accessibility needs, learning preferences, and the demands of the project.

Different topics may also call for different learning methods. Facilitation and meeting skills may be strengthened through mentoring and practice. Interviewing may be learned through role-playing and feedback. Community engagement strategies may be best taught or co-developed by community participants themselves. Whenever possible, training should recognize that expertise exists throughout the group rather than flowing only from professional evaluators to community participants.

Some areas in which preparation or training may be helpful include:

• The participatory evaluation process. How participatory evaluation works, its goals, the roles participants may play, how decisions will be made, and what participants can expect.
• Meeting and collaboration skills. Listening, contributing to discussion, facilitating participation, navigating disagreement or conflict, sharing decision-making, and establishing group agreements.
• Interviewing. Building rapport, asking open-ended and follow-up questions, listening carefully, documenting responses accurately, being aware of body language and tone, and conducting individual or group interviews.
• Observation. Understanding different forms of observation, choosing appropriate settings and times, identifying relevant information, recognizing potential bias, and documenting observations accurately.
• Recording information and reporting it to the group. Documenting what participants say or do, the context in which information was collected, relevant environmental or situational factors, and other information needed to interpret findings responsibly.

Participants should have access to recording and reporting methods that work for them. Depending on people's preferences, languages, accessibility needs, and the setting, useful approaches may include written notes, drawings, maps, diagrams, photographs, audio recordings, video, storytelling, or other formats. When audio, photography, or video is used, participants should understand how the material will be used and provide informed permission before recording begins.

• Analyzing information. Critical thinking, interpreting quantitative and qualitative information, recognizing patterns and limitations, considering alternative explanations, and determining what findings may mean for the project.

Planning and implementing the project and its evaluation

A fully participatory approach assumes that stakeholders have meaningful opportunities to contribute not only to evaluation, but also to assessment, planning, implementation, and decision-making. The same people do not necessarily need to participate in every phase. However, when community members and other stakeholders have been involved from the beginning, they often have a deeper understanding of the project's goals, history, assumptions, and structure. That knowledge can strengthen the relevance and interpretation of the evaluation.

Naming and framing the issue or goal to be addressed

Identifying what you are evaluating helps define what the project is intended to address and accomplish. Community members, organizations, project participants, staff, and others with a stake in the work can collaborate to develop a shared understanding of priorities and desired outcomes. By examining community concerns alongside strengths, resources, relationships, and existing efforts, participants can identify where attention and action may be most useful.

Naming an issue or goal means identifying what the community wants to understand, prevent, improve, or change. Framing refers to how that issue is understood and what factors are considered relevant.

Consider community violence involving young people. If the issue is framed primarily as a law-enforcement problem, the responses considered may focus mostly on policing, prosecution, or punishment. A broader public health and community-safety framing may examine factors such as access to firearms, economic opportunity, housing stability, school climate, exposure to trauma, social connection, neighborhood conditions, access to recreation, mental health support, substance use, and relationships with community institutions.

That broader understanding may lead to a wider range of strategies, such as youth employment, mentoring, violence interruption, safe community spaces, behavioral health services, family and peer supports, community-led safety initiatives, firearm injury prevention, and changes to policies or systems that contribute to unequal exposure to violence. Including multiple perspectives can help communities understand both immediate risks and the conditions that shape them.

Developing a theory of practice to address the issue

How can a community effort contribute to meaningful and lasting change? Projects are often less effective when organizations launch disconnected activities or assume that a single strategy will address a complex issue. A stronger approach is to develop a clear plan for understanding the issue, coordinating action, implementing strategies, evaluating progress, adapting the work, and sustaining what is effective.

Whatever you call this plan—a theory of practice, theory of change, logic model, framework, or approach—it should explain how activities are expected to contribute to desired outcomes. It should also reflect community context, existing strengths, available resources, potential barriers, and the roles of different partners.

Once an issue has been identified, one possible theory of practice might include the following:

• Form a coalition of community members, organizations, agencies, and other partners connected to the issue.
• Recruit and prepare a participatory research and evaluation team that includes a range of stakeholder perspectives.
• Gather quantitative and qualitative information about the issue while also identifying community strengths, resources, relationships, and existing efforts that may contribute to solutions.
• Use what is learned to design strategies that reflect the complexity of the issue and the local context.

The result might be a single program or initiative or a coordinated community-wide effort involving several organizations, institutions, media partners, networks, and community members. When multiple partners are involved, coordination, communication, shared decision-making, resource development, and strategies for addressing organizational or systemic barriers should be included in the plan.

• Implement the agreed-upon strategies.
• Conduct monitoring and evaluation that provides ongoing information about implementation, outcomes, equity, and opportunities for improvement.
• Use evaluation findings to adapt and strengthen the work.
• Continue gathering information, evaluating progress, and adjusting strategies as community conditions and priorities change.

Deciding what evaluation questions to ask and how to answer them

Choosing evaluation questions helps determine what the project will pay attention to and what information will be collected. Important effects can be missed if no one asks questions designed to identify them. For this reason, evaluation questions should be selected carefully and developed with input from people who understand the project and the community from different perspectives.

Framing remains important at this stage. Participants should consider the issue in context, examine their assumptions, identify whose perspectives may be missing, and think about the outcomes they hope to see. They should also consider what social, environmental, organizational, economic, or structural conditions may influence those outcomes.

For example, if the goal is only to measure whether incidents of youth violence decrease, evaluation questions might focus primarily on reported incidents or injuries. If the broader goal is to strengthen long-term community safety and well-being, the evaluation may also examine young people's sense of safety and belonging, access to supportive relationships and opportunities, school engagement, exposure to violence, access to behavioral health services, neighborhood conditions, trust in institutions, disparities in outcomes, and other factors connected to community safety.

Broader goals generally require broader evaluation questions. They may also require combining multiple types of evidence and examining not only whether change occurred, but how, for whom, under what conditions, and with what unintended effects.

Collecting information

Collecting information is often one of the most time- and resource-intensive parts of an evaluation.

Depending on the questions being asked, evaluators may use one or more of the following approaches:

• Research using public records, administrative data, news archives, library collections, online sources, organizational records, and other available information
• Individual or group interviews
• Focus groups
• Community information-sharing and dialogue sessions
• Surveys
• Direct or participant observation

Evaluation methods should be adapted to participants' language, literacy preferences, accessibility needs, cultural context, and familiarity with research. Depending on the community and the evaluation questions, maps, drawings, photographs, storytelling, timelines, audio, video, participatory mapping, or other creative approaches may sometimes provide richer information than written questionnaires alone. These methods should be selected collaboratively rather than based on assumptions about what participants can or cannot do.

Analyzing the information you've collected

Once information has been collected, the next step is to make sense of it. What do the numbers suggest? What do people's experiences, observations, and stories reveal? Did the project unfold as planned? If changes were made along the way, what prompted them and what difference did they make?

Some questions may be relatively straightforward. If the project established clear participation or service goals, for example, you may be able to determine whether they were reached. If the goal was to engage 75 people and 82 participated, that tells you something about reach. If 50 participants were expected to complete a program and 61 completed it, that provides another piece of information.

Other findings require deeper interpretation. What if approximately half of participants report that a project was helpful while the other half report that it was not? That result should prompt further questions. Were people's experiences different depending on race, ethnicity, language, disability, geography, income, age, gender, program location, staff relationships, access barriers, or other relevant factors? Did different groups experience different parts of the project? Were the project methods equally accessible and responsive to everyone?

Collecting information often requires substantial effort, but analysis and interpretation are what turn that information into useful knowledge. Strong analysis can help identify ways to improve the project, understand differences in outcomes, recognize unintended effects, demonstrate accountability, and communicate the value and limitations of the work. Participatory analysis also helps ensure that conclusions are informed by people who understand the community and project from different perspectives.

In general, information gathering and analysis should address the three areas discussed earlier: process, implementation, and outcomes. The goal is both to support continuous improvement and to provide accountability to participants, communities, funders, organizational partners, and other stakeholders.

• Process. How well did planning, coordination, communication, participation, staffing, resource development, and decision-making work? Was the planning process meaningfully participatory? Were timelines realistic? Did the team have the resources and support it needed? Were meetings and participation accessible? Did planning and evaluation teams work effectively together? Were responsibilities clear? Did new leaders, partnerships, or opportunities emerge?
• Implementation. Did the project carry out the activities it intended to carry out? Did it reach and engage the people it hoped to reach? Were planned approaches actually used? Were services, activities, or opportunities provided at the intended level? What adaptations were made, and why? Implementation evaluation focuses on what was done and how it was carried out rather than on whether it produced the desired outcomes.
• Outcomes. What changes occurred? Were the expected outcomes observed? Who experienced those outcomes, and were there important differences among groups? What evidence suggests that the project contributed to those changes? What other factors may have influenced the results? Were there unexpected effects, whether beneficial, harmful, or neutral? What can be learned from those results?

Using the information to celebrate what worked and to adjust and improve the project

Accountability is important, but a major purpose of evaluation is also formative: to provide information that helps people strengthen the project as it develops. When reviewing process, implementation, and outcomes, useful questions include: What worked well? What created barriers? Who benefited and who may have been left out? What unintended effects occurred? What should continue? What should change?

Answering these questions may require additional analysis and discussion, but doing so can lead to meaningful improvements. Elements that are ineffective or create unnecessary barriers may need to be changed or discontinued. At the same time, successful strategies should also be examined carefully so they can be strengthened, sustained, and adapted when appropriate.

Remember to recognize progress and contributions. Celebrating accomplishments acknowledges the time, knowledge, effort, and relationships people contributed to the work. It can strengthen shared commitment, reinforce community relationships, and make visible what people have accomplished together.

Participatory research and evaluation are ongoing processes. Once a project has demonstrated positive results, continued learning and adaptation remain important. Community conditions, priorities, resources, and relationships change over time. Evaluation teams may also change, but continued participation from people with different stakeholder perspectives can help keep the work relevant and responsive.

Successful community work rarely means that no further effort is needed. Progress often depends on maintaining effective strategies, strengthening community capacity, monitoring changing conditions, addressing new challenges, and continuing to adapt. Participatory research and evaluation can help communities and organizations understand what is changing and determine how the work should evolve.

In Summary

Participatory evaluation is one component of participatory research. It involves people connected to and affected by a community project in determining what should be evaluated, identifying appropriate questions and methods, collecting and interpreting information, and using what is learned to strengthen the work.

Participatory approaches bring together multiple forms of knowledge, including lived experience, community history, cultural knowledge, professional expertise, organizational experience, and research skills. These perspectives can improve the relevance and usefulness of an evaluation. Meaningful participation can also strengthen relationships, skills, shared decision-making, community leadership, and confidence in collective action.

Conducting a participatory evaluation generally involves:

• Recruiting, preparing, and supporting a diverse stakeholder evaluation team
• Naming and framing the issue, opportunity, or goal
• Developing a theory of practice or logic model to guide the work
• Identifying meaningful evaluation questions and appropriate methods
• Collecting information
• Analyzing and interpreting information collaboratively
• Using what is learned to recognize progress, address challenges, and adjust or improve the work

As with many of the community-building strategies described in the Community Tool Box, the final step is to continue learning and adapting. Participatory research and evaluation should continue for as long as the work can benefit from understanding changing community priorities, conditions, strengths, and outcomes. Ongoing evaluation can help communities and organizations sustain progress, respond to new circumstances, strengthen effective approaches, and remain accountable to the people most affected by the work.