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MAPC outlines year-long study to evaluate what engagement methods work across communities
Summary
Metropolitan Area Planning Council staff described a year-long mixed-methods evaluation—including a dozen focus groups, public forums and short post-event surveys for participants and staff—aimed at identifying which community-engagement approaches best reach and serve different communities.
Metropolitan Area Planning Council planner Gloria Hong Pugh told a lunchtime webinar audience that MAPC is launching a year-long evaluation to test how well different community-engagement methods reach and serve diverse communities.
"Program evaluation is a practice...to understand the effectiveness and impact of programmatic work through a systematic analysis," Gloria Hong Pugh said, framing the project as both an accountability and learning effort for MAPC's community engagement team. The project will combine short participant exit surveys, staff surveys and a mix of in-person and virtual outreach to compare methods across contexts.
The evaluation will include "a dozen or so focus groups across the course of 1 year," Pugh said, along with public forums, tabling and event-based outreach. MAPC plans two new short tools: a one-page participant post-event survey asking how attendees heard about an event, whether they learned something and whether they know how to stay involved, and a staff survey asking about target audiences, outreach methods, partner organizations and accessibility accommodations.
MAPC will use an analysis tool to extract themes from each event, then synthesize findings across community types and project contexts to develop generalizable recommendations for planners and municipal partners. Pugh said the team is especially interested in whether more inclusive, equity-centered engagement approaches reach people who do not typically attend evening public meetings.
During a question-and-answer segment, organizers said they plan to translate surveys into commonly spoken regional languages and keep the instrument short and straightforward to reduce barriers to completion. On incentivizing responses, Pugh said the team will generally rely on brief, exit-style surveys rather than offering financial incentives, emphasizing low burden and clear framing instead.
MAPC invited attendees to craft evaluation questions in breakout groups and to share ideas about indicators that signal an engagement event "went well," such as participant learning, lingering conversation after an event and clarity about next steps. The team asked participants to complete a final feedback poll and said slides and a recording will be posted on MAPC's website; attendees were given a communityengagement@mapc.org contact for follow-up.
Next steps: MAPC will deploy the post-event surveys at upcoming engagements over the next few months, analyze individual events, and publish synthesized findings and recommendations at the end of the project timeline.
