Stakeholders have to be involved to develop evaluation’s key questions. Hence it becomes important to understand the significance of the method of engagement as per circumstances.
Following criteria should be considered while evaluating strategy for stakeholder engagement:
• Time constraints for resorting to informal approach like telephonic conversations which require less planning time
• Budget costs for gathering input from stakeholders
• Geographic locations of the stakeholders for bringing people physically or virtually together
• Brainstorming, focus group interviews, or Appreciative Inquiry can be used while ascertaining a variety of opinions of a diverse group with different perspectives
• Existing relationships of stakeholders to understand willingness thereby facilitating engagement
• Handling a large number of stakeholders through multiple phased process. For e.x. one group of stakeholders can attend meeting either in person or virtually and a list of possible questions could be deliberated. This could be later asked by a larger group forprioritizing the questions through a survey
• If stakeholders are not familiar with evaluation, they must be provided with background material as per the complexity levels of the program and more time should be given for better understanding and generation of consensus.
One of the following options for engaging Stakeholders can be used:
• One-on-one meetings: Individual, both formal and informal process with interview, ad hoc conversations with allowance for feedback, done virtually, via phone or email, or in person
• Group meetings:
• Logic modeling: Used when there is a lack of clarity of a program or initiative’s goals and expected outcomes or significant differences in opinion exist. It is a visual depiction of how the program is supposed to work which helps focus an evaluation by making a program’s assumptions and expectations explicit, and increases stakeholders’ understanding about the program or initiative
• Mind mapping: A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, activities, actors, purposes or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea through groupings, relationships and connections
• Appreciative Inquiry: It explores the best practices in an organization or community and finds ways of enhancing and replicating what has worked in the past
• Role playing: In order to understand perspective of stakeholders, their roles are assumed on the basis of available information
• Brainstorming/Nominal Group Technique (NGT): It is an intensive and energetic group discussion where every participant is encouraged to think aloud and suggest as ideas withholding analysis, discussion or criticism until the brainstorming session is over. NGT invites participants to individually brainstorm and write down the questions they think the evaluation should address followed by voting. Questions with highest number of votes reflects the most important evaluation questions
• Focus group interviews: Stakeholders can be engaged in a more structured way through a focus group interview with a group of 6–12 stakeholders for one to two hours to explore issues that have not been surfaced
• Discussion of an article or presentation: Sending out results of research, or inviting guest speakers on issues of CSR initiative for promoting dialogue with the stakeholders. This can also be done virtually through video, telephone, conferencing.
• Surveys: It isa way of gathering input from stakeholders who may be difficult to engage in an individual or group setting
• One-Time Survey: It is an efficient, low-cost approach to getting information from a broad range of stakeholders.
• Delphi Technique: It is effective when there are multiple stakeholders, geographically dispersed and have many competing views and experiences related to the program being evaluated. List of questions is submitted by stakeholders and they are asked to rate the relative importance of the questions using a Likert scale. These results are tabulated, and sent out to the stakeholders for multiple rounds of rating unless this process is repeated till the final list of questions has emerged. This results in consensus which reflects the participants’ combined perspectives and knowledge.