Getting Started

What is Public Engagement?

Public engagement and community engagement are often used interchangeably, but public engagement is a broader term for involving the public in dialogue and decision-making on common issues, while community engagement is a more specific, collaborative process that focuses on working directly with a local community to address issues that affect its well-being. Both involve two-way communication to foster a sense of shared ownership and lead to better, more sustainable outcomes, though the terms can have different meanings depending on the context.

“Public engagement, just like science, can be messy and head in unexpected directions. That cannot, and must not, be a reason not to do it: science has a duty to respond to the views of the public it seeks to serve and represent. And done properly, public engagement can give research more impact and relevance.”

2018. How to get public engagement right. Nature 555, 413–414.

What is Community Engagement?

Community engagement and involvement is understood to mean

  • An active involvement of the community throughout the research process, using participatory approaches and working in partnership with all key stakeholders.
  • A range of activities which involve interactions between researchers, community members, and stakeholders, aimed at improving the relevance, value, and conduct of health research.
What is Community Engagement

Community at the Center of Public Engagement 

In the context of engagement, “community” has been understood in two ways. It is sometimes used to refer to those who are affected by the health issues being addressed. This use recognizes that the community as defined in this way has historically been left out of health improvement efforts even though it is supposed to be the beneficiary of those efforts. On the other hand, “community” can be used in a more general way, illustrated by referring to stakeholders such as academics, public health professionals, and policy makers as communities. This use has the advantage of recognizing that every group has its own particular culture and norms and that anyone can take the lead in engagement efforts. It is important to identify your target community within every research endeavor and place them at the center.

  1. Defining agenda and identifying opportunities
    Involving communities in building agendas and shaping the opportunity space, reflecting their contexts, histories, needs and aspirations.
  2. Researching and data-gathering
    Working with communities throughout the learning process, sharing agency and building capacity.
  3. Implementing for impact Engaging in collective action, shifting power so communities have greater agency and ownership in bringing new approaches and solutions to life.

Guiding Principles & Ethics

CEI stands for community engagement and involvement - the active involvement of communities throughout the global health research process. 

The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) has outlined seven guiding principles for global health research. The principles provide guidance for the research community in developing, delivering, and evaluating CEI. They can help ensure that planned activities are robust, appropriate, and effective for the local context, research topic, and design. The principles can also be helpful as criteria to assess research proposals. These principles are not a set of rules, but a values-based tool. They are non-hierarchical and non-linear guiding principles, designed to be flexible and motivational and can be operationalized in many ways.

The Principles

  

CEI should be appropriate and relevant to the local context and research aims 

Planning for CEI requires input from communities at early stages of research to ensure it aligns with local values and needs. CEI should take into consideration the type and aims of the research, local knowledge, and context. This can be achieved through collaboration and partnerships with community members and organisations to ensure wider representation, including the most vulnerable and marginalised.

 

Involve the community at the earliest opportunity and throughout the process 

Working with communities to identify priorities and to develop mechanisms for continued collaborations throughout research planning, delivery, and dissemination. This enables a sense of joint ownership, adds value, increases the relevance, reach, and impact of the research. It is important to note that the level of involvement may vary at different stages of the research lifecycle and according to the type or nature of research.

 

Understand your communities 

Communities are not homogenous. They can consist of people with different interests, histories, social structures, values, and cultural customs. Learning about the community and the variations within it is an important element of knowing which CEI approaches will be appropriate within a research context. Researchers should respect the different forms of knowledge and experience that influence the way people learn and engage.

 

Build open, trusting, and mutually beneficial relationships 

Taking time to actively listen, respect, and understand the perspectives of communities and research collaborations helps to build strong relationships, and enable community partnerships to thrive. It is necessary to develop mechanisms for two-way communication and feedback that are ethical, sustainable, and mutually beneficial.

 

Facilitate power‑sharing 

Regularly assessing and addressing evolving power dynamics ensures that power‑sharing practices remain relevant and effective in promoting equitable CEI. Identifying opportunities to facilitate working together will enable community members to speak freely, without fear of being intimidated.

 

Be flexible and creative 

There is no "one size fits all" approach to CEI because every community and context is unique and responds to changing circumstances differently. Embedding critically reflective practices and trying different approaches in response to community feedback will ensure that research remains focused on local needs.

 

Embed monitoring, evaluation, and learning 

Plans should be developed for recording and evaluating CEI processes and outcomes against the research objectives to understand their impact; these can be both positive and negative. This process helps to determine what works and enables changes to be made. Involving community members in monitoring, evaluation, and learning activities from the beginning will help to produce indicators and measures that are mutually valuable.

Ethical Considerations

“Community engagement is grounded in the principles of community organization: fairness, justice, empowerment, participation, and self-determination.”

2011. Clinical and translational science awards consortium community engagement key function committee task force on the principles of community engagement

Community engagement is about relationships between and among communities, researchers, and research institutions. Community engagement creates opportunities to improve the consent process, identify ethical pitfalls, and create processes for resolving ethical problems when they arise. The Yale University Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Committee on Ethical Principles of Engagement developed an expanded set of ethical guidelines specifically for community-engaged research in 2009. The Committee expanded upon traditional biomedical ethics of the Belmont Report (Respect for Persons, Beneficence, and Justice) to focus on the relationships between researchers and community partners, emphasizing that ethical review should not just protect individual research subjects but also govern the interactions and power dynamics between research partners (academic institutions and community organizations).

Core Ethical Principles

The committee identified several key areas for ethical practice:

  • Shared Power and Decision-Making: Moving away from top-down research to a model where community members are partners in all steps, from planning to dissemination.
  • Transparency and Trust: Open communication regarding the goals, risks, and benefits of the research to build long-term trust.
  • Mutual Respect: Valuing the expertise, lived experiences, and cultural norms of community partners.
  • Avoidance of Harm: Actively mitigating negative impacts on the community, including avoiding the exploitation or overburdening of the community.
  • Dissemination and Action: Ensuring findings are returned to the community in an accessible format to facilitate action and, where possible, economic or social benefit.

 

Respect and Cultural Legitimacy 

All partners receive equal respect.

  • Demonstrate an awareness of and respect for cultural differences between the researchers, sponsors, and communities.
  • Ensure mutual respect for recruited participants, study populations, and all partners involved.
  • Enhance respect for communities.
  • Expanding respect beyond the individual to the stakeholder community.
  • Assess whether relevant research is culturally and practically acceptable in the context it is intended.
  • Build and enhance the legitimacy of the research project.
  • Ensure acceptance of research by the affected community.

 

Equity, Power, and Shared Responsibility

Communities and investigators share power and responsibility equitably.

  • Partners share responsibility for the conduct of the research.
  • Diverse perspectives and populations are included in an equitable manner.
  • Minimize the possibility of exploitation.
  • Avoid exploitation by ensuring a fair distribution of the benefits of research.
  • Ensure that power dynamics do not disadvantage some stakeholders more than others (minimize the threat of exploitation).
  • Ensure that disparities and inequalities are not inadvertently replicated or reinforced.

 

Community Protection and Risk Minimization

Protect communities in research.

  • Enhance protection for communities.
  • Ensure that community disruption is minimized (e.g., avoiding the displacement of local medical staff from pressing local needs).
  • Take into account the ethical hazards that may be part of the social, economic, and political landscape of the community.
  • Prioritize the management of stigma and involuntary isolation.
  • Identifying and managing non-obvious risks and benefits.

 

Relevance, Benefit, and Scientific Value

Protect communities in research.

Communities and investigators share power and responsibility equitably.

  • Ensure relevance of research to the affected community.
  • Tailor research to better meet the needs of communities.
  • Enhance benefits for communities.
  • The research project results in mutual benefit for all partners.
  • Support research that is respectful to individuals and communities where social value is maximized.
  • Increase the likelihood that the research will have a long-term impact.
  • Ensure the ethical and scientific quality and outcome of proposed research.
  • Ensure emerging challenges are addressed.

Training & Learning

Theory & Foundational Methods

This section presents some theory and foundational approaches to public and community engagement.

<4h> Community Engagement Continuum

Community engagement can be seen as a continuum of community involvement. The Figure below, modified from a diagram originally drawn by the International Association for Public Participation, illustrates one way of thinking about such a continuum. The IAP2’s Spectrum of Public Participation was designed to assist with the selection of the level of participation that defines the public’s role in any public participation process. Over time, a specific collaboration is likely to move along this continuum toward greater community involvement, and any given collaboration is likely to evolve in other ways, too.

Community Engagement Continuum

Arnstein’s and Hart’s Ladder of Community Participation

Another useful tool was famously outlined by Sherry Arnstein in 1969. This is a model showing levels of community involvement in decision-making, ranging from non-participation (manipulation, therapy), through tokenism (informing, consultation, placation), to genuine citizen power (partnership, delegated power, citizen control), aiming to illustrate where real influence lies and encouraging movement towards shared power for meaningful engagement. In his essay for UNICEF, Children’s Participation: From Tokenism to Citizenship, Hart (1992) adapted Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation (1969, p.217) “to serve as a beginning typology for thinking about children’s participation in projects” (p.9).

The Ladder of Participation

What is Participatory Health Research?

Participatory methodologies can play a crucial role in increasing adherence, participation, and engagement of people toward a common goal. In health actions, these methodologies are especially powerful, as they encourage active collaboration between health professionals and the community, ensuring that activities are more relevant, accessible, and meaningful to the populations involved.

Resources

Free Courses

  1. Complete a free online CEI course developed by NIHR with Mesh
  2. Community Engagement 101: Ultimate Beginner’s Guide 
    This Guide by Visible Network Labs is designed to be your go-to resource, offering insights, tools, and actionable plans at every stage of the community engagement lifecycle, from planning and stakeholder analysis to implementation and long-term relationship management.

Resource links

  1. What is Participatory Health Research?
  2. CDC’s Principles of Community Engagement: Second Edition
  3. Putting People at the Centre of Research: A guide for Community and Public Engagement with Science (Science for Africa)

Practical Methods for Community Engagement

Toolkits & Templates

Evaluation & Impact Assessment

Evaluation and impact in community engagement focuses on assessing how well engagement processes work (process evaluation) and the real-world changes they create (outcome/impact evaluation) to ensure effectiveness, accountability, learning, and meaningful community influence. This means moving beyond just proving success to understanding transformations in people, systems, and outcomes, using tools like logic models and focusing on collaboration, equity, and feedback loops.

Approaches to Evaluation

Two approaches are particularly useful when framing CE evaluation; both engage the involved stakeholders. The first one emphasizes the importance of participation; while the second focuses on empowerment.

The first approach, participatory evaluation, actively engages the community in all stages of the evaluation process. The second approach, empowerment evaluation, helps to equip program personnel with the necessary skills to conduct their own evaluation and ensure that the program runs effectively.

Participatory Evaluation

Participatory evaluation can help improve program performance by:

  1. involving key stakeholders in evaluation design and decision making,
  2. acknowledging and addressing asymmetrical levels of power and voice among stakeholders,
  3. using multiple and varied methods,
  4. having an action component so that evaluation findings are useful to the program’s end users
  5. explicitly aiming to build the evaluation capacity of stakeholders (Burke, 1998)

Characteristics of participatory evaluation include:

  • Focusing on participant ownership; thus, the evaluation is oriented to the needs of the program stakeholders rather than the funding agency
  • Participants meet to communicate and negotiate to reach a consensus on evaluation results, solve problems, and make plans to improve the program
  • Input is sought and recognized from all participants.
  • The emphasis is on identifying lessons learned to help improve program implementation and determine whether targets were met
  • The evaluation design is flexible and determined (to the extent possible) during the group processes
  • The evaluation is based on empirical data to determine what happened and why
  • Stakeholders may conduct the evaluation with an outside expert serving as a facilitator
Empowerment Evaluation

Empowerment evaluation is an approach to help ensure program success by providing stakeholders with tools and skills to evaluate their program and ensuring that the evaluation is part of the planning and management of the program.The major goal of empowerment evaluation is to transfer evaluation activities from an external evaluator to the stakeholders.

Empowerment evaluation has four steps:

  1. taking stock of the program and determining where it stands, including its strengths and weaknesses;
  2. establishing goals for the future with an explicit emphasis on program improvement;
  3. developing strategies to help participants determine their own strengths that they can use to accomplish program goals and activities;
  4. helping program participants decide on and gather the evidence needed to document progress toward achieving their goals

Characteristics of empowerment evaluation include the following:

  • Values improvement in people, programs, and organizations to help them achieve results
  • Community ownership of the design and conduct of the evaluation and implementation of the findings
  • Inclusion of appropriate participants from all levels of the program, funders, and community
  • Democratic participation and clear and open evaluation plans and methods.
  • Commitment to social justice and a fair allocation of resources, opportunities,
  • obligations, and bargaining power.
  • Use of community knowledge to understand the local context and to interpret results
  • Use of evidence-based strategies with adaptations to the local environment and culture
  • Building the capacity of program staff and participants to improve their ability to conduct their own evaluations
  • Organizational learning, ensuring that programs are responsive to changes and challenges
  • Accountability to funders’ expectations.
What frameworks exist for assessing community impact?

Several frameworks are available for evaluating community impact, each offering unique approaches to understanding and measuring outcomes. The most used frameworks include the Logic Model and the Theory of Change, which help organizations articulate their goals and assess their effectiveness in achieving them.

Logic model framework

The Logic Model framework provides a visual representation of the relationship between resources, activities, outputs, and outcomes. It helps organizations clarify their goals and the steps needed to achieve them, making it easier to track progress and evaluate success.

Key components of a Logic Model include inputs (resources), activities (program actions), outputs (direct products), and outcomes (short-term and long-term effects). For example, a community health initiative might list funding and staff as inputs, health workshops as activities, the number of participants as outputs, and improved health metrics as outcomes.

When using a Logic Model, ensure that each component is clearly defined and logically connected. Common pitfalls include vague definitions and overlooking the importance of measuring both outputs and outcomes. Regularly revisiting and updating the model can enhance its effectiveness.

Theory of change model

The Theory of Change model outlines the necessary preconditions, pathways, and interventions required to achieve desired outcomes. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the context and assumptions behind a program’s strategy, making it a comprehensive tool for impact assessment.

This model typically begins with a clear definition of the long-term goal, followed by the identification of intermediate outcomes and the specific activities that will lead to those outcomes. For instance, a program aimed at reducing youth unemployment might identify skills training as an activity, with increased job placements as an intermediate outcome. To effectively implement a Theory of Change, engage stakeholders in the development process to ensure buy-in and relevance. Avoid assumptions without evidence and regularly review the theory to adapt to changing circumstances or new insights. This iterative approach can significantly enhance the model’s accuracy and applicability.

Resource: An interactive template developed by the Global Schools Forum in collaboration with Better Purpose.

Theory of change vs Logic Models
Evaluation Methods

The evaluation of community engagement may need both qualitative and quantitative methods because of the diversity of issues addressed.

An evaluation can use quantitative or qualitative data and often includes mixed methods. Both methods provide important information for evaluation, and both can improve community engagement.

Qualitative methods

Qualitative assessment methods focus on gathering in-depth insights through interviews, focus groups, and open-ended surveys. These approaches allow for a nuanced understanding of community experiences and perceptions regarding specific initiatives.To implement qualitative assessments, consider conducting regular community meetings or workshops where participants can share their thoughts and feelings. This can help identify strengths and weaknesses in programs and highlight areas for improvement.

Quantitative methods

Quantitative metrics involve numerical data that can be statistically analyzed to measure community impact. Common metrics include participation rates, demographic changes, and economic indicators such as income levels or employment rates. When selecting quantitative metrics, ensure they align with the goals of your community initiatives.

Mixed Methods

Community engagement evaluation may need both qualitative and quantitative methods due to the diversity of issues addressed (e.g. population, type of project, and goals). The choice of methods should fit the need for the evaluation, its timeline, and available resources.

Stakeholder Feedback

Stakeholder feedback is crucial for understanding the effectiveness of community programs. Engaging with community members, local businesses, and organizations can provide valuable perspectives on how initiatives are perceived and their actual impact

To gather feedback, consider using structured surveys or informal discussions. Regularly reviewing this feedback can help adjust programs to better meet community needs and enhance overall effectiveness.

Case studies analysis

Case studies analysis involves examining specific instances of community initiatives to draw lessons and insights. By analyzing successful and unsuccessful programs, organizations can identify best practices and common pitfalls.

When conducting case studies, focus on diverse examples from similar communities to understand different contexts and outcomes. This comparative analysis can inform future strategies and improve the likelihood of success in new initiatives.

Publications & Resource Centre

Case Studies

Research Articles

  • Duea SR, Zimmerman EB, Vaughn LM, Dias S, Harris J. A guide to selecting participatory research methods based on project and partnership goals. Journal of Participatory Research Methods. 2022 May 23;3(1):10-35844. https://doi.org/10.35844/001c.32605
  • MacQueen KM, Bhan A, Frohlich J, Holzer J, Sugarman J, Ethics Working Group of the HIV Prevention Trials Network. Evaluating community engagement in global health research: the need for metrics. BMC Medical Ethics. 2015 Jul 1;16(1):44. DOI 10.1186/s12910-015-0033-9

Webinars & Videos

  • NIHR Three critical considerations for community engagement and involvement 

  • NIHR Community Engagement and Involvement Impact Showcase - 25 November 2025 

  • The Tamarack Institute: Community is a verb 
    At the heart of Tamarack lies the belief that true community building, engagement and change go beyond mere words; they require genuine care, compassion and action. Visit their resource hub for more information.