Public participation and community engagement toolkit

Partnership for Public Service

If your agency seeks to evaluate how well it’s doing in the area of public participation and community engagement, or PPCE, you can find everything you need in the toolkit below.  

The toolkit offers a user-friendly strategy, and resources to design and evaluate an effective public participation and community engagement activity. We include strategies to collect and analyze data and identify metrics (like engagement quality, engagement satisfaction, etc.) to understand if your engagement and participation activities were successful at achieving their goals and supporting continual improvement and learning for the federal government. 

Below we provide a variety of resources to help you get started. We designed and built the tools to be flexible, and for any agency to use. Your organization can modify or customize these resources for its specific needs. 

To help orient you to our approach, we provided our original concept paper. If you're ready to start, we suggest you first review the "How to use the toolkit" section below. 

*This toolkit was created in 2024

Resources

HOW TO USE THE TOOLKIT

Here we provide a quick overview for how to navigate our toolkit and the resources provided.

PLANNING DOCUMENT

Here we provide the overall planning document to help you plan for all six phases of engagement: 

  1. Problem definition

  2. Resource allocation

  3. Pre-engagement

  4. Selecting a method for engagement

  5. Engagement

  6. Post-engagement follow-up

EVALUATION GUIDES

- Community Data Presentation 

- Consensus Building 

- Deliberative Planning

 


  •  

- Focus Groups 

- Interviews 

- Online Forum

- Participatory Appraisal 

- Surveys 

- Website 

- Youth Empowerment 

INTERACTIVE TOOLS

Here we provide links to the interactive tools to help your agency choose the best PPCE method for its needs. You can use both tools or pick the one that works best for you and your organization—they both achieve a similar goal: 

DASHBOARD

The dashboard is designed to help your agency select the best method, after selecting some or all of these factors: the level of engagement, amount of funding, number of participants and desired methods. 

PARTNERSHIP FOR PUBLIC SERVICE PPCE COPILOT

The Partnership PPCE Copilot is designed to help your agency select the best method by answering a series of prompts. It also uses generative AI to provide additional details. 

    • CASE STUDY

    Here we apply our tools to the case study provided to demonstrate how the tools can be used. 

    The case study addresses the following questions: 

    • What should Agency X consider when deciding what PPCE approaches, including methods of engagement, to implement?   
    • What does Agency X need to do as part of the implementation planning and rollout to support evaluation of the PPCE activity it chooses?   
    • What should Agency X measure and how?  
    • Overall, how would your toolkit be responsive to Agency X’s need as described in the case study?   
    CONCEPT PAPER

    Here we provide the background information on the research and concept for our solution.