Community Involvement Measures

As participatory methods gain recognition in measuring complex social change, this document offers a rigorous and hands-on toolkit for assessing social norms through community-centered inquiry. It does not merely describe research techniques—it empowers users to adopt creative, inclusive, and context-sensitive tools to surface deep-rooted beliefs and practices. M&E professionals, program designers, and social norm practitioners are invited to treat data generation as a collective process of learning and transformation. Here, participation is not a means—it is the method itself for decoding and reshaping social expectations. – It defines participatory research as a method that prioritizes community voice in measuring and interpreting social norms – It introduces nine tools including Body Mapping, Gender Boxes, Lifeline, Social Network Mapping, and 2x2 Tables – It links each tool to specific constructs like injunctive norms, reference groups, stigma, and power dynamics – It emphasizes participatory analysis as a feedback loop for community learning and adaptive programming – It provides examples from UNICEF-supported programs in India, Ethiopia, Guinea, Macedonia, and Jamaica – It guides ethical engagement, data use, and safeguarding when working with children and marginalized groups – It integrates frameworks like ACT for social norms change around FGM and other harmful practices – It offers visual aids, step-by-step instructions, and interpretation models to support field-level application Bridging academic depth with operational usability, this toolkit transforms research into a shared journey of discovery and change. Each section enhances the ability to translate norms into evidence, voice into strategy, and behavior into measurable impact. More than a technical manual, it is a participatory instrument for social listening, accountability, and systemic empowerment.

Community engagement is healthcare’s most powerful tool. Yet it’s deeply misunderstood—costing time, funding, and patient lives. Here’s a practical, 7-step roadmap to do it right for maximum impact: Community engagement isn’t just a checkbox in healthcare. Done well, it improves outcomes, equity, and trust. It’s not about events or outreach. It’s about trust, access, and shared purpose. Here’s a practical 7-step roadmap that actually works: Step 1: Identify trusted local networks. Before launching anything, map who the community already listens to. Think faith leaders, small business owners, school staff, peer mentors. They often hold more influence than formal institutions. Step 2: Show up consistently—before launching a program. Trust takes time. Attend events, join conversations, offer support without pitching anything. Being present without an agenda signals real commitment. Step 3: Invite collaboration early. Don't finalize plans before listening. Hold roundtables or informal chats. Ask: What health needs matter most? What’s worked before? This helps shape services around real, local priorities. Step 4: Remove barriers to participation. Offer stipends, food, or transport. Choose venues people already know and trust—like schools or churches. Make engagement as easy as possible for working families or caregivers. Step 5: Track meaningful outcomes. Go beyond attendance or signup sheets. Measure trust, satisfaction, behavior change, or program retention. Qualitative feedback from participants matters just as much as data. Step 6: Build community leadership. Train local ambassadors, peer educators, or advisory board members. This shifts programs from “delivered to” → “co-led by” the people they serve. Shared ownership builds long-term impact. Step 7: Stay engaged over time. Real engagement isn’t a campaign—it’s a relationship. Keep checking in, sharing updates, and asking for feedback. Stability and consistency build trust far more than short-term effort. Community engagement works best when it’s grounded in respect, shared goals, and consistency. It’s not about scale—it’s about fit. When built well, it improves access, trust, and long-term outcomes. If you’re designing healthcare services with communities in mind: • Start early • Stay consistent • Make participation easy • Measure what matters ↓ Thanks for reading! I'm Sam Armstrong, Founder of Kismet Healthcare. If you found this useful, follow me for more real-world frameworks on community-centered care. Repost for your network:🔄

Today we published a practical guide to Effective Community Engagement in Local Development Planning and the supporting Impact Assessments, which have been finalised following public consultation in 2023.   The guidance was prepared under the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1997 Section 16C and supports meaningful and inclusive engagement in the Local Development Planning context. This useful guide is designed for professionals and communities to help people be more involved in decisions about their places that affect them. It is easy to understand and supports best practice. It provides diagrams and a quick reference guide as a structure to help planning authorities decide how and when to engage with communities, people and communities to understand when their effort will have most impact or influence on making Local Development Plans. Practical examples of engagement can be accessed on the Our Place website which may help in putting the principles set out in the guidance into practice. https://bit.ly/3VMB3L2

How can research create lasting change in society? Traditional models often view research impact as a linear process—research is conducted, findings are shared, and outcomes (hopefully) follow. But the reality is often far more complex. This fascinating paper, Pathways to Co-Impact: Action Research and Community Organising, challenges this notion by introducing the concept of "co-impact"—a dynamic approach that embeds social and economic change within the research process itself. The paper outlines three types of impact: 🔹 Participatory Impact: Process-based changes in thinking, skills, and empowerment among participants. 🔹 Collaborative Impact: Findings-based changes in policies, practices, and culture through collaborative research. 🔹 Collective Impact: Targeted social change through strategic, co-designed actions by diverse stakeholders. Using Debt on Teesside a participatory action research project highlights how community involvement can: ✔️ Build skills and confidence in low-income households. ✔️ Influence local authority policies and practices to address predatory lending and financial resilience. ✔️ Mobilise campaigns that successfully changed high-cost credit practices. Why This Matters 🔄 Challenges to Linear Models of Impact: Participatory Action Research (PAR) shows that impact is not a downstream product of research findings—it evolves dynamically as roles blur between researchers, participants, and stakeholders. 🌍 The Power of Participatory Research: By embedding communities in the research process, PAR fosters both micro-level empowerment and systemic policy reforms. Lessons for Action-Oriented Research 🔑 Collaboration requires trust, flexibility, and mutual learning. 📈 Participatory approaches challenge traditional power dynamics, ensuring research addresses real-world needs. ⏳ Success depends on iterative processes and long-term engagement, not just immediate outcomes. Research has the potential to drive meaningful change when communities and researchers work together, sharing power and purpose. #ResearchImpact #ParticipatoryResearch #ActionResearch #PolicyChange #Collaboration

Like slimy blobs, communities are hard to control. They move in mysterious ways. This also makes them challenging to measure. ⚡ In very practical terms, the challenge is that attribution (or cause-effect) is tricky to measure, if not impossible, in communities (or social learning in general). This is mainly because the impact is rarely immediate. So, how do we know they are working? 👀 We listen to the stories their members tell. Stories enable learning.🧠 As Etienne Wenger-Trayner says, stories "convey learning that doesn’t impose itself. It’s the listener that chooses what’s applicable to them and their context." And more than that, stories also capture the type of value that's so hard to quantify. 💕 How do you measure connection? Belonging? Support? Inspiration? Confidence? Sense of purpose? Beverly and Etienne Wenger-Trayner propose a value-creation model focusing on real stories of impact from community members. While the model has eight types of potential value, I usually focus on four of them in my practice and client work: 🎯 Immediate value Was the experience of being in the community valuable? Did it feel good? Was there trust and psychological safety in the conversation? Did you build rapport with others? 🧠 Potential value Did you take something valuable from it? This is all the practical and useful stuff you gain by participating in the community: concrete ideas, insights, tools, and resources, as well as less visible things like friendships and relationships. 🌱 Applied value What did you do with it? You don’t have to adapt it faithfully. You can adjust it to your context, use only parts of it, or tweak it with your insights. Even if you fail, the fact that you intentionally did something with an idea is valuable. It teaches you what works and what doesn’t. Applying the idea in your work is as full of learning as getting the idea in the first place. 🌟 Realized value These are the actual results—the KPIs, statistics, and progress. Many people call it "impact," but in community terms, this is you getting closer to the difference you are trying to make in the world. As community builders, we are usually concerned about “immediate value” and “potential value,” as these are the areas where we have more influence or control. Our stakeholders are interested in “realized value," often in the form of numbers. That is why capturing and sharing these personal value stories with leadership and stakeholders is critical. I wrote some of my lessons learned with community impact measurement in this article, including an example to bring it all to life: https://lnkd.in/e5w7dkE3 How do you measure the impact and value your community creates? And what are some struggles you are tackling at the moment? #communityofpractice #buildingcommunityfromwithin #sociallearning