Ahead of the 2021 CoP26 conference, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (UK Branch) brought together a diverse set of organisations delivering public engagement on climate change topics, motivated by the upcoming CoP26 event in Glasgow, to design and test an evaluation framework and tools. Evaluation specialists worked to guide the participating projects through a theory of change and the resulting design of an evaluation programme. The aim was not only to help the organisations understand the impact of their activities, what to repeat in the future and what to adapt, but may also lead to new standards in impact evaluation.

In addition to a fairly standard evaluation, POP tried something a bit different… exploring the use of ‘sentiment analysis’ on textual data. See our Sentiment Analysis project page for details.

For all this evaluation work, POP linked in our arts-based public engagement efforts; see Ocean ARTic and the ‘Taming Ægir’ Just Transition Art Residency and to apply or adapt the approach to other public engagement work in the future.

We wanted to find out how our public engagement activities make people FEEL, what it makes them THINK, if it inspires them to TALK, and whether it empowers them to ACT.

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Update June 2022

The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation commissioned evaluator Sally Cupitt to lead the collaborative projects and produced a full report. The group met and shared learning through a series of virtual meetings, held between June and November 2021, where the evaluators helped the organisations implement frameworks, design data collection tools, and assess their work. Read the blog here for more

The outputs were a short “top-tips summary report” and the full report providing details behind the contributing projects titled “Engaging the Public around CoP26: What Worked?“.