Determine the indicator's value by using the following methodology:
1) Define who can be considered as ‘project staff’ according to this indicator. This should be all the staff expected to follow the project’s community engagement and participation measures, including the staff of partner organizations, relevant volunteers, consultants and contractors.
2) Define a limited amount of the most important knowledge related to community participation and engagement that the project staff should have.
3) Prepare a test assessing whether the project staff have the predefined, most important knowledge. The test can use a combination of the following:
- questions assessing people’s knowledge related to key principles and practices of community participation and engagement
- scenarios where the person is asked to describe how s/he would respond to a given situation (i.e. there are no predefined answers)
- a task to develop an outline for a community participation / engagement event following the principles that the staff learned
- questions assessing the extent to which people believe common misconceptions related to community engagement and participation
Ensure that you include enough open-ended questions, as – compared to questions with single / multiple choice answers - these allow you to better understand people’s knowledge level. If you do not specialize in mainstreaming community engagement and participation, engage a relevant expert in preparing and evaluating the test.
To avoid having unrealistically high or unnecessarily low requirements, verify the difficulty of the test by pre-testing it with several people.
4) Decide how many marks will be allocated to each correct answer. For example, you can give one mark for a correct answer to a simple question, while for correct answers to more complex questions / scenarios, you can give two marks.
5) Decide how many marks a person needs to get to be considered as “understanding the project's key community engagement and participation measures” (e.g. a score of at least 15 out of 20).
6) Administer the test. If you need to compare a member of staff’s awareness before and after a certain learning event (e.g. a training), you might need to design two comparable tests to administer a pre- and post-test.
7) Count the number of staff who achieved the minimum acceptable score (see point 5).
8) To calculate the indicator’s value, divide the number of staff who achieved the minimum acceptable score by the total number of staff who completed the test. Multiply the result by 100 to convert it to a percentage.