You might think outreach and recruitment strategies are important for political activists, community organizers, and awareness campaigns. But they are incredibly important to evaluators, too. Why?
- The wider the participation is in your evaluation, the more inclusive it will be of varying (and important) perspectives
- When people see that you’ve made a thoughtful effort to include them in an evaluation, they may be more willing to give you complete, in-depth information
We’ve reached into the literature on evaluation, research, and community organizing for lessons learned. Bottom line: We learned that evaluators should consider the why, who, what and how to plan outreach and recruitment.
Why
Articulate the purpose of the evaluation and why it will be strengthened through the inclusion of many perspectives and voices. Explore why people of different backgrounds might care about the evaluation. For example, perhaps the recommendations will improve the services they use.
Who
Consider the experiences, preferences, and identities of potential respondents. Have there been breaches of trust in either research or service delivery with the people you hope to include? Are there other barriers to overcome, such as limited access to technology, busy schedules, varying levels of literacy, or other issues?
What
Evaluators can use several strategies to engage people:
- Employ trusted liaisons to help reach and recruit people. Depending on the community, these could include service providers, advocacy organizations, religious organizations, educators, and others.
- Use snow-ball or other respondent-driven sampling methods; when one person who has agreed to participate in the study assists in recruiting other participants.
- Use the media or other trusted sources of information to describe the study and encourage people to participate. Increasingly, this may include social media.
How
These strategies will work best when they incorporate the following methods:
- Personalize your contact with people, letting them know you’ve thought about them, why the study is important to them, why they are important to the study, and that you’ve considered ways to make participation easy
- Take time to reach out to people more than once, ideally using multiple methods (i.e., social media post and phone call)
- Pay attention to language and design. Make the study accessible, showing you are available to answer questions and be engaging. Below are two examples of letters we used to recruit student parents to a study. The first is about 10 years old; the second was from last year. Our thinking has evolved significantly in that time. Now, we give parents more opportunities and information to learn about the study and we use visual tools to help guide them through the document.
Below are some other resources you can access on research we have done related to incentives and outreach strategies: