9117 Digital Communities of Practice Evaluation Toolkit

Tender description

Historic England has been involved in developing, using and supporting online communities of practice for over twenty years. Though the technology to set up and run these online communities is very cheap, to be most effective they need an investment of staff time which results in both direct and indirect costs, before, during and after set-up. This project will develop an Evaluation Toolkit which will support future evidence gathering and business case preparation for future proposals to develop online communities of practice, forums and knowledge exchange hubs, and to help the sector evaluate the effectiveness of these resources.The Evaluation Toolkit will draw on established practices in digital community management, and provide a standardised approach for evaluation suitable for use by Historic England and sector partners. Inspiration for making evaluation more consistent comes from our development of the Labour Market Intelligence Toolkit to improve the collection of LMI survey data, but in this case focussed on evaluating online communities. What questions should we ask about online communities of practice? What should we measure to evaluate them? This project is scoped to include development of the toolkit in Year 1 and then its trial use in practice with three online communities in Years 1 to 3.