Planning an application
We know that you’ve got great ideas for public engagement. To get funding through our competitive peer review process you need to be able to articulate those ideas clearly, whether you’re applying for a dedicated public engagement award, or requesting funding via a research grant or fellowship.
Find out more about good public engagement.
Evaluating your public engagement activities
Planning for evaluation is vital. Your application must show that this is considered and tailored as part of your planning.
Evaluation framework for public engagement
The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has its own framework to help the community evaluate the outcomes and impacts of their public engagement. We invite grant holders to consider how the concepts in this framework can be used to better understand the impact of their work.
Read STFC’s public engagement evaluation framework.
Reporting using Researchfish and recording the results of your public engagement
Like all research councils, we use the Researchfish platform to gather evidence of impact arising from our grants.
STFC public engagement grant holders have a specific series of questions to complete on Researchfish that allows us to better understand the audiences, reach and outcomes of our engagement. We have aligned the questions in Researchfish in such a way as to complement our evaluation framework.
To help our grant holders collate the relevant data, we have created a metrics spreadsheet. This should be used to collect evaluation data throughout the lifetime of an award and must be submitted every year to the STFC Public Engagement team.
Read our guidance on reporting the results of public engagement and download the metrics spreadsheet.
The guidance explains our intentions and provides context to help an individual complete their Researchfish data entry and the metrics spreadsheet.