Open Educational Resources Advocacy Toolkit by Council of Australians University Librarians is licensed under CC BY 4.0 except where otherwise stated.
Just as the outcomes of advocacy activities require evaluation, so to does the practice of advocacy. This can be challenging as advocacy rarely lends itself to linear design and execution, usually requires iterative development, and the outcomes can't always be defined with precise qualitative measures. Rather, the success of this type of evaluation is predicated on asking the right questions, asking those questions of the right people, and professional reflection.
Using existing tools and frameworks provides a foundation for action and you can consider localising these resources or aligning them more strongly with your outcomes. The resources below will support you in evaluating your advocacy:
A key part of evaluating one’s advocacy is assessing whether you're gaining traction with stakeholders. Here are several questions you can use or integrate into advocacy workshop feedback planning:
These types of questions lend themselves well to qualitative data collection such as semi-structured interviews. Always built re-use and repurposing into data collection to maximise the outputs. A semi-structured interview could become a short video asset or a featured case study that can then be hosted on the institutional website or used in subsequent workshops or presentations as local examples of practice to inspire others. Given the limited resources available at most institutions, OER advocates need to plan how to strategically leverage the freedoms of OER for their own practice.