A number of funders actively support public engagement projects. This is not an exhaustive list and other funders may also support public engagement activities:

UK wide

National Lottery Heritage Fund 

• Their webpage provides the contact details for each country and area. There may be workshops running for potential applicants to attend. To see if your area is running workshops you should visit https://www.heritagefund.org.uk/in-your-area. 
• For grants between £3,000 and £10,000 there is a ‘straight to application’ process so it is recommended to attend a workshop if possible, due to limited resources to provide pre-application advice and support. 
• For grants between £10k and £250k, applicants can complete a project enquiry form. This will enable the fund to respond with tailored advice and support, which could be anything from an email or telephone call to a face to face meeting. 
• For grants above £250k applicants must complete an Expression of Interest (EOI) which is a way of making sure the time and effort of making a full application will be worthwhile. Heritage Lottery states that they will respond to this EOI within 20 days, either releasing an application form or not and providing advice and support as appropriate (not all applicants will receive advice and support at this level).

Mellon Foundation

• As the largest supporter of the arts and humanities in the US, the Mellon Foundation seeks to build just communities where ideas and imagination can thrive. They also fund arts and humanities in the UK & South Africa.

NCCPE has put together a useful database of public engagement funding opportunities

Grantfinder is an online database of grant and funding opportunities

England 

Arts Council England

• Project Grants can be used for this purpose where the public engagement partnership supports the public library Universal Offers and/or enables or is linked to cultural or arts activities.

Scotland 

SLIC

• The Public Library Improvement Fund (PLIF) supports creative and innovative public library projects throughout Scotland.
• SLIC administers the Fund on behalf of the Scottish Government.

Scottish Book Trust

• Live Literature is a Scotland-wide programme that helps fund and support author events in communities all over the country.

Creative Scotland

• The Open Fund: Sustaining Creative Development is open to libraries as well as other organisations, and aims to enable organisations to explore ways of working that will help them to adapt and respond to the current changing circumstances. 
   

The NCCPE has a wealth of information about how to design and deliver successful public engagement projects 

If you want some inspiration about public engagement activities to run in your public library, take a look at our case studies.

Here are some specific hints and tips from Engaging Libraries projects on how to:

The Engaging Libraries programme has shown that public engagement activities can have a big impact on participants and HEI partners as well as library staff. It also impacted public perceptions of the library service. 
 

The next toolkit section gives some starting points for thinking about how to evaluate and develop your projects.

Your evaluation plan needs to 

• Measure what matters
• Be realistic
• Work for you and your project

Don’t be scared to flex the models and approaches you can find in the links below. Some higher education partners may have specialist evaluation skills or resource they can draw on so do ask them about this when planning the project.

It’s important to think about what to measure and how you’re going to measure it before you begin your project. If you do this:

• You’ll have a clear roadmap of what you want to achieve
• You can design and pilot any tools before activity begins
• You can involve your Higher Education Institution, partners  and target audience in helping to co-create your evaluation plan
• You can collect data from those you want to have an impact on, rather than retrospectively attempting to do this 

Questions to ask yourself:

• Why are you evaluating your project in the first place?
• What will you do with the findings?
• What are your principles of evaluation? 
• What type of evaluation will you need to do? (Front-end, formative, summative?) You can find helpful definitions of these in this Australian toolkit 
• Which staff will need to be involved in the evaluation process? Do you have the resources and skills needed in-house or will you need to bring in expertise?

Useful links:
Centre for Cultural Value Evaluation Principles
Libraries Connected Evaluation Toolkit
Guidelines for Good Practice in Evaluation – UK Evaluation Society
Creative People and Places example evaluation of projects
 

• What are your overarching project aims, inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes? 
• Who are the direct and indirect beneficiaries of your project?
• Can you involve your target beneficiaries in helping develop your evaluation plan? 
• What does success look like? What evidence will demonstrate that you’ve achieved your intended outputs and outcomes?
• Which data collection methods will you use  to capture the evidence you need? 
• How will you evidence unintended outcomes?
• Will you embed reflective practice for your staff, volunteers, artists?
• How can you present and communicate your evaluation plan to colleagues?

Useful links:
Example logic model
Story of Change explainer
Gibbs Reflective Cycle
A guide to social return on investment evaluation (SROI) including downloadable ‘how to’ guide  
Arts in Health evaluation guide
NCCPE guide to evaluating public engagement projects
ILFA Generic Learning Outcomes (GLOs) and Generic Social Outcomes (GSOs)

• When will you collect the data? Who from? Where? How will you make sure the sample is representative, robust, and free from bias?
• What are the most appropriate data collection tools?
• What might you need to consider in order to work ethically and legally when you’re collecting and storing the data?
• Do you need to consider any specific ethics or inclusive approaches e.g. if you’re working with vulnerable groups or those who may not be able to access other methods?

Useful links:
Creative Research Methods: A Practical Guide (Kara, H; 2020)
Family Evaluation and Audience Research
Collecting public engagement data online
NEF Measuring Health and Wellbeing
Happy Museum project evaluation tools
Market Research Society Code of Conduct

• How will you systematically collect and record the evidence? Where will you store it so that it’s safe? How will you stay on the right side of UK GDPR?  
• Which method will you use to analyse your data? 
• What is the data telling you? Be cautious of unconscious bias and look for insight rather than simply reporting information.

Useful links:
Information Commissioner’s Office
Association for Qualitative Research
Better Evaluation
NCVO guide to analysing qualitative data

• How will you tell the story in a succinct and interesting way, presenting insight rather than simply information?
• Thinking about the audience for your evaluation findings, what is the best way to share and disseminate your findings? How will you use the evidence going forward?

Useful links:
Canva
Visualising Data
Infogram
How to create infographics with impact

Public engagement activities have the potential to change perceptions of the public library among the public and local authority stakeholders, open the door to bigger and longer-term project working and raise the profile of the library service in the local press.

There are many ways to raise awareness of your public engagement work, including:

• Create and disseminate a report about the project
   

Create a film about your project and promote it via social media and in your library

• Calderdale Libraries created a film about their Something In the Air project
• Libraries NI worked with a partner organisation to create a film about their Turning Heads project

Deliver presentations to other local authority departments and decision-makers about the project - use the findings from your evaluation

• A top tip is to think about the 'elevator pitch' for your project and if you had to get support from a decision-maker in 30 seconds or less, what would you say?

Work with your communications team to promote the project

• Libraries Connected have a range of tools to support advocacy and promotion

Use a successful track-record to bid for a more ambitious project.