Assessing the impact and sharing the learnings to strengthen the media literacy sector

Developed within its media literacy programme “Making Sense of Media” (MSOM), Ofcom's toolkit was designed as a practical guide to allow all media literacy practitioners, regardless their resources or experience, to build evaluation into their projects.

 

For the purpose of this toolkit, 'evaluation' shall be understood as an assessement of the impact of a project, and namely the “change at an individual or societal level that can be attributed to an intervention”.

Ofcom's evaluation toolkit is structured around three steps:

1. Preparing: how planning the approach and creating an evaluation framework
2. Doing: how designing evaluation questions, collecting and analysing data
3. Sharing: how putting and sharing a clear and compelling evaluation report

 

For each step, the toolkit provides practical definitions and recommendations, illustrated by a fictional example.
 

Key messages from the toolkit:

- Evaluation should be integrated into the development and design of any project from the beginning

- Evaluation helps frame and learn about the project and its outcomes

- Evaluation provides evidence that might ease future fund raising

- Sharing evaluation evidence and the learnings is vital to helping the media literacy sector to become more effective

 

In the Annex of the toolkit, Ofcom also provides for two searchable online libraries: one listing media literacy initiatives and another listing media literacy research.

By nudging media literacy stakeholders towards more impact evaluation, Ofcom also seeks to encourage the sharing of lessons learned and evidence collected by media literacy practitioners.

In this regard, media literacy practitioners are invited to share their evaluation reports with the regulator.

• Link to the Evaluation Toolkit
• Link to Ofcom's news
• Link to Ofcom (Making Sense of Media)'s work on evaluation
• The Ofcom's Media literacy research library
• The Ofcom's Media literacy initiatives library

Source: Ofcom 

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EMIL (EPRA) & Evaluation: set up in 2018 and formally launched as EMIL in 2021, the EPRA Media literacy taskforce has regularly addressed the topic of MIL evaluation. Ofcom's plans for an evaluation toolkit were presented at the 9th EMIL meeting in November 2022.

Key EMIL resources on evaluation:
- Ofcom toolkit's presentation by Kate Morris and summary of the 9th EMIL meeting (Nov. 2022)
- 3rd Online Roundtable on Evaluation (2020)
- EMIL Top tips for evaluating media literacy projects (2018)