Once Upon a Time in Victoria: Viability and use of performance indicators to assess community engagement

Building on the work done for the report 'Beyond Rhetoric: University-Community Engagement in Victoria', this paper discusses a pilot project which investigates the practicality of using existing information to report against a set of indicators to determine the type and extent of community engagement activity of Victorian universities. A condition of this indicator set was that it should not place yet another demand on universities to generate data, but should operate within the framework of current data collected and reported by universities. The intention of the project therefore was not to suggest a new suite of indicators but to select from those validated in the literature a set that could be applied to evaluate the nature of community-university engagement in Victoria. Or, to be more precise, to actually assess whether such an approach might work. The international literature search resulted in six possible indicator sets. These indicator sets were evaluated on the following criteria: Relevance, Reliability, Transparency, Availability, Auditability and Cost, with the best scoring set selected and modified for application in our study. A trial run, consisting of an analysis of existing Victorian university reports and other available forms of data, was undertaken to see to what extent the suggested set of indicators could indeed be viably used to assess community engagement activity. The outcomes of this trial run were disappointing. At present, there seems to be insufficient publicly available information to even superficially understand the level of community engagement being undertaken by a university. We believe that this is not the result of the indicator set selected, but the consequence of what universities report - or not report for that matter - in the area of community engagement. Real reporting of achievements against stated intent only takes place to a very limited extent.