Participatory Evaluation for Researchers: Super Team Guide | Issue 7 of 12
Who's This For
You organize networking sessions at convenings, conferences, workshops, and program events. People show up, make small talk, exchange business cards, and leave. Some connections stick. Most do not. You have no idea which ones mattered or why.
Your funder asks about partnership formation. You report the number of attendees and maybe a satisfaction score. You know real connections formed (you watched them happen), but you cannot show who found whom, what they were looking for, or whether the connections your program facilitated were the ones participants actually needed.
This issue is for you if you have ever watched a room full of potential partners wander past each other because nobody could see what anyone was seeking or offering. You are about to make those invisible interests visible, and capture the connection data in the process.
The Partnership Moment
You are running a networking reception at a cross-institutional convening. Seventy people in a room. Faculty from research universities. Community college instructors. Industry professionals. Graduate students. Nonprofit directors. Every person in the room has expertise someone else needs. Every person is looking for something another person could provide.
But nobody can see it.
A graduate student who desperately wants mentorship in science communication stands three feet from an industry professional who coaches early-career scientists for a living. They do not talk. A community college instructor who wants to connect her students to summer research stands across the buffet table from a PI who cannot fill her REU slots. They exchange pleasantries about the coffee and move on.
You watch these missed connections accumulate. The room has everything it needs to generate transformative partnerships. But the matching is random, driven by who happens to stand next to whom, who already knows someone, who is outgoing enough to introduce themselves to strangers.
After the event, you ask attendees to complete a networking satisfaction survey. They rate the session 3.8 out of 5. You report the number. Your funder nods. Nobody learns anything about what connections actually formed, what connections were missed, or what the network needed most.
Under the Surface
Random networking is not just inefficient. It systematically favors people who already have networks and disadvantages those who need them most. The graduate student who does not know anyone stays quiet. The community college instructor without conference experience sticks to the one person she recognizes. The tribal education director fields a dozen introductions from people who want something from her community but offers nothing in return.
The deeper problem is an information asymmetry. In any room of potential partners, each person carries invisible information: what they are seeking, what they can offer, what drives their work. Traditional networking forces people to discover this information through serial conversation, asking "so what do you do?" fifty times and hoping to stumble onto a match.
This is extraordinarily wasteful. If you could make partnership interests visible (literally visible, on a name badge or a card) networking becomes purposeful. People can scan a room, identify complementary interests, and walk toward the right conversation instead of the nearest conversation.
The evaluation insight is equally important. When you make interests visible through markers, the markers themselves become data. You can see what people are seeking. You can track which markers lead to follow-up conversations. You can analyze whether your network has more seekers than offerers, more mentorship needs than collaboration needs, more aspiration than infrastructure. The visibility that improves networking simultaneously generates the evaluation evidence you need.
