Section Overview
You’ve recruited a CAG, you’ve set a meeting schedule, and you’re ready to start doing things. This section focuses on the nuts and bolts of how you can work with a CAG to co-design and co-implement broader impacts.
Defining the CAG's Scope
What can you actually do with a CAG? While your focus and work will likely—and should!--shift based on your CAG’s interests and priorities, possibilities include:
- Co-designing broader impacts deliverables: Even if you convene a CAG after a proposal is funded, the broader impacts plan in your proposal is likely brief and would benefit from meaningful community participation in moving from proposal to work plan to deliverable. CAGs can be vital partners in co-designing products such as museum exhibits, formal or informal learning experiences for K-12 students, citizen science projects, and other work that engages public audiences with research. The earlier you involve a CAG in the co-design process, the greater their potential influence and impact.
- Building relationships with intended audiences: Recruiting a CAG is just the first step in building strong community partnerships. CAG members can bring deep knowledge and strong working relationships with specific organizations and populations that you hope to engage. These community relationships can be valuable at every stage of design and implementation, from planning a product that is culturally relevant to implementing programming at sites where the intended audiences feel welcome and perhaps already gather.
- Co-designing and participating in evaluation: A CAG can help plan your metrics for success, design surveys and interviews to be relevant and appropriate to your intended audience, and interpret findings to iteratively improve your work. An external evaluator can help you plan how best to engage your CAG with project evaluation, including by seeking data and insights from the CAG members themselves.
- Planning for project sustainability: If you intend to fundraise to continue your work beyond a grant period, a CAG can offer unique insights into local fundraising. But sustainability can take other forms beyond fundraising. If your grant project develops products such as curricula, science activities, professional development resources, or exhibits, CAG members could promote the longevity of those products in the community by implementing them with their audiences and potentially sharing them with peers.
Tip Sheet: Agendas
| Do | Don't |
|---|---|
| Build agendas collaboratively with CAG members, as appropriate to their roles and interests. | Don't underestimate the value of relationship building, both between you and the CAG and among CAG members. Reserve adequate time, ideally at each meeting, for announcements and updates from members (whether or not directly pertinent to your project), introductions if guests or new members join, and unstructured social time. |
| Circulate the meeting agenda in advance and follow up with meeting notes. | Don’t be overly rigid about the CAG’s scope and goals, which may evolve over time. Be open to topical and member-initiated agenda items and ideas. |
| If applicable, consider inviting members to host a CAG meeting in their space and offer a tour or experience specific to their organization (e.g., libraries, museums, schools, or other community organizations). If of mutual interest to you and CAG members, rotating meeting sites can be a great way to build shared knowledge and understanding among the CAG, as well as to distribute power among CAG members. | Don't run meetings past their scheduled end time. If serving meals or refreshments, consider building in some optional, additional time before or after to socialize and network informally. |