Guides

Assess your institutional culture: Introducing the EDGE tool

on this page
  1. About the EDGE tool
  2. The EDGE Tool at a glance
  3. Reflect on the culture of your organisation
  4. How to use the EDGE Tool
  5. Delving deeper: the nine mini EDGE tools

Explore the EDGE tool and how to use it to self-assess your support for public engagement.

updated on 09 Oct 2023
3 minutes read

About the EDGE tool

How well does your institution currently support public engagement? What are you doing well, and are there areas which you could quickly and efficiently target to make a big difference? We've distilled the work of the Beacons for Public Engagement and other universities to create the EDGE tool, a self-assessment tool to help you take stock and plan your own work.

The tool has nine focal points which form a self-assessment matrix, to allow you to assess your institution's current performance and to begin to identify areas where you would like to see progress. We've called it the EDGE Tool as it describes 'Embryonic', 'Developing', 'Gripping' and 'Embedded' approaches to supporting engagement.  

Explore the EDGE Tool

The EDGE Tool at a glance

The EDGE tool provides a useful device to get colleagues talking and reflecting on the current state of play in your department, school or institution, and helps to identify where to focus your efforts.

Embryonic

Institutional support for engagement is patchy or non-existent, although some engagement activity is underway

Developing

Some support has been put in place, but in a relatively unsystematic and non-strategic fashion

Gripping

The institution is taking steps to develop more systematic and strategic support

Embedding

The institution has put in place strategic and operational support for engagement

Reflect on the culture of your organisation

So what does the EDGE tool highlight? It invites you to reflect on three aspects of your culture:

  • Your Purpose: how is public engagement built into institutional mission and strategy and how effectively it is led
  • Your Processes: how far your systems and support processes facilitate involvement
  • Your People: how you involve staff, students and representatives of the public

For each area, there are three probes to focus your attention.

Purpose

Mission: Have you created a shared understanding of the purpose, value and meaning of engagement and embedded this in your strategy and mission?

Leadership: Do you support champions across the organisation who embrace engagement?

Communication: Do you communicate consistent, clear messages to validate, support and celebrate it, and ensure open and two-way communication with internal and external stakeholders?

Process

Support: How do you co-ordinate your support to maximise efficiency, target support, improve quality, foster innovation, join up thinking and monitor effectiveness?

Learning: What opportunities do you provide for learning and reflection and what support do you provide for CPD?

Recognition: How do you recognise and reward staff involvement within recruitment, promotion, workload plans and performance reviews, and how do you celebrate success?

People

Staff: Do you ensure that all staff – in academic and support roles – have opportunities to get involved in informal and formal ways?

Public: Do you proactively involve people from outside the university in shaping the mission and in the delivery of the strategy, and maximise opportunities for their involvement?

Students: How are students involved and what opportunities do they have to contribute their expertise and energy?

How to use the EDGE Tool

Image of the EDGE tool logo: Embryonic, Developing, Gripping, Embedding

EDGE Tool guide

This guide will help you plan how to deploy the EDGE tool in your institution.
woman in purple jumper on blue laptop

EDGE Tool Survey

We have created an EDGE tool survey which you might want to use in your institution. Read more about it here.

Delving deeper: the nine mini EDGE tools

The EDGE tool lets you take a high level ‘temperature check’ across your institution. We have also created nine further EDGE tools, one for each of the dimensions.

These allow you to take a deeper look at how you are supporting public engagement and focus attention on the interventions which can make the greatest difference in each of the nine areas. We outline the focus of each below, and provide links to PDFs of each

Delve into your organisation's strength of Purpose for engaging with the public, and explore our three mini edge tools exploring Mission, Leadership and Communication.
Understand how your organisation's Processes support engagement within its culture. Have a look at our three mini edge tools exploring Support, Learning and Recognition to find out more.
Focus on how effectively People are involved and supported in their engagement work. Explore the Staff, Students and Public mini edge tools for more information.