How to Use World Cafés as an Evaluation Data Collection Method
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If you want to collect richer data than a survey can provide, but interviews and focus groups are not feasible for your number or availability of participants, a World Café might be your solution!
World Cafés are a great option when participants are already convened together, usually in person (admittedly, I’ve never done this virtually, but I suppose it is possible with breakout rooms!). Instead of handing out a post-event survey, consider hosting a post-event World Café to contribute to your evaluation. Before I jump into some details, I want to let you know that there is a great website dedicated to World Cafés: The World Cafe | Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter. It’s not specific for evaluation, but it is a great resource.
What is a World Café?
A World Café is a facilitated dialogue process that allows participants to share their perspectives and experiences on a topic of interest or answer a question. It is based on the idea that conversation is a powerful way to create collective knowledge and foster collaborative learning.
A World Café typically involves a series of small group discussions, followed by a report-back session where the main themes and insights are synthesized and reported. It’s called a World Café because the environment is key. A World Café is inviting, casual, and safe. It is not as formal as a focus group, there is no digital recording. The room buzzes with voices as if you were enjoying a latte at your favourite coffee shop. Some hosts will even decorate with tablecloths and a vase of flowers!
Word Cafés are probably more commonly used for purposes outside of evaluation. But in this article, I’ll focus on World Cafés as a data collection method.
Why use a World Café for data collection in evaluation?
A World Café can be a useful data collection method for evaluation when you want to explore complex issues, engage diverse or hard-to-reach participants, or generate new ideas or solutions. A World Café can help you to:
Collect rich and qualitative data from multiple perspectives and sources in a relatively short time frame
Encourage dialogue and interaction among participants, who may not otherwise interact
Foster a sense of community
Enhance trust and rapport and create a positive and enjoyable experience
Support your participatory evaluation, building engagement and understanding in evaluation activities
The World Café method is particularly useful when you want to be sure to explore a topic from multiple perspectives and dive deep into participant insights. A World Café will help to ensure that everyone in a room contributes.
Isn’t this just a focus group?
A lot of this may sound like a focus group would suffice. For me, the big difference is that a World Café likely explores fewer topics in greater depth; it encourages building on the ideas and experiences of others to address a topic more deeply over several rounds. Focus groups move the same group of participants through a series of questions or topics; everyone gets the same order and experience. In a World Café:
the groups change with every question
the order changes
every round after the first builds upon what previous groups have shared
How to plan a World Café
Most importantly, and a potential barrier for many solo evaluators, is that you need a team of facilitators, sometimes called “hosts”. These hosts stay at the table while your participants circulate. To compile your team of facilitators you might be able to consider other organizational peers, fellow evaluators, or even subcontract to a group to help you out. The facilitators don’t have to be facilitators by occupation, but their role is important, so you’ll want to find individuals with good people skills; a basic knowledge of qualitative data collection is probably an asset. You’ll need one facilitator per table (more on this later).
Role of the host:
Facilitate dialogue and engage participants
Record responses
Share insights back with subsequent groups
Share insights back in The Harvest
Much like an interview or focus group, the host should not dominate the conversation.
World Cafés require no pre-work from the participants, but it’s smart to bring the facilitators together for a huddle ahead of time to chat about goals, strategies, or approaches. They’ll need to know the context of the evaluation, and you’ll want to give them some instruction on facilitation, note-taking, and reporting back.
Secondly, you need the physical (or virtual) space. The larger group will be divided into as many smaller groups as you have tables. Each table has one question or topic. A good rule of thumb is to aim for groups of four to six per table, so the number of tables is roughly the size of your larger group divided by four to six. Depending on how many questions you have, you may have some tables that cover the same question. That’s ok! Ahead of your World Café, prepare the questions on a flip chart or virtual board.
Depending on the number of questions you have, and the time allotment per question, World Cafés likely take 1 – 3 hours.
Some key preparations include:
Ensure your questions are well articulated and map back to your evaluation
Decide on the number of questions, number of tables, and time allotment
Prepare your facilitators with the process and talking points if needed
You may also need to give facilitators specific instructions, for example, if a comment is endorsed or emphasized by more than one participant, facilitators can add a star or underline it. Keeping these notation strategies consistent will be important in transcription and analysis later on
Creating good World Café questions
Much like crafting good evaluation questions, good World Café questions should be open-ended, inviting discussion.
Much like creating interview or focus group guides, the questions should have a clear purpose in your evaluation, aligning back with your key evaluation questions. A key difference is that a World Café question should be able to stand on its own, without a lot of follow-ups or probing questions. Because World Cafés cover one topic at a time before your participants physically move onto another, the conversation needs to be kept focused and on-topic. Conversely, in interviews or focus groups, the conversation can meander a little more, explore some rabbit holes and emerge again to re-focus because there is usually no set time per topic.
Of course, you can still provide your facilitators with probes for questions but the questions should be discrete and require no stage-setting discussion ahead of time or afterward since the order will vary for every participant.
How to conduct a World Café
The World Café starts as a large group. Explain the activity to the group as a whole before they divide up. Consider setting the stage by briefly explaining the purpose and intended use of the overall evaluation, and the purpose of the day’s activity. Much like any other qualitative methodology, prepare your speaking points to cover consent, the voluntary nature of participation, confidentiality of sharing, and risks and benefits of participation.
To start your Café, invite participants to join a table of their choosing, aiming to evenly distribute themselves. The facilitator or “host” of that table will initiate discussion among the smaller group and record responses on a flip chart or board visible to the group. This is where arming your facilitators with talking points or probes if the conversations falter is helpful. A time limit is set for each table. When the time is up, participants move freely to any other table/question.
Importantly, participants DO NOT need to move as a group. Each participant can choose where to go next, so long as it’s not a question they’ve covered before. Groups will vary from session to session. This is one of the strengths of this methodology.
When a new session starts, the table facilitator will briefly recap some themes from the previous session(s). The goal is that each conversation adds new insights and learning or validates/confirms previous discussions without starting from scratch. This building on or layering is a key benefit to the World Café, allowing for deeper exploration of key topics.
Participants are instructed to cover all the tables in the allotted time. When participants have had time to visit all the tables, it’s a good time for a quick break. During the break, the table facilitators may take a few minutes to gather some key themes. Questions your facilitators may consider when preparing their report back include:
What are the common or recurring themes or patterns that you see?
What are the divergent or contrasting perspectives or opinions that you notice?
What are the new or unexpected insights or ideas that you discover?
What are the implications or applications of these insights or ideas for the intervention or the evaluation?
What are the gaps or challenges that remain to be addressed or resolved?
What are the next steps or actions that need to be taken?
After a break, the larger group reconvenes to hear a report-back (sometimes called The Harvest). The facilitators share key themes they heard from the multiple groups who contributed to answering their question. This process is like real-time qualitative analysis and real-time member checking. You can invite participants to share their own key insights (what surprised them, what ideas or questions do they have). You can also have one of your facilitators take notes during this report back, particularly if the audience shares new insights based on the themes.
You may close a World Café with a thank you and reminder of how the results will be used, a timeline for reporting and next steps.
Analyzing World Café data
The flip charts/notes are your data. Consider photographing them and/or having them transcribed into analysis software. I’ve used Excel in the past where each comment on a flip chart is one line in Excel. This is where it’s important that you understand any shorthand in note-taking from your facilitators. For example, what does that star mean? Or how will you transcribe a note if it’s been underlined to ensure that you are appropriately translating the emphasis?
Then qualitative coding begins as usual. I think World Cafés lend themselves to deductive analysis but that’s just my preference, not a rule. As in any thematic analysis, your analysis can identify patterns, insights, ideas, and divergence. As in any evaluation, you can use the findings in triangulation with other data sources.
Unlike other qualitative data, quotes are tougher to use. You may need to give your facilitators explicit instructions to use quote notations in their notes if it was the exact words or phrase someone used.
Weaknesses of a World Café
A World Café is certainly more of an event than a focus group. It requires a team of people and substantial planning. The event itself can take several hours. So, while the benefits are that you capture feedback from a large group of people simultaneously and that you can layer insights allowing for deep exploration of topics, it is resource-intensive.
As mentioned, it’s more difficult to get example quotes from this method. It’s also unlikely you’ll be able to segment or stratify your findings by any participant characteristics.
The role of the facilitator is somewhat important; getting the right team together can be a significant barrier. These facilitators are simultaneously the interviewers, scribes, and analysts!
Summary
For me, World Cafés blur the lines between a data collection tool for evaluation and a strategy for eliciting ideas and insights from a group, say for strategic planning. World Cafés can also be used for brainstorming innovative ideas or solutions, exploring opportunities, or addressing challenges, usually outside the scope of an evaluation, but that doesn’t mean they can’t double as a solid data collection tool in your evaluations! In fact, World Cafés are also great tools for building logic models or theories of change.
A World Café is a powerful and versatile method that can enrich and enliven your evaluation. A World Café can help you engage and involve your participants, generate and share knowledge, stimulate and foster creativity, and enhance and support learning. A World Café can also help you create a positive and productive evaluation culture, where evaluation is seen as a collaborative and creative process that adds value and meaning to your intervention.