Societal engagement staff survey

Every few years we run a staff survey to look into what public engagement activities staff have taken part in, what motivates them to get involved, what barriers they face, and to what degree they feel that there is a supportive culture for engagement at Imperial. We have run the survey in 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2025.

The survey is extremely important for a number of reasons:

• It is the largest investigation into societal engagement activities across the whole College and provides key data to evidence the level of participation for our funders and policy makers.
• It helps us to understand the collective impacts our engagement is having on public and internal audiences.
• It highlights where our enabling activities, such as training and awards, are facilitating engagement and where more focus is needed.

You don’t need to have taken part in any engagement activities to get involved – in fact, we love to hear why!

Key findings from the 2025 survey

• Societal engagement continues to increase at Imperial. 76% of staff surveyed reported that they had taken part in some form of public engagement over the last 12 months. This is compared to 62% in 2019 and 59% in 2017.
• 41% of staff dedicated more than 5 days per year to societal engagement, up from 35% in 2019 and 29% in 2017.
• Evaluation of engagement activities also continues to increase, with 41% of respondents saying they evaluate their engagement most or all of the time, compared to 21% in 2019 and 12% in 2017.
• The most reported engagement activities were giving a public lecture or talk, posting content to social media and working with schools and school children.
• Respondents’ top motivations for taking part in societal engagement were to inspire others about their areas of work, and to create a more fair and equitable society by engaging with audiences traditionally underrepresented or excluded.

Aside from time, money remained the key barrier to engagement work, alongside finding opportunities to get involved in societal engagement and a perceived lack of recognition of the time required for, and value of, societal engagement within roles and career progression.

Priority areas moving forward

• Reinvigorate communications – Raise awareness of engagement opportunities, funding and training through clearer, more targeted internal communication and storytelling
• Enhance recognition – Embed and refer to societal engagement more visibly within appraisal, promotion and reward frameworks to ensure contributions are consistently valued
• Diversify engagement formats – Support colleagues to use a variety of modes of engagement, including co-creation, partnership and community collaboration
• Strengthen and broaden support – Increase opportunities, guidance, mentoring and visibility for early-career and mid-level staff to ensure participation in engagement grows across all career stages

We are now working on implementing the insights from the survey and will provide further updates on our actions. Take a look at some of the steps we have taken following previous consultations:

• Adding new masterclasses to our training offer, including around digital engagement and participatory research.
• Launching new funding pots to support societal engagement projects and ideas, including the Collaboration Kickstarter. And making our ongoing seed fund more responsive and flexible.
• Increased and supported volunteering opportunities in societal engagement, including through the Great Exhibition Road Festival and Imperial Lates.

If you would like to discuss the findings from the Staff Survey 2025 in more detail, or use the data for supporting engagement within your own teams and departments then please do get in touch with the Public and Community Engagement team.