Impactful Crisis Evaluations: AI-enabled Participatory Evaluation

According to the PLOS ONE study, using strategy mapping software in a participatory evaluation generated ten participant-developed recommendations and was perceived as impactful by participants in follow-up interviews. "Strategy mapping methodology is a viable approach for conducting impactful participatory evaluations of crisis management efforts, " Björnqvist et al. wrote in August 2026.

• 15 participants worked through four workshops in April–June 2023 to map risks and generate recommendations, according to PLOS ONE.
• The workshops produced ten final recommendations, and Björnqvist et al. reported ten semi-structured follow-up interviews in spring 2024 to assess use and perception, according to PLOS ONE.
• Participants praised the mapping visuals: Interviewee 9 told the authors, "I think that when we drew these arrows, and it resulted in this where you could group all the data which we just threw out which somehow became logical and represented the pandemic."
• The PLOS ONE authors used an LLM (M365 Copilot, GPT-5) to translate and recreate maps, and they verified all AI outputs against originals, according to PLOS ONE in August 2026.

According to PLOS ONE, the evaluation used strategy mapping software across four facilitated workshops in April–June 2023 to elicit risks, create causal maps, and generate recommendations with 15 staff from a Swedish regional communicable disease unit.

According to PLOS ONE, the process followed these steps: anonymous individual idea-gathering, collective clustering, causal linking to form a risk system, subsystem extraction based on centrality, participant rating of risks and recommendations, and validation in a final session on 12 June 2023.

According to PLOS ONE, the study then conducted ten semi-structured interviews in spring 2024 to code whether recommendations had been used and how participants perceived the process; the authors combined directed content analysis and manually corrected transcripts after automatic speech-to-text.

According to PLOS ONE, outcomes included ten validated recommendations and participant reports of both process-level learning and varying degrees of implementation across recommendations.

Participatory mapping workflows can increase uptake but need better post-workshop synthesis: according to PLOS ONE, participants found the causal maps useful for shared understanding, yet some recommendations were "too vague" or dependent on other actors, reducing actionability.

According to PLOS ONE, the study authors argue facilitators may need to be more active in refining participant recommendations to improve clarity and implementation potential while preserving ownership.

According to PLOS ONE, evaluators should define what counts as "use" before follow-up: the authors reported variation in interviewee judgments about whether a recommendation was 'used' or merely 'started' or 'planned', suggesting evaluators must pre-specify use metrics for reliable impact assessment.

According to PLOS ONE, strategy mapping software produced actionable recommendations and delivered process-level learning for participants in a 2023 case study, but recommendation clarity and follow-up measurement varied.

According to PLOS ONE, AI can help where transcription, translation, synthesis, and recommendation drafting are bottlenecks if AI outputs are verified by facilitators and participants.

If you run participatory evaluations, start by automating transcripts, extracting coded excerpts, and using AI to draft clearer recommendations for participant validation; Evidano can operationalize each step with secure, research-grade tools and reproducible outputs.

Try the workflow yourself, or Try Evidano for free to ingest transcripts, run thematic and frequency analyses, and export traceable recommendation drafts for participant review.