I do not consider recruitment as a key engagement outcome,
I understand and completely agree that engagement is beyond participant recruitment, however when it comes to Monitoring and Evaluation issues at least recruitment is something that can give us numbers, or can be used as an indicator.
At times we organize engagement activities like a community meeting or event to raise awareness on a trial, we speak, provide leaflets etc, but at the end of the day is not easy to measure and we are even not sure how many people read and understand the leaflets unless we use other ways of evaluation may be administering a short questionnaire before and after. Additionally just like Charles mentioned in most projects serious community engagement is done around recruitment and that is when the money for outreach activities is released to ensure that we get the desired numbers.
I guess is possible to change this perception but it needs more effort to get the PIs and other scientists understand that community engagement is an ongoing process with or with out recruitment.
