Michigan State University has annually collected data about community-engaged scholarship and university outreach from its faculty and academic staff since 2004. Researchers with MSU's Office of University Outreach and Engagement (UOE) developed the Outreach and Engagement Measurement Instrument (OEMI), and variants of it, in order to gather this important data. Since 2021, UOE deployed a briefer version of the OEMI to collect data from faculty about their community-engaged scholarship and university outreach activities.

The OEMI first asks respondents to report how much of their academic work was community engaged, then to characterize this work in a number of ways. The survey asks respondents to describe specific projects (actions taken, for whom, goals, research conducted, classes held, etc.). It gathers data about societal issues addressed, the duration and length of the project, mode of engagement (face-to-face or technologically mediated), identification of partners and geographic locations, engagement of students, sources of funding, non-university people involved or served, evaluation, creation of intellectual property, resulting products, and impacts on scholarship (e.g., ongoing research, teaching practices, assessments about the practice of community-engaged scholarship).

These voluntarily, self-reported data are used to generate institutional and college-level reports that may be used for benchmarking outreach and engagement activities and to support faculty in their annual reviews. They are also used to describe the university’s engagement enterprise to the public and campus by communicating examples across disciplines/sectors and identifying and supporting the recognition of exemplars. The data support accreditation and other institutional self-studies, assessments of strategic plans, faculty networking efforts, professional development planning, university development initiatives, public access efforts, mapping locations of partnerships, etc.

Download the list of questions on the 2024 version of MSU's OEMI.