As a part of tri-campus efforts for increasing capacity for community engagement, partners across the University of Washington sought a way to improve the documentation and assessment of community engagement. They approached the eScience Data Science & AI Accelerator program seeking tools for this purpose and found unexpected insights in the process. During this collaboration, eScience Senior Social Scientist Anissa Tanweer and Community Engagement & Leadership Education (CELE) Center Community Engagement 
Analyst Afomia Assefa quickly realized that they could not immediately jump to establishing metrics for assessment. They would first need to explore higher level questions about goals and strategy, as well as take stock of the technical landscape and support available to execute future assessment. Before they could even get to the point of discussing specific metrics, they needed to be clear about why the university was doing assessment in the first place. They also needed to establish who is going to use the results and for what purpose. In the process of exploring these ideas, Assefa and Tanweer also asked what the drawbacks or risks might be of trying to assess community engagement because, as Tanweer notes, “from our perspective, you can’t avoid those pitfalls unless you know to look out for them.”