Together with the University of Leeds, the Centre for Cultural Value have launched a free-to-access online course: “Evaluation for Arts, Culture and Heritage: Principles and Practice”

The course aims to support skills development in evaluation – demonstrating the practical application of a set of principles co-created with people from across the cultural sector.

The 12 principles, grouped under 4 headings, will, however, most likely resonate with anyone working in the third sector :

Challenges of Evaluation

Too often our evaluation practice is reactive, and targeted at funders – when it should be part of an ongoing, internal process of learning and reflective practice.

When small and micro-charities comprise a huge 96% of the sector and about half of all UK registered charities have an income of less than £10,000, it’s easy to see how incredibly hard it is for our sector to allocate resources to evaluation.

But being able to critically reflect on their own practice is essential if organisations want to meet their charitable objectives.

Evaluation as a Holistic Process

In this context, it’s helpful to think of evaluation not as a separate process which runs alongside a charities’ activities, but is instead at the heart of it.

As the course writers explain, evaluation is deeply linked to the strategic purpose of an organisation – connected to and informed by the many ways through which we articulate and communicate the value of what we do. It should feed into the objectives we set out for our projects, how our marketing teams communicate about our work and the feedback mechanisms we set in place for those who engage with us on a day-to-day basis.

Proportionate Evaluation

First and foremost, evaluation should address the needs of organisations, service users and the wider public and be purposeful and proportional.

Under the “Robust” heading, the Centre for Cultural Value suggests the following questions when auditing your own evaluation practice

Is your evaluation activity proportionate?

• Does your evaluation activity provide you with a good return on your investment (e.g. of time and money), achieving its original aims? If not, why not?
  
• Do you need to evaluate all of your work? What evaluation activity provides you with the greatest potential learning?
  
• Have you done this evaluation before? Are there ways in which you could take a more pragmatic approach, such as reducing the scale or scope?
  
• Are there others who are interested in the same questions with whom you could collaborate and share resource?
  
• Can you access additional funding for external evaluation support?
  
• If your evaluation activity is designed to meet certain funding criteria, can you discuss with your funders what might be most useful, in terms of types of information and format of reporting? Can you ask them to provide examples of the type or level of evaluation for different funding amounts?
  

Resources

Free course: Evaluation for Arts, Culture and Heritage: Principles and Practice

Explore the 12 Principles here

Evaluation for change: a really useful tool to critically reflect on your existing evaluation practice