© Annabel Jackson Associates
Bevel: Evaluation arts programmes and projects

Text Box: Our work has included: Text Box: Carrying out some of the main evaluations for Arts Council England. Our work includes evaluating Grants for the arts, the Regional Arts Lottery Programme, Arts for Everyone Express, Arts for Everyone Main, and many smaller assignments. The first two of these studies were carried out with Graham Devlin, former acting Secretary General of the Arts Council. Text Box: Developing the majority of the evaluation and performance measurement system for The Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Our work includes the evaluation framework for Creative Youth Partnerships, evaluation of Advancement, the Evaluation Toolkit for Community and Voluntary Arts Organisations, a system for measuring regularly funded organisations, the r eview of the strategy To The Millennium, and evaluation of support to artists. Text Box: Producing key evaluation documents for the UK Film Council . Our work includes a framework for measuring the outcomes from film, evaluation of First Light (an educational programme), an evaluation framework for the UK Film Council’s Regional Investment Fund, and an evaluation framework as part of the contract between the UK Film Council and the British Film Institute. Text Box: Producing an evaluation framework for an individual philanthropist . This methodology measures the social impact of arts projects in a programme of activity that will be implemented across the world. Text Box: Writing a guide to the contribution of the voluntary arts to social inclusion for the Voluntary Arts Network . This guide describes specific examples in detail, such as SMART, Survivors’ Poetry, Fine Cell Work, Plaza Cinema and Share Music.

The arts have a reputation for being difficult to evaluate because:Text Box: Artistic quality is difficult to codify and often only recognised retrospectively. Text Box: Some of the people in arts organisations or projects are anti-numbers. Quantification is perceived as antithetical to the complexity and ambiguity at the heart of much artistic practice. Text Box: Arts organisations vary widely in their objectives. They operate on a spectrum from those with purely artistic goals to those with purely social goals. Furthermore, having explicit social goals is not necessarily related to achievement of social outcomes.

In practice, evaluating the arts is no more difficult than other areas of activity because:Text Box: Debate and enquiry are an integral part of artistic endeavour. Evaluation simply serves to systematise and document this debate. Text Box: Artistic activity is associated with a high level of abstract thought. Staff often understand evaluation systems more readily than happens in other work environments. Text Box: Numbers can be seen as a form of precise communication, rather than an alien language. Text Box: Precise rating of artistic quality is not usually necessary in evaluation. Text Box: Arts projects are less likely to have unintended negative consequences than most other social projects. Simple measures of impact are therefore more likely to be net.

This file provides an introduction to evaluation and standard questionnaires for arts organisations to track their achievements.

Evaluation Toolkit for Voluntary and Community Arts in Northern Ireland

 

 

 

Text Box: The best evaluation embraces complexity. Text Box: Arts projects are less likely to have unintended negative consequences than most other social projects. Simple measures of impact are therefore more likely to be net.

This file provides an introduction to evaluation and standard questionnaires for arts organisations to track their achievements.

Evaluation Toolkit for Voluntary and Community Arts in Northern Ireland