Author: John Knell
Happy 10th birthday to you and us.
Celebrating a Decade of Co-Creation
The Quality Metrics National Test (QMNT) was launched in 2015, with 150 National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs) volunteering to partner with Counting What Counts Ltd (CWC) to develop and test what we now call the Dimensions Framework.
Our co-creation work with the UK cultural sector, seeking to address key evaluation challenges, commenced in 2012 with the Manchester Metrics Project. However, the QMNT marked the beginning of our large-scale work with Arts Council England’s (ACE’s) funded portfolio.
A decade on, and well into the second iteration of the Impact & Insight Toolkit, CWC wants to mark this 10-year anniversary by thanking all arts and cultural organisations who have partnered and co-created with us, helping to solve key parts of the data and evaluation puzzle for cultural organisations. We are deeply appreciative of their willingness to engage with us, and their ongoing commitment to evaluation.
Building the Toolkit Together
All the key outcome measures in the Toolkit – including how to best understand and measure online work and place-based outcomes – have been co-created with cultural organisations and practitioners. For example, 266 organisations took part in the Strategic Development Strand of the first phase of the Toolkit. The huge variety of funded organisations and the works they deliver poses CWC a welcome and incessant challenge, constantly stress-testing the utility and appropriateness of standardised outcome measures.
Our ten-year collaborative birthday – both CWC and arts and cultural organisations get to blow out the candles on this particular cake – feels like a timely moment to reflect and, looking back over that decade, there are many things we should all be proud about.
From Anxiety to Widespread Adoption
It is fair to say that many NPOs were anxious about the Impact & Insight Toolkit when it was launched, particularly about how the resulting data might be used by Arts Council England. Happily, our initial reassurances, and those of Arts Council England, that this was a tool for NPOs to help them better understand their creative intentions and impacts, no longer need to be repeated. The Toolkit is now a widely understood and appreciated part of the evaluation landscape.
Growing Participation and Embedding Outcome-Based Evaluation
As of October 2025, there are over 800 organisations registered to the Impact & Insight Toolkit project; over 500 of which are NPOs. Growing involvement in the project demonstrates that CWC has honoured our founding promise that we would always seek to build evaluation tools around their needs and intentions.
From NPOs to Creative People and Places, Project Grant recipients and beyond, we’ve supported organisations in cohorts, individually and collectively. Whether it’s developing a formal evaluation approach for the first time; supporting data analysis using APIs; aggregating data and establishing interactive dashboards, we have really enjoyed working with the incredibly varied needs of arts and cultural organisations.
Ten years on, it is gratifying to see how widely arts and cultural organisations are now embedding outcome-based evaluation in their improvement cycles. They are using Toolkit data in lots of different ways – from better understanding how their work makes people feel, through to strengthening their case for financial support.
Navigating a Challenging Landscape
The commitment of the sector to keep working with us is all the more notable given the challenges they have faced. Alongside the jolting impact of COVID-19, the last ten years have brought an ongoing decline in public funding, with sharpening and sometimes conflicting demands as cultural organisations strive to demonstrate their value to different funders.
CWC sees how stretched resources are in the sector, with Toolkit project participants struggling to give the time and resources they would like to their evaluation efforts, and to develop the digital and data capabilities they know they need.
The Power of Culture
Through it all, the last ten years (and the data obtained via the Toolkit project) resolutely confirm that cultural organisations retain the enduring power to challenge, captivate and inspire us, and help all of us to experience the world afresh.
Happily, because of all their collaborative work with CWC on the Impact & Insight Toolkit, NPOs and the wider cultural sector are also better equipped than ever before to capture and demonstrate their extraordinary and unique value.
If that’s not an excuse for a slice of birthday cake, we don’t know what is.
For more information on the history of the Impact & Insight Toolkit, please see our website.
Image credit: Freepik