This blogpost considers the background to the development of the Culture Counts to Illuminate Conversion Service. It doesn’t provide information on how to use it. For that, please see the associated guidance.

 

Introduction

In 2022 it was announced that Counting What Counts (CWC) had been commissioned by Arts Council England (ACE) to offer the Impact & Insight Toolkit, a project focussed on quality evaluation. Amongst other things, this involves surveying audiences and participants to understand their experience of a work that’s delivered or curated by arts or cultural organisations. The surveying platform used for this purpose is Culture Counts.

Alongside this, PwC was commissioned by ACE to provide an audience data platform, Illuminate, through which audience and participant demographics could be explored. Similarly to the quality evaluation approach, this also involves surveying audiences and participants.

Both platforms are important and beneficial to an individual arts or cultural organisation, as well as to the wider sector. However, there are clearly some challenges when both approaches require surveying of audiences and participants yet use different survey systems.

 

Data Conversion Service

For organisations that choose to use both systems, it has always been possible to collect Illuminate data in Culture Counts and to subsequently upload that data into Illuminate.  However, no secret has been made of the fact that, although Illuminate data can be collected in Culture Counts, data manipulation is required so it can be successfully uploaded to Illuminate.

We provided some tips on this via our resource – Transferring Data from Culture Counts to Illuminate: A Few Tips to Get You Started. Nevertheless, we know that it can be resource-heavy to successfully achieve the import to Illuminate.

To further address this challenge, we worked with some willing participants of the Impact & Insight Toolkit project* to develop a data conversion service which we are now delighted to share with you.

This conversion service provides you with the Illuminate data you collected in Culture Counts in the correct format to be imported into Illuminate without the need for complicated data manipulation.

The two systems, Culture Counts and Illuminate, remain separate such that the movement of data between them isn’t done automatically and there is still the need for a data upload step. However, it drastically reduces the amount of manual work required on the part of the user.

To learn how to access the Culture Counts to Illuminate Conversion Service, please read the guide.

 

Closing Words

Our aim at CWC has always been to provide opportunities for insightful data collection. By combining your recommended Illuminate questions with Impact & Insight Toolkit questions, you can build a strong picture of your public and their experiences. And now, with the development of the Conversion Service, it is smoother to achieve just that. This service has been developed with the endorsement of ACE, so you can feel assured that you are not deviating from your Illuminate responsibilities in any way.

We look forward to working with you and streamlining your evaluation processes, so that you can benefit from the opportunities both Illuminate and the Impact & Insight Toolkit offer.

 

 

*Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this area of work, testing the Conversion Service and providing vital feedback.

 

 

Featured image:  Joshua Kettle on Unsplash