At CWC, we always welcome feedback about your experience of the Impact & Insight Toolkit. We encourage you to get in touch if you have suggestions for things you’d like to see or do that we might be able to implement. After reflecting on recent feedback, we’re happy to share some changes that we’ve already made and some that will be happening in the coming months.
Analysis and Reporting Live Online Demonstrations
As the analysis and reporting options available to you in the Toolkit have developed, they have outgrown our current one-hour session. We don’t want to overload you with too much information all in one go and simultaneously not do the tools we have available justice. So, from October, we will be delivering two separate Analysis and Reporting Demonstrations.
One session will look at the analytics and insights options available in the Culture Counts evaluation platform. The other will look at the Reporting Dashboard, including the benchmarking opportunities and the Thematic Analysis tool.
Being able to focus on each of these things in different sessions will make them easier for you to digest and allow us to demonstrate them in more detail.
Check out upcoming dates on our website.
Impact & Insight Toolkit and ACE’s Strategy
We want to highlight how you can use the Toolkit evaluation approach to help you align with ACE’s strategy. The Toolkit doesn’t just support the Ambition and Quality Investment Principle, as it was initially funded to do — it also helps evidence Excellence, one of ACE’s investment priorities, and a key objective in its new Strategic Framework.
Using the Toolkit approach to evaluation, you can:
- Define what ‘excellence’ looks like for your organisation through your choice of dimensions and additional questions
- Track your progress
- Use that evidence in forward planning and funding applications.
Learn more in our blogpost, ‘The Toolkit and ACE’s Strategic Framework’.
Image credit: Imagine Buddy on Unsplash
The Evaluation Lab
This opt-in feature broadens the opportunities for participation in the Toolkit, making it suitable for a more diverse collection of arts and cultural organisations. It was developed in response to conversations we’ve had with participants throughout the project. Dimension questions may not always be the best option, or the work being delivered may not fit neatly into standard performance, exhibition, or participatory categories. The Lab offers practical starting points for the evaluation of different types of work. It is a growing resource, and we are always keen to hear your experiences of trying it out, or thoughts on things you would like to see.
There will be more content added to The Evaluation Lab soon! In the meantime, read our blogpost all about it.
Reporting Dashboard
Also coming soon are some updates to the Reporting Dashboard. We’re making the Evaluation Results and Public Demographics pages more streamlined. There’ll be opportunities to compare and benchmark, not just your results for Dimension questions but your results for Question Bank questions too. We know that the ability to exclude evaluations from comparison charts for different analysis and reporting purposes is useful for many users of the Reporting Dashboard, so this option will now be available in the comparison charts on the Evaluation Results page.
Toolkit participants have shown real curiosity about understanding and optimising how they use their data; these updates are designed to support exactly that.
Keep an eye out for these changes and the supporting resources.
Image credit: Erwan Hesry on Unsplash
Support for when you leave your organisation
When you’ve invested time and energy into establishing your organisation’s participation in the project, we know that handing over responsibility for Toolkit-related activities to a new colleague can be daunting. Turnover of staff means that continuity of data collection and evaluation can be disrupted if new staff aren’t fully aware of what the Toolkit has to offer. To help with this, we’ve created a one-page document that contains the basics of the project and how to get in touch with us.
We trust this will provide support in the handover process when someone either leaves or changes roles within an organisation.
Access it in our guidance, and download it from our website.
Closing words
Do you have feedback or thoughts on these new offerings?
As a participant in the Toolkit project, we encourage you to:
- Establish what matters most to your organisation
- Articulate this through your choice of relevant metrics
- Gather evidence to measure these
- Use the available analysis tools in Culture Counts and the Reporting Dashboard
- Demonstrate the extent to which you are meeting your own definition of excellence
- Reflect on this within your teams; make developments to your organisation’s offering; include data obtained in funding applications; use the data in advocacy materials, and more!
If you have ideas for future developments that can further help you achieve this, let us know. We always love to hear from Toolkit participants and explore opportunities to improve things for you.
Featured image credit: Jaykumar Bherwani on Unsplash