Arts Council launches Evaluation Toolkit for the Arts  

The Arts Council of Northern Ireland launched an evaluation toolkit for the community and voluntary arts at a day-long seminar for the sectors at the Malone Lodge Hotel in Belfast.

Voluntary and Community Arts Evaluation Toolkit ( Rich Text or PDF)

Voluntary and Community Arts Evaluation Toolkit Quick Guide ( Rich Text or PDF)

The toolkit provides a consistent and sympathetic method of measuring the social impact of arts groups working in the community and voluntary sectors. It will help groups to enhance areas of their practice and to offer up accurate, evidence-based data in support of advocacy work.

The Arts Council commissioned Annabel Jackson Associates to work with a steering group of 15 community and voluntary arts groups from across Northern Ireland on the development and road-testing of a self-evaluation system. The intimate participation of these sectors is one of the Toolkit’s principal strengths – it is informed and guided by the insight of groups that have direct and lengthy experience of working in their sector. This investment lends credibility to the evaluation system and enhances the sectors’ sense of ownership, which is critical to its overall effectiveness.

This new system has several clear advantages over its predecessors. It respects the differing needs of individual groups and is absolutely relevant to the need to produce measurable outcomes. It can be easily integrated into an organisation’s day-to-day operations, feeding into business plans and helping to clarify an organisation’s core objectives, strengths and weaknesses. It is not rigid and mechanistic, but can be customised to suit individual needs. It extracts the maximum of information with the minimum of effort. Most importantly, this system unifies previously dissimilar data gleaned from across the sector, giving across-the-board coherence and consistency of evaluation and making it possible build a complete picture of the sector and the impact it has in economic and social terms.

The evaluation toolkit for the community and voluntary arts sectors is the first step in a larger process that will soon see similar evaluation extended to other art forms and other key areas of strategic importance identified in the Arts Council’s five year plan for the arts. The evaluation Toolkit will greatly assist our arts organisations in assessing the impact of their work and will provide new substance and weight that will strengthen advocacy of the arts in general.