Evaluating your way through the Investment Principles
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A holistic approach to the Investment Principles
It is hard to think about or apply the Investment Principles in isolation. For example, delivering an artistic programme in an environmentally responsible way might well involve planning fewer productions that might tour to fewer venues. This will inevitably impact on your ambitions (regarding volume of work and audience reach, perhaps) and might in theory enhance the quality of your work.
Related to this, in order to be truly dynamic, the cultural sector will need to do fewer things but with a sharper focus. Building more ‘open space’ into cultural programmes for dynamic elements would support responsiveness and enhance relevance. This open space could protect more time for strategic planning and reflective practice, enabling a reflexive engagement with the IPs in the context of inclusive practice. So you can see how the Investment Principles are indelibly interlinked and might benefit from being evaluated in a holistic way.
There is no doubt that the Investment Principles have more chance of being embedded systematically if cultural practitioners and organisations work collaboratively to apply them.
The Evaluation Principles
The Centre for Cultural Value’s Evaluation Principles foster a culture of reflective practice. The premise behind them is that evaluation is a values-based process of reflective learning geared towards positive social change. Our principles state that evaluation should be:
Beneficial: committed to learning, ethical and applicable
Robust: rigorous, open-minded and proportionate
People-centred: empathetic, many-voiced and socially engaged
Connected: transparent, aware and shared
Organisations and practitioners across the UK are starting to apply and embed these principles into their evaluation activity. For example, LEEDS 2023 have recruited Neighbourhood Hosts in every ward in the city to co-create elements of the city’s year of culture. An anthropologist based at the Centre for Cultural Value is working with these hosts to ensure the programme’s evaluation is many-voiced and socially engaged.
There is no doubt that the Investment Principles have more chance of being embedded systematically if cultural practitioners and organisations work collaboratively to apply them. Our Evaluation Principles support a collective approach that shares learning and fosters inclusive, dynamic, responsible and high-quality practice. The synergies with the IPs are clear, so applying these principles to your evaluation activities will certainly support your progress in applying the IPs too!
But any evaluation or reflective practice that is focused on learning for change needs to not only celebrate our successes, but also acknowledge our failures.
This is based on the principle that success and failure are not binary opposites, but exist along a spectrum and can co-exist in our work
Rethinking failure
The Failspace project demonstrated how distrust, fear of punishment and a lack of agency in the cultural sector has created a culture of celebration in which failure seems to be the hardest word to say. But it also unearthed a real desire for more honest and open conversations and so the research team designed a framework, and associated toolkit to help overcome the barriers to talking about and sharing stories of failure.
This is based on the principle that success and failure are not binary opposites, but exist along a spectrum and can co-exist in our work, across different facets, to different degrees, for different people and over different timescales. Our research suggests that accepting these principles makes honest conversations about failure more possible and has the potential to rebuild trust.
In line with the Centre’s Evaluation Principles, this framework supports the idea that evaluation should be based on reflection for learning. This should not only be personal reflection but critical reflection with a range of different people who can offer very different perspectives. In other words, we need to actively seek out those who don’t agree with us, not just those who do.
Furthermore, this critical reflection needs to be built in at every stage of programme delivery. From planning stages, where Failspace asks you to consider not what activities you will deliver but what success and failure would look like. At the delivery stage, where time needs to be built in for not only review but revision based on the level of successes and failures to date. And at the end of the process, evaluation should be based on learning from what did and didn’t work.
We know that such an approach requires whole sector change, with funders as well as deliverers committing to evaluation that aims for improvement not just accountability for the investment. But without this, we will continue to make the same mistakes over and over again.
Find out more
Find out more about the Centre for Cultural value on their website, where you can also sign up to our mailing list.
Find out more about the Investment Principles at the Investment Principles Resource Hub.
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