Year of evaluation
- 5 Feb 2015
2015 was announced as the International Year of Evaluation at the Third International Conference on National Evaluation Capacities.
During the year, partners aim to advocate for and promote evaluation and evidence-based policy making at international, regional, national and local levels. Internationally and nationally a number of activities will be held across the year to promote the need for and value of evaluation.
Evaluation in the arts and cultural sector is important. Organisations in the sector are increasingly incorporating evaluation into their programs and services. Good evaluation can have a number of benefits to the sector including:
- strategic learning and reflection – understanding why something worked or didn’t work; improving what we do and how we do it; learning lessons for the future; building a sector culture where learnings are shared with others
- advocacy – developing a body of evidence that shows what we are doing makes a difference
- credibility – building a reputation as a transparent, accountable organisation open to sharing information about outcomes of programs and services.
Arts Queensland has developed a number of resources to assist in evaluation.
- Getting started with evaluation fact sheet – PDF (PDF 555KB), Word (DOC 242KB)
- Engaging an external evaluator fact sheet – PDF (PDF 320KB), Word (DOC 231KB)
- Evaluation plan template – PDF (PDF 72KB), Word (DOC 18KB)
- Program logic (theory of change) template – PDF (PDF 194KB), Word (DOC 18KB)
We also have a suite of tools on our Outcomes Reports web page that support outcome reporting process but also broader evaluation skills and knowledge development.
During the year, we will be posting about evaluations undertaken in the sector. If you have any examples we could showcase please let us know.
Feature image: Freeimages.com