Many people in the creative industries need to be able to professionally communicate the impact of their work for others. Often, people are in receipt of a grant, or funding from a foundation, and need to report to their grantee, how their project went.

This is where evaluation comes in. An evaluation is a judgement about the value and achievements of a project. An evaluation follows a basic methodology. Following this enables anyone to build a comprehensive set of findings from a set of data, that enables you to draw conclusions about your work and even recommendations about what should happen next (hopefully more funding!).

By the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

Select a good project to evaluate
Do a basic plan and work out your objective and evaluation criteria
Work out who your stakeholders are
Work out which method is best to ask them questions
Ask some questions or review desk top data to build a data collection
Analyse your data and determine findings
Draw conclusions, and
Work out which is the best way to communicate your evaluation results with others.

A project workbook is provided to help you do each stage of an evaluation.

Reach out to me, Anne, to help you on your journey. I have many years experience doing evaluations and I teach and mentor others - interns in my business and new evaluators in the Australian Evaluation Society, of which I am Vice President.

Don't pay me to do your evaluation. Do it yourself!

Anne Stephens

linkedin.com/in/annestephensphd

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