With the next NPO round approaching, evaluation has never been more mission-critical. As audience specialists who have worked with arts and culture organisations for almost 20 years, we know that evaluation can just feel like a reporting burden. However, it should be a tool for demonstrating impact and enabling better decision-making to deepen that impact in the future.
We recently compiled an evaluation of the impact of Without Walls from 2023 to 2025. The headlines were impressive: more than 408,000 audience members reached across 77 festivals and 168 events. The data showed sustained engagement during a period of cost-of-living pressure and declining attendance elsewhere in the sector.
Impact isn't just attendance figures, though: it's audience experience, community benefit, artistic development and reaching groups who wouldn't normally engage with the arts. Outdoor arts has a potential advantage here: it’s often free, happens where people already are, and activity is often planned to reach audiences who are under-served (who are also the audiences that funders often - rightly - care about).
This advantage only counts if it can be evidenced. When you take the time to draw together the data, a powerful story can emerge, as it did here. When we analysed the results over those three years, the impact story was overwhelming*:
- 28% of audiences were under 35 vs. 13% average in the arts
- 42% of audiences were from Levelling Up areas and 35% from Priority Places
- Around 1 in 3 were new attenders to that festival, above the England average for first time attenders
These stats are great for funders, but the real value comes not just from "proving" but from "improving". Evaluation is an opportunity for learning, not just accountability. Good evaluation tells a story funders can use, combining hard data (demographics, reach) with qualitative insight (what the work means to people). Creating these success stories is, of course, vital, but we need to ensure evaluation also feeds back into programming decisions.
So here are our top tips for making your evaluation count, for you and for your funders:
- Embed evaluation from the very beginning. Clarify what you are trying to achieve and how you’ll measure it
- Capture audience feedback in a range of ways as soon as you can. You can use short surveys via interviewing or QR codes, video vox pops, observation or just having a chat with as many people as you can
- Create and use frameworks, ideally ones that allow you to compare yourself with others
- You don’t need to collect everything. Focus on what will really make a difference to you
- Think about both numbers and stories. We’re all human and we connect with stories, so don’t neglect this at the expense of counting
Inevitably, future funding (whether Arts Council England or from any other source) will reward organisations who can show they know their audiences, understand their impact in their communities and are using that knowledge to improve the services they create.
Evaluation done well is an investment for the future, not a form-filling exercise.
*All these were compared against Illuminate averages for the purpose of this evaluation.