Here at thrive, we love evaluation. We’ve written about its importance before, encouraging organisations not to see it as a chore and to plan ahead. We regularly help organisations with evaluation, and we’re committed to approaching it in creative ways. Like when we took part in art workshops at Golden Thread Gallery to understand how they were positively impacting participants’ lives. We also love shining a light on great evaluation; in the past we spoke to Belfast Community Circus School about the success they had with setting dedicated outcomes and figuring out creative ways to measure them.

What do you do when something is hard to measure, something like socially engaged practice?

What is socially engaged practice?

Socially engaged practice is when an organisation takes steps to have a positive impact on the communities they’re a part of, through collaboration and interaction. The Museums Change Lives campaign breaks this down into distinct areas of change:

• Creating better places to live or work
• Enhancing health and wellbeing
• Inspiring engagement, debate and reflection

While you might know anecdotally that your organisation is affecting your community in these ways, you need to be able to measure this impact in a way that works for you. Easier said than done, right?

Measuring Socially Engaged Practice

This toolkit by Museums Association covers:

• What is meant by social impact
• Methods for measuring social impact
• When to measure

With case studies from a wide range of museums, this toolkit has valuable steps your museum can take to measure socially engaged practice, whether you’re just starting out or wanting to improve on your current approach.

Whether you’re a museum or an arts organisation, we can help you measure your impact. Talk to us about evaluation.