NEW CLIENT: PRESTON PARK

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The Evaluator is delighted to be working with a new project and a new client – Preston Park Museum. This House Sparks Joy: Decluttering Preston Park Museum is a heritage project, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, as part of their ‘Dynamic Collections’ initiative. The project involves moving objects from an offsite store to a new onsite open store, where the public can view the ‘behind the scenes’ processes of cleaning, conservation, and preparation. It also focuses on developing a sustainable approach to rationalising the collection, which encourages community input into decision-making about objects.

The reason this project is called This House Sparks Joy is that it is inspired by the Marie Kondo book –  The Magic of Tidying Up. This book explains how individuals can declutter their homes by only keeping the things that spark joy.

Now imagine all of that being translated to a museum. In fact, museums cannot keep everything forever because storing items requires not only care and attention but also mending, regular checks, cleaning and much  more behind the scenes than you may think.

So how do you make choices about what to keep, what to display and what to move on? How do you make sure that those difficult choices are made, whilst also listening to the voices of your community?

“Preston Park Museum & Grounds has been awarded £237,000 of National Heritage Lottery Funding as part of the Dynamic Collections Project. Thanks to National Lottery players, we are able reshape and improve the management of Preston Park Museum’s collection, whilst also evolving to meet the changing needs of the communities around us, and to reflect more people’s history and experiences.

The two-year project will help bring hundreds of unseen local objects, on display, in an interactive and visible store. Preston Park Museum currently has over 100,000 objects in its collection, with less than ten percent on display for public viewing. Working hard behind the scenes to uncover and bring to life the stories of the people and objects from across the Tees Valley, is over 35 volunteers.”

The museum explains.

You can read more about the project here

DATA DRIVEN DECISIONS

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June is a busy month for our team as it is when we make all the data-driven decisions for the National Portfolio Organisations (NPO) funded by the Arts Council.

We offer an affordable service to help organisations collect all the data they need during the year for the Arts Council. We also help them import it into the funder’s portal, which opens between April and June. Whilst we are then  assembling all of the data, ready to fill in the portal, we analyse and report on all the data for the organisations, to enable them to make data-driven decisions. This is when we bring the data to life. Our data-driven decisions take the form of a team presentation followed by a report. We share trends shown over time, outputs, audience information and artist voices. We anonymise and share any staff issues and also provide staff and board demographic profiles. We look at ideas and spaces where organisations could shout about the great work they are doing (or do more of) alongside ways to improve. Some include practical operational tips to make sure organisations are using their limited resources and limited staffing in the best possible way, i.e. the most efficient way. The beauty of these presentations is that they are data-led and we don’t know what we will find until we analyse the information.

What is an NPO? The Arts Council explains “National Portfolio Organisations are leaders in their areas, with a collective responsibility to protect and develop our national arts and cultural ecology. Public investment brings public accountability, for us and for the organisations we invest in, and this is reflected in our expectations.”

Organisations do have to be accountable in terms of detailed data. It can be quite tricky to understand the requirements too, for example, in 2024/2025 there have been a lot of changes, with the launch of a new system for one part of data collection, called ‘Illuminate.’

The Evaluator has been offering this service for a number of years, and our NPO cohort has grown significantly since 2023. We love working with arts organisations to make sure we figure it out for them. The Arts Council is keen for organisations to use their own data more, so it’s a win-win relationship.

Are you  an NPO organisation who has recently been through a challenging time in finding data, assembling the right information and putting all your data into the portal when it opened? If so then why not give us a call? We might be able to help you and it is much better value than you might expect. In fact, our packages have a standard cost of £2,400 plus VAT each year. You can call us on 01756 532 538 or email info@theevaluator.co.uk

If you are interested in this idea but are not quite sure you want to talk yet, then why not join our mailing list?

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VISIT IN PERSON: WE INVENTED THE WEEKEND

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We were lucky enough to be invited to evaluate the ‘We Invented the Weekend’ festival at Salford Quays in June 2024. The festival is busy! It attracts thousands of visitors and has; performances, tents, music, shopping, sports, boats, cyclists, dancers, parades, talks – you name it and it is probably taking place across the site. Evaluating something like this requires a lot of energy and luckily The Evaluator has been honing its festival approach for many years now. We don’t often get to work next to celebrities like Bluey and Supertato though! Not forgetting the Gladiators and Mr Motivator!

You can read more about the We Invented The Weekend festival here.

four colourful textiles with the letters W I T W in a grid

We worked with an amazing team of volunteers and two giant dice to collect feedback at the weekend festival. We are very proud to say that across two sites, with a really small evaluation team, we were able to collect almost 500 completed feedback surveys during the weekend itself. We also created a brand-new game which worked really well, involving a giant dice and questions which aligned to the dice roll. This means that we have really good results across a wide cross section of people, great sample sizes and very good data.

 

photogragh of Salford Quays which shows tall buildings and blue skies next to water with people walking

Whilst there, we also carried out extensive footfall counting, to allow us to create a robust estimate of footfall over the whole weekend.

Our surveys are still live for this project and we are looking forward to collecting and analysing all the data over the summer months.

You might spot us at the next couple of festivals we are working on; these are ‘The Festival of Culture’ in Nelson in June and also ‘The National Festival of Making’ in July.

You can see more about The Festival of Culture here, and you can see more about The National Festival of Making here.

We actually evaluate the number of festivals and are happy to come along and support data collection if needed. Our festival analysis includes audience profiles, quality measures, practical experience and ways to improve, alongside footfall and economic impact. We would be happy to have a chat if you have a festival, that you would like to know more about, evaluating. You can call us on 01756 532 538 or email: info@theevaluator.co.uk