Social Research ¦ Market Research ¦ Behavioural Insight ¦ Evaluation ¦ SROI
Social Research ¦ Market Research ¦ Behavioural Insight ¦ Evaluation ¦ SROI
The aim of this project was to create an evaluation framework and toolkit that can be used across departments and programmes at the Museum. It is essential that the Museum regularly evaluates their work and that they learn from each evaluation so that they can constantly improve practice year-on-year across the museum’s activity.
The framework and toolkit was expected to:
• Meet their strategic needs, including reporting to funders such as Arts Council England and the National Lottery Heritage Fund
• Be future-proof, allowing for adaptation to upcoming changes in the way they operated
• Be ethical, legal and proportionate – considering the needs of the audience and not just collecting data for the sake of it
• Be flexible whilst still maintaining consistency and generating comparable data
• Build on the good practice, knowledge and skills of staff
• Generate staff buy-in, so everyone could see how evaluation benefits them
• Provide support and guidance for staff without research expertise
• Be easy to use, i.e. not overly long or complex
Initially, we undertook a thorough review of the existing evaluation frameworks currently being used within the museum to understand what works well and what didn’t, and where there was potential for duplication of effort or areas where insight might fall through the gaps.
We then undertook a series of 20 interviews with individuals from across departments and at a range of levels. These ranged from the Director of Corporate Services to Head of Marketing, and from individual curators to digital content teams. We wanted to ensure a holistic view of what was needed, what was useful, what the current sticking points were, and what could be removed or needed to be created from scratch.
We also used these interviews to understand the level of research expertise within the organisation, as well as to understand the types of programming that needed to be evaluated in order to tailore the framework effectively.
On discussion with the project steering group, we devleoped a framework that worked as a ‘constellation’ of documents, with the vision that the framework would be available digitally in the format of a Wiki hosted on the internal intranet.
We clearly articulated three distinct levels – Monitoring, Evaluation and Research – and when each was appropriate and the techniques that could be used to undertake each level. This design was there to help reduce the amount of ‘over-evaluation’ (e.g. of programmes and activities that had been on-going for a long time and which it was known ‘worked’) that was going on and free up resource to focus on more novel, or high-budget work that needed to be tested for its impact and effectiveness.
“The steering group greatly appreciated the time and effort put into this project by M.E.L, which we appreciate may have been more than originally anticipated, as it has resulted in a strong resource with rich but accessible information that we will be rolling out to relevant staff by the autumn. This work will inform both internal audience research collection as well as any future external commission for evaluation, and will therefore have quite a legacy in shaping our knowledge, learnings, and future growth, particularly at a time of historic transformation.”
