The universe has a funny way of bringing things back around, doesn’t it?
At the start of 2024, I found myself getting stuck into a personal research project, sparked by a question I’ve heard too many times: “But is that project worth the money?” That question — often asked with the best intentions, but rarely with a full understanding of what we are really doing in our industry — stuck with me. It lit a fire in my heart about the work that we do and why.
I knew the projects we were doing weren’t just “worth the money.” They were worth ten times that. And not because of the numbers we could squeeze into a report, but because of the lives we were changing.
So, I started late night researching and it’s taken me on a journey that’s become a bit of passion project to make sure project evaluation and giving participants a real voice sits at the heart of everything I do.
Back on a cold January morning, surrounded by Sharpies and flipchart paper on the floor of my office, (which is really my favourite place to be!) I was trying to find a language for something we often feel more than we get the chance to say — that the work we do in the arts, in community, in culture — it’s more than ticket sales and “bums on seats.” It’s more than big productions that earn awards and are deemed ‘high-quality’ arts and culture projects.
It’s about impact. Real, human, life-altering impact. And going home at night, feeling like you’ve made a tiny difference in someone’s life that day.
That research took me on a much bigger journey (with a few exciting side quests I’ll share another time), but it grounded me in something I now hold space for in all my work: when we work with communities, with audiences, with participants — we hold stories. And those stories matter.
Not just as proof. But as truth.
How do we capture those moments — the ones where someone says, “I never thought I’d get to do something like this,” or “This changed everything for me”? How do we hold those experiences in a way that honours the person, without turning them into a statistic or a soundbite?
And how do we share those stories ethically? With care, with consent, and without slipping into tokenism?
Because most of us are here because we have one of those stories. I know I do. If it weren’t for youth theatre when I was growing up, I wouldn’t be here. No question. It gave me somewhere safe to be and a place to learn and have purpose. And no spreadsheet will ever capture that.
Collectively, how do we gather what matters in a way that doesn’t place more pressure on the people we’re trying to support? Can we break the mould and create a new way of gathering and showcasing the data we need? Can we create frameworks that support our participants?
How do we move beyond the surveys and toward something more human, more accessible — especially in a world still recovering from survey fatigue and pandemic burnout. Being able to collate the real data from a project can help you with everything from your marketing plan, to programming and taking any guess work out of making decisions in your work.
What do you want to see when it comes to measuring the impact of our creative industry projects?
Because if we want to change the system — if we want to show that this work is worth it — we must tell the truth about what it really does. Not just in numbers. But in stories.
My journey in my career has always been around the truth and the stories of the projects I’ve had the chance to work on and I’m loving having the opportunity to delve deep into an area I love working in again, except this time, it’s a sunny day in my new beautiful home office on the hill with the sharpies and big paper!
ps. as always, these are my views alone, just writing the thoughts down 🙂