Evaluation Resources

BYP Group is the Social Impact Evaluation Partner for Creative Victoria’s Social Impact, Diversity and Inclusion Programs, 2018-2020. As part of this work, we will be creating and sharing on this website a range of workshop presentations, tools, templates and resources for anyone wanting to monitoring and evaluate their social impact. We encourage you to review, adapt and share these resources, and your insights about what works.

Here is a quick summary of our approach to social impact evaluation in the arts.

How do I know my project has led to change?

Because arts projects generally don’t have the resources to do a big-scale piece of research like a randomised control trial, what you can do is work out:

Does my project have the qualities that are ALREADY KNOWN to contribute to social impact?

Did the participants in my project experience the kinds of change which are KNOWN DETERMINANTS of social impact?

In other words, you:

• Look at the existing research about what types of projects lead to that impact (See the evidence resources on this site for references and findings).

• See if your project has these qualities and outcomes.

It’s a shortcut, and it’s only indicative, but it is much better than nothing, and is a commonly used approach. It also helps you to challenge your assumptions about what you think leads to change versus what the research says leads to change.

How do I know if the answer is ‘yes,’ or ‘no,’ or ‘maybe a little bit’?

That is the focus of most of the evaluation resources on this site. Here are the basic steps:

1. Understand the impact you want to achieve and what leads to this type of impact

2. Develop an evaluation framework (this includes the impacts, outputs and process aspects of your project)

   • Impact evaluation framework

   • Process evaluation framework

   • Outputs evaluation framework

3. Develop the tools for data collection (interviews, surveys, questionnaires, arts-based tools…)

   • Quantitative vs qualitative data

   • Surveys

   • Qualitative tools and qualitative methods

4. Analyse, and share results

   • Write a report

   • Communicate results

Click on the below links to find out more about how you can measure and evaluate change.

For information on how to apply for the Evaluation Exchange, please visit Creative Victoria.