Creative Workforce for the Future: Evaluation Report
A full evaluation report sharing reflections and insight from the pilot Creative Workforce for the Future programme
Programme evaluation
The programme's lead delivery partners – Bristol & Bath Creative R+D, UWE Bristol and Watershed – have published this full internal evaluation of the project.
The report shares the good things, difficult things and lessons learned across this pilot project, which took place from October 2020 to March 2021.
Watershed's lessons learned
Watershed learnt a huge amount from Creative Workforce for the Future and is grateful to everyone involved in the project – particularly the Creative Professionals.
We have done this full internal evaluation of the project which shares the good things, difficult things and lessons learned across the project. The report shares some really valuable in depth learnings with a lot of project specific detail.
For Watershed there are 4 key areas where we think we need to do better in future projects, summarised below:
- When imagining new projects, think carefully about who it is for and how to involve them in both the design and decision making process. We have developed the Inclusive Framework for Change to help us with this.
- Try not to do too many things at once. Pilot programmes should not be too big in scale or have overly ambitious targets - this means being careful about what funding we go for. We now use Consequence Scanning to help us think through possible outcomes.
- Intentionally design governance structures – thinking about power and representation – and then explain that to everyone involved. We have done some research into more inclusive forms of governance to help us do this better.
- Create clear lines of communication, recognising different styles and needs. This must include routes for how people feed back and/or raise concerns and a plan for how to listen and respond. We have a created a standardised Complaints Policy to build on with a bespoke approach for each project.
When producing projects, our team are necessarily responding to opportunity and working in partnership with all sorts of other organisations so we have created a new ‘Project overview and intentions’ process to help keep ourselves, and each other to account.