Planning Evaluation

I recognise whole-heartedly the importance of planning how I will evaluate the FAF events, as I want to identify the key performance indicators at the planning stage, so I can plan for them!

Our brief calls for me to bring the PM Studio and its projects, artists, technologies and ethics to a family audience. I will have achieved this if we can get a high attendance at our events and especially if I can get some people who have not been to Watershed before.

I will also collect feedback about how participants rate the event and what they would improve.

Evaluation Workshop

I really enjoyed the session we had with Lycia from Glow Consultants last night: we used the ‘story of change’ framework to think about the amount of change and the significance of the change our events might have and on whom. Lycia began by giving us a talk through the framework and explaining some examples, then we set about applying these methods to our events (which at the moment are not very firmed up at all, but we know what we want to do for the brief – an Imagination Lab of sorts with Magic Show launch event).

I identified key beneficiaries, the inputs I would make, the outputs or events I would produce, and the impact I would have and how I would measure this.

Objective: Bring the work of the PM Studio to a family audience.

Beneficiaries:

1 – Families (existing and new Watershed customers)

2 – PM Studio (raising profile)

3 – Watershed (experimenting with a new format, reaching a new audience, organisation exposure through FAF)

4 – Studio residents (workshop facilitation and profile)

5 – Us (talent development and career experience)

Inputs: We invest time, Watershed invests time, money and resources, Studio residents’ invest time, effort and resources

Outputs: We will produce events for the season.

Impacts (key performance indicators – how to measure):

– Families find out about PM Studio (many families come to our events – measure through attendance)

– Children and adults have fun together and learn some new skills with a view to inspiring them to explore art and technology in the future (participants gain confidence and knowledge, and have lots of fun! – measure through feedback forms)

– PM Studio, its residents, and Watershed are more widely recognised and they find a successful format for family events (we get press coverage and expand our family audience and offer – measure through listings etc and coverage and build on this with similar events in the future)

– We learn new skills and about arts event production (we gain confidence and knowledge – recorded in this blog)

This framework has really helped me to define the key performance indicators for this project and I plan to take necessary steps to evaluate them to be able to report on them later.

 

I think it will be important to collect information about the families who attend (ages and postcodes) and where they found out about the event, whether they are new to Watershed, how they would rate the event, what they would improve and if they plan to come back. I will adapt the Watershed feedback forms for our events.

I also wanted to have a more dynamic way for our participants to feedback so we came up with the evaluation boards, one with post-its for adults and one with stars that could be placed next to a smiley face, indifferent face and a sad face for the kids. I think it is really important to let people know you are listening!

To read about the delivery of events and initial feedback gained go to Arts Leadership – Unit 2 #4 – Promotion, Further Planning and Delivery.

Collecting Feedback

At the events I was very focused on collecting feedback from all events and we imputed the info into a spreadsheet we shared as a group on Google Docs. I got the financial report and the Box Office reports and sent this over to FAF as part of the required base-line survey we were required to complete. This will help to inform future Family Arts Campaigns.

Reporting and Reviewing the Events + Feedback

Here is a draft report I have written with some screenshot below – it outline what we did and why, what worked, what didn’t and what we we would do differently next time as an organisation.

Did we achieve our objective? How can we measure our impact?

I believe we have achieved our objective of bringing the PM Studio to a family audience.

– Families found out about PM Studio (for each event we achieved 90 – 100% of tickets sold – see Box office report above – and 34% of bookers we captured were new customers)

– Children and adults had fun together and learnt some new skills with a view to inspiring them to explore art and technology in the future (participants gained confidence and knowledge and have lots of fun! – captured via feedback forms and anecdotal evidence)

– PM Studio, its residents, and Watershed are more widely recognised and they find a successful format for family events (we got press coverage, got 34% new bookers, 43% of attenders came to more than one event showing they enjoyed the season showing we found a relevant theme/format)

– We learn new skills and in depth about arts event production (I have gained confidence and knowledge, my journey is recorded in this blog)

Reflection

We met up after the last event to debrief on the project as a team with Hannah Higginson, and share our experiences and insights. Here are mine:

My favourite part of producing the events was definitely achieving nearly all sold-out events and working with genuinely inspired and excited families (seeing Dad’s and Grandmas with little and big kids all sharing the same activities was great!). I loved the atmosphere and flow of the Tea Party and was really happy with how our theme and branding developed.

Challenges I faced were time and energy constraints whilst working full-time whilst delivering this season, and when I had to completely re-think the format and activities of the Storytelling Workshop. I think we could have found better ways of communicating than via email and Facebook, which I find get clogged and confused after a while. We perhaps should have used Basecamp or another similar platform and this is something I would like to try out in the future.

Programming these events has given me invaluable experience and has been very enjoyable, if seriously hard work! Here are some of the things I learnt: 

– Not to over-programme and to think seriously about how much time you will have in one workshop if you have different activities to complete.

– To be really flexible when programming events: last minute changes can shake things up considerably and it is best to have a plan B when that happens.

– To say ‘no’ to things when necessary and to keep it simple so you can give lots of thought to each element of a project. If something seems really difficult, it probably will be, so think of another way to do it, or use your plan B.

– To use a framework for evaluation which makes things nice and clear and helps you to identify your objectives and how to achieve them, as well as making you think in advance about how to measure success. In other words, I have learnt that evaluation is a crucial part of event planning and helps to keep you focused throughout a project.

– To programme events for families. I learnt lots about family audiences and what makes a good family event. The most important things I learnt were that thoughtful touches made all the difference to families and they really appreciated lots of clear information. I learnt that a launch event is a great way to start a family season as it gets word out there.

– To budget carefully and keep updating the budget.

– To work collaboratively in a team (and with the Watershed team!) to produce an event, across departments and organisations.

– To utilise joint marketing opportunities. If print is not necessary, it is still good to come together to discuss cross-promotion and sharing resources.

– To understand the Watershed work-flow and people’s roles in the organisation better and am more familiar with the systems in place and to understand where Watershed fits in with other Bristol arts organisations.

– To lead on marketing and event planning, production, delivery and evaluation by being committed, hard working, flexible, creative and unafraid to ask questions.

What I would do differently next time

• Price confidently
• Plan interaction with customers into this e.g. content prior to event / content around it at the time / info flow to them in run up to event (new box office system will make this easier).
• Have a longer lead-time to help with planning and implementation and spend some more time on the PR opportunities.
• Use a different way of communicating across the group e.g. Basecamp.
• See if we can have a dedicated family page on the website and assess our family friendliness and include info to make our family offer more enticing and field some faqs.
• Have even more clearly defined roles within the group to share workload more. 
• Set clear targets to measure success against (e.g. number of attenders we want next year).

Course summary

Doing the Future Producers course has been fantastic I have learnt so much about producing, engagement and participation, family events, roles in the sector, the arts industry as a whole: I’ve had the opportunity to spend dedicated time researching and reflecting on what I would like to do in the future. I have learnt some new skills, such as animation, filmmaking, photography and have met lots of great people along the way. Having the opportunity to explore and experiment with my own artistic practice has reinvigorated my confidence and I am keen to use my creative skills more now and am really looking forward to the animation/illustration/filmmaking collaboration between myself and Alex. Its been quite a journey spanning around 6 months, full of ups and downs, mad moments and challenges, but mainly lots of fun and satisfaction. There is still lots I would like to learn and I hope to continue to develop as a creative practitioner in the future.

Thank you to…

Hannah WW, Amy and Louise for being great team members and always smiling; to the other Future Producers for their bags of creativity and skill sharing; all the artists we talked to and worked with and to Rishi and Kieron; Hannah Higginson, Clare Simmonds, Claire Stewart and Maddy Probst for mentoring our group throughout the course, and to Paddy and Grace for fielding my many questions; all the Watershed departments for your help and patience, especially box office, events and projection; and to the other Bristol organisations who helped promote our events and Ellie Jeffs for her fantastic work bringing us all together for the FAF; and of course to everyone who attended the season, it was a great experience.