Last week we were given a very detailed introduction to operations & health and safety within the Watershed thanks to Operations Manager, Layla Barron. Although I am well-familiarised with health and safety having been a premises manager over many years, it was refreshing to recap over the details.

We then welcomed back Lycia, following from our ‘The Story of Change’ workshop, and recapped/re-thought the concept of success with the following questions discussed:

What we are hoping to achieve? – we are hoping to put on an event/curate online exhibition of film,. create a community, build a legacy for the Electric December brand, engage a younger audience in Watershed projects and the film industry in general, and increase online and offline audiences.

Who will be the most impacted and why? – young filmmakers and the Watershed by showcasing talent and strengthening Watershed’s youth engagement.

Where are we at with evaluation? Do we know why we’re evaluating? What do we need to strengthen or need help with? How can the group help? – we are evaluating our project to maintain sight of aims and feedback on on-going process. Currently, we are proceeding with project without taking the time to evaluate, although the knowledge of how we evaluate is making us question decisions we hadn’t before. We could perhaps schedule in occasional evaluation meetings?

If we know already, how will we measure the impact of our project? Whom we survey? What date we collect and how/frequency? Data analysis? Reporting? – Measure success via online stats and engagement/sharing/via Facebook/twitter/Watershed website data analysis. Google analytics. Feedback/survey from filmmakers.

Lycia didn’t seem to think we were approaching our evaluation in the right way but we did suggest it may be because the project is so far away and we have barely begun with enough to evaluate now! Also the project is mostly based online so we will need to base our research into our success heavily on web stats alone.

After this session I was able to publish the Electric December mood board on Pinterest which is a live update of images the team find that mirror the discussions we have made into the design of the website. This can be found here (still being worked on) I also commented on questions set out by David Redfern, Watershed online publishing manager which can be found here.