Managing Evaluation: A Community Arts Organisation Perspective.

Area of Science:

• Arts and health research
• Organizational studies
• Program evaluation

Background:

• Arts and health organizations face increasing pressure to demonstrate impact to stakeholders.
• This demand presents logistical and ideological challenges.
• The study explores the tension between organizational ethos and external evaluation requirements.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine how arts and health organizations navigate external demands for evaluation.
• To understand the relationship between an organization's ethos and its approach to impact measurement.

Main Methods:

• An ethnographic approach was employed, with the primary researcher embedded in the organization for one year.
• Data collection included informal discussions and twenty semi-structured interviews with staff and participants.
• Qualitative data analysis involved coding transcripts and identifying emergent themes.

Main Results:

• Organization staff viewed evaluation as both necessary and useful, but also time-consuming and potentially threatening to their ethos.
• Staff successfully negotiated evaluation terms to satisfy both internal needs and external stakeholder requirements.
• The organization actively reworked external evaluation demands into processes compatible with their operational framework.

Conclusions:

• Arts and health organizations can maintain their core ethos while responding to external evaluation pressures.
• Strategic adaptation of evaluation processes allows organizations to meet stakeholder demands without compromising their values.
• This approach facilitates the integration of evidence generation within the organization's existing framework.