aceUVi

CODA: COMBINING MEASURES
OF EXPERIENCE AND QUALITY AT
THE POLICY LEVEL
Throughout this literature review, we
have presented perspectives on how
people are affected by arts and culture
and how these effects can be accounted
for either at the individual level or
within the context of organisations.
However, discussions of the value and
impacts of cultural participation have
also been prominent at the policy level.
While the statistics collected by ministries
of culture and arts agencies around
M Chappell and J Knell, 2012, Public Value
Measurement Framework: Valuing and Investing in
the Arts—Towards a New Approach, Government of
Western Australia, Department of Culture and the
Arts.
C Bunting and J Knell, 2014, Measuring quality in
the cultural sector: The Manchester Metrics pilot:
findings and lessons learned. Arts Council England.
the world used to focus almost exclusively on outputs, participation
rates and economic and social impacts (Selwood 2002);
NEF 2008, 8; Turbide and Laurin 2009, 60-61; Radbourne et al
2009, 4-5; White and Hede 2008, 20), government bodies are increasingly
developing more sophisticated accountability frameworks
that take the audience experience and organisational
quality into account.
At the time of this writing, two separate but related initiatives—one spearheaded
by the Department of Culture and the Arts in Western Australia, the other championed
by a group of arts organisations in Manchester, UK—have joined forces
to develop, test and implement a new system of evaluating the work of cultural
organisations. In this emerging framework, opinions expressed by audience
members in post-event surveys are combined with self-assessments by the organisations
and reviews by peer evaluators to gain a fuller understanding of the
quality of the organisations’ programmatic output. While a full discussion of this
initiative is not possible since the work is on-going, this coda briefly addresses
the project’s general approach towards integrating the quality of the experience
reported by attendees (ie, the audience’s experienced impact) within a larger
measurement framework.
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