![© Marc Wathieu](/sites/default/files/styles/square_large/public/images/news/5263053787_960e125fdc_o.jpg?itok=UdBMucKB)
Look, I am priceless! IETM’s new toolkit on how to assess your organisation
Our newest publication “Look, I’m priceless! Handbook on how to assess your artistic organisation” aims to guide art professionals through the key steps of evaluating their organisations, whether they have chosen to do it themselves or if a funder or decision-maker asks them to do so and provides them with pre-conceived tools.
The first part of the toolkit provides the reader with an insight in the general principles that structure the evaluation process; the second part lists and explains the various tools an art organisation might choose to use for their evaluation; the Annex includes a blank template that can be adapted to specific needs, and a visual summary of the self-evaluation process.
The toolkit builds on the belief that arts organisations need to be equipped with the right tools to defend their own agenda when it comes to define, measure and investigate what is the ‘value’ of arts to our troubled societies. Art should not be reduced to a policy instrument and should not follow any agenda other than its own. That is the core principle that guided this toolkit too. That is why the publication does not follow the typical self-evaluation toolkit pattern, which predefines the ‘value’ and elaborates allegedly universal tools to assess it. Instead, it allows the organisation to decide whether the focus of its evaluation will be ‘innovation’, ‘participation’, ‘vibrancy’, ‘inclusion’, ‘artistic excellency’ or anything else the organisation considers important.
The toolkit considers the variety of contexts it may be applied within, and so it addresses both organisations able to commission evaluation to external experts and organisations conducting evaluation in-house.
Look, I’m priceless! Handbook on how to assess your artistic organisation is written by Vassilka Shishkova, independent arts and culture impact researcher, and published by IETM.
Picture: ©Marc Wathieu