Develop Your Evaluation Plan
It’s a good idea to develop your evaluation plan at the same time as your event plan. To develop an evaluation plan, you need to know what your objectives are, what indicators you will use to measure your objectives and who your stakeholders are. Objectives for your evaluation will be the same as those for the project.

To identify your stakeholders, ask: “Who can help us understand if we are meeting those objectives?”. Arts in the Parks evaluation focuses on a range of stakeholder perspectives that allow us to understand the event from different angles. We call this a 360-degree evaluation because it provides feedback from the point of view of different stakeholders. From 2016 to 2018, we collected 3149 surveys from attendees, volunteers, artists and arts organizations and community organizers.

Indicators are elements that help you identify and measure what you achieved – how many came to the event, from where, how long did they stay, did they enjoy the activity, etc. Indicators can be quantitative (statistics) or qualitative (narratives).

For example, one of the objectives for Arts in the Parks is to make arts more accessible for residents living in the inner suburbs of Toronto where there are few dedicated arts facilities. We consequently survey audience members to determine how many attendees are from the neighbourhood or region of the city where the event took place. We also ask how they found out about the event, who they came with, what barriers they faced to getting there, if they felt welcome in the space, and if they enjoyed themselves.  

With a few minor changes we have been using the same set of indicators (or asking the same set of questions) since 2016. In 2018, we did a round up of evaluation results from 2016 to 2018 to compare responses over a number of years, which helps us see how our initiative is growing and what areas need improvement.

Ontario Trillium Foundation Evaluation Resources
Online courses and webinars from OTF are great resources to help people with evaluation, including:

1. OTF’s online Evaluation E-Learning course
2. Evaluating Your Pilot: Setting yourself up for success
3. Impact measurement:  What Makes Arts for Change Work Excellent

“We began to understand this summer that community engagement is vital to successful Arts in the Parks events. We were very pleased to be invited to take part in a pilot project to engage local artists in the events and would suggest that this kind of activity is very important in continuing to bring arts programming to communities outside the downtown core.”

- Artist, 2018