We’re returning to season 3 of our podcast, Reflecting Value: Evaluation Principles in Practice, for a bonus episode!

In season 3, we’ve been exploring our co-created Evaluation Principles. Throughout the season, we’ve been checking in with cultural sector professionals, evaluators and academics about their experiences of using the Principles in their work, both as reflective prompts and practical tools.

In this bonus episode, we’re discussing transparency.

How can we be open with our learning and acknowledge its limitations? Should our evaluations be made available publicly rather than just to the stakeholders we originally had in mind? And who is transparency for? Can we really expect smaller, less powerful cultural organisations to be totally candid with their work in the face of the demands placed on them by funders and stakeholders?

In a conversation facilitated by freelance evaluator Dawn Cameron, we ask what it means to be truly transparent.

Featuring Stella Kanu (CEO at Shakespeare’s Globe) and Ben Walmsley (Director of the Centre for Cultural Value), this episode explores the risks and benefits of sharing evaluations and talking openly about our work.

You can listen to Reflecting Value at Spotify, Apple Music or wherever you find your podcasts and don’t forget to rate, review and subscribe.

Referenced in this episode:

• Impact 08 – Examining Liverpool’s experience as Capital of Culture
• Dear Work, we need to talk by Jo Verrent
• Esmée Fairbairn Foundation
• Paul Hamlyn Foundation
• Here to Stay (evaluation report) and All Of Us (campaign)

Read a transcript of this episode here.

Hosted by Chuck Blue Lowry, this episode of Reflecting Value: Evaluation Principles in Practice explores rigour.

Keeping our evaluations rigorous is crucial if we want our findings to be accurate, giving us the best chance of learning from our activity and making meaningful changes to it.

But how do we make our evaluation rigorous? How do we identify the appropriate methods for our work, and apply them properly? How do we balance pure numbers with the human stories that come out of evaluation?

Join us as we ask our guests about identifying methods, sticking to the evidence and balancing analysis with description. We'll wade into the age old debate - "quantitative or qualitative data?" - and discuss how the two can be properly combined into a mixed methods approach.

You can listen to Reflecting Value at Spotify, Apple Music or wherever you find your podcasts and don’t forget to rate, review and subscribe.

Hosted by Chuck Blue Lowry, this episode of Reflecting Value: Evaluation Principles in Practice explores proportionality.

Proportionality involves doing less - and doing it better. It involves editing yourself down and knowing what you need out of an evaluation, and what you don’t. And it also involves being selective and saying no when you might not be best placed to do an evaluation.

In this episode, we also find out that proportionality is really hard to implement. To be proportionate, we have to think about our own role in an evaluation - whether we are a cultural manager, practitioner, evaluator or funder.

Join us as we talk about overkill, adapting methods in face of changing circumstances and regenerative practice.

You can listen to Reflecting Value at Spotify, Apple Music or wherever you find your podcasts and don’t forget to rate, review and subscribe.