Date: Thursday, March 13, 2025
Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
Hello! We are Mateo Porciúncula, the evaluation lead at ICTJ, and Mike Moore, an independent researcher & evaluator.
Some of the most powerful interventions with real people in real communities center shared creation and art. Yet interventions with art often trouble planners and funders in results-focused contexts, because their influence seems hard to assess.
As evaluators, we are in the perfect position to address these concerns. We can help support the best of these approaches and help move output-focused folks towards better evaluations.
Interventions that center engagement with art – meaning creative work of any kind by any person – are often chosen by practitioners on the promise of lasting change, authentic participation, and healing of participants along the way.With advocacy and social change efforts, such as in transitional justice where we developed our work, participatory artistic interventions are claimed to heal individual trauma, help reconnect communities, and produce powerful influence in political and cultural agendas. We can easily point to dozens of compelling claims with plausible explanations such as relatability, emotional power, genuine engagement, and adaptability in creation & experiencing of the art (such as here, here, here, here, here, and here).
Does evaluation of these interventions require special experience or skills or methodologies?Stephen Duncombe of The Center for Artistic Activism described that we can look past the art to the aims and intentions of the intervention – what are we trying to accomplish and what are the best ways that we have to investigate that accomplishment?This should sound quite familiar to evaluators as the reminder to get past outputs – the immediate products of a program – to wider or deeper outcomes.
We can use our position as evaluators to turn doubts about artistic interventions into good questions and better evaluations. Take doubts and pose evaluation questions to resolve them. If it isn’t typical where you work, this could also be a chance to encourage program designers to share goals with you early in their planning and leverage your support.Identify claims and effects, and establish meaningful methods to collect data and assess change.
If your organization or clients are already good at evaluating beyond outputs into outcomes, let interest in artistic interventions be an opportunity to remind decision-makers of your success. Speak up early about how you can evaluate important outcomes as in prior projects. Use known methods to assess advocacy or healing. If you need help, review your AEA TIG selections and ask for advice on a methods or an issue TIG that fits!
If your organization or clients are very output-focused, the power of artistic interventions could be a new way to push for more meaningful evaluation. Be the research leader that brings in examples of artistic interventions that matter to your organization or clients.Get program leaders talking about what these interventions could bring, and be ready to explain how sound evaluation can be the perfect complement.
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.