I just had the pleasure of co-presenting a workshop for the National Guild for Community Arts Education with their Boston Ambassador, Kathe Swaback of Raw Art Works. We focused on inspiring arts organizations to use their data to demonstrate their impact in creative ways. The presentation I used is hosted on Prezi.com.
I shared some powerful examples and helped them talk to each other about the challenges and successes in their organizations.
One challenge in our conversations was getting from mission, to outcomes, to ways to measure those outcomes and evaluate impact. We took the approach of inspiring folks with ways they could communicate those data-stories once they had the data, rather than getting mired down in their individual outcome-identification processes. The Guild is creating separate programs to help them do that, so I didn’t feel bad about taking this jump.
We practiced using different types of data presentation techniques using an excerpt from the MuralsArts PorchLight evaluation done by the Yale School of Medicine. After scanning the handout, I assigned each small group a technique to use.
They came up with amazingly creative ways to tell the impact stories they saw in the data. Everything from expressive data dancing, to participatory interviews where people move to answer questions! I look forward to seeing how these organizations can adopt and try out some of these techniques.
Data Therapy 
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