Gathering feedback
The final category of questions is about understanding people’s subjective experience of your work. This is arguably the most insightful and yet challenging part to evaluate. We want to know people’s true feelings about their experience, yet we also need to be able to analyse, compare and make sense of the feedback we receive.
So how can you gather feedback from people effectively when it comes to digital work?
Use an outcomes framework
An outcomes framework is a good way to structure feedback to support analysis and comparison and also relate feedback to the intentions of the work.
An example of an outcomes framework can be found in the Impact and Insight Toolkit created by Counting What Counts in partnership with Arts Council England. The Dimensions Framework in this Toolkit was co-created with the arts and cultural sector. It provides a shared language for how arts organisations describe their intentions for their work.
To use a framework like this, you select a set of statements or ‘dimensions’ that you feel describe the potential qualities or outcomes of the work. You then use these dimensions in survey questions that measure the strength of agreement with your chosen statements. Example dimensions include:
- “It held my interest and attention”
- “It challenged me to think in a different way”
- “It helped me to feel connected to people in the community”
- “It was different from things I’ve experienced before”
- “It opened up new opportunities for me”
Download the full dimensions framework for free.
The Impact and Insight Toolkit provides an online evaluation platform which comes with the dimensions framework built in, and which allows you to collect and compare feedback from three different groups: the artists, curators and/or cultural organisation that created the work; peers who have relevant knowledge of the field; and audience members or participants who experienced the work. This approach allows you to understand how the subjective experience your audience and peers have of your work is similar or different to the experience you hoped they might have.
Using surveys
You can also adopt a similar approach to the Impact and Insight Toolkit using your own survey tools. But however you decide to survey your audience, it can be challenging getting people to respond, especially when it comes to work that exists online. Our advice is to keep your list of questions short and consider offering an incentive to encourage responses. For online work, you could email the survey to people after the event or incorporate it more directly, by taking people to the survey. If you’re hosting a work in-person, you could load surveys on to fixed devices or display QR codes which allow people to complete the survey on their own device – this can work well for immersive place-based work.
Tip: It’s worth including some open-ended feedback questions to better understand people’s feelings and to provide important context to your survey results. For example:
Following on from your experience, are there any changes you would recommend to the organisation to inform its future programming?
Culture Counts has some best practice tips for designing surveys.
Embedding audience evaluation
The are other approaches to capturing feedback from audiences, including doing so as part of the experience itself. Digital platforms and tools give us a unique ability to do this, so think about whether you can create a feedback loop between you and your audience. Done well, this allows you to gather the information you need in a way that enhances the audience experience and becomes part of how people engage with your work. Read our article Embedding evaluation into interactive projects for more tips and case studies on this.
Social media sentiment analysis
Another approach to understanding the audience’s subjective experience of your work is via sentiment analysis – analyzing how people talk about a particular work or brand. It’s often used on social media and can be done manually or with an AI tool. At a basic level, sentiment analysis allows you to determine whether comments or mentions are positive, negative or neutral. But you can also use it for more nuance. For example, if one of your desired audience outcomes is captivation, identify words or statements that will help you categorise which comments speak to this. Remember the culture of the platform you’re using – people communicate differently on social media than they might do on email or in person. And context is key, so scour for sarcasm. Hootsuite has a guide to getting started with social media sentiment analysis.
Regardless of whether you choose to adopt social media sentiment analysis as an evaluation method, it’s important to make time to listen to what people are saying about your work online. It’s a crucial feedback loop and unprompted feedback can shed valuable light on the audience experience.
Telling a story with your data
Piecing all your data together to tell a clear story is the last step in understanding and communicating the impact of your project.
Here’s a reminder of the three categories of audience data we’ve looked at:
- Who are you reaching and engaging?
- How are they finding and interacting with your work?
- What is their subjective experience?
The insights you gain can be used in several ways:
- To refine your current work, for example by addressing any negatives or gaps between expectations and the audience’s actual experience.
- To inform future work that you might want to create. Is there anything you would you do differently next time?
- To paint a picture to stakeholders about what went well and what you learned. This might be funders, management, the audience/community who engaged with your work, and/or the wider sector.
The more we can share insights and learn from each other, the better we’ll be at understanding and communicating the value and impact of digital arts and culture, and the stronger we’ll be as a sector.
Illustrations by Jazz Rumsey
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