Cultural Indicators Pilot
This project's final report and evaluation was completed on 16 February 2016
Project approach
The objective of the Cultural Impact Framework (the framework) is to provide decision makers with the necessary capacity to make wise, intelligent, 'value for money' and sustainable choices to make life better for their community.
Cultural Impact Framework instruction manual
The framework is a collection of tools developed to enable decision makers to consider and measure the impact of any decisions on culture, and for municipal councils to understand the effectiveness and impact of their cultural investment on cultural activity, assets and infrastructure. The framework describes five cultural domains: values, engagement, creativity, connectedness and cultural sustainability, each with a set of three indictors and provides various tools for data collection, interpretation and reporting.
The tools developed are:
- Framework with Step-by-Step instruction guide to using the tools including:
- SA Cultural Impact Guide - in determining cultural impact
- Narrative Evaluation Tool — guidelines for consistent reporting
- Cultural Activity Assessment -projects, programmes and events
- Cultural Asset Assessment - buildings, infrastructure and collections
- Annual Internal Cultural Overview - general data including personnel, budgets
- Annual External Cultural Overview - from external data sources relating to the local government area)
- Surveys templates for each data collection area
- Cultural Impact Assessment tool — impact of council decisions on culture
- Council report template regarding cultural impact
Throughout the development of the project the Steering Group and consultants were keen to engage stakeholders from across Australia who are working in the cultural indicator field.
Interested stakeholders were kept informed of the development of the Framework and Toolkit as it progressed. This has resulted in on-going relationships with the National Local Government Cultural Forum, Flinders University Laboratory Adelaide project, and interest from State Government bodies to utilise the tools to determine the impact of projects on community culture.
The Steering Group have been able to present findings of the project to date as it progressed to various forums and conferences including:
- LGA Annual conference 2012 and 2015
- Regional Arts Conference 2015
- the Australia Council for the Arts Learning Forum in Melbourne 2015
- National Local Government Cultural Forum meeting October 2015
- Social Theory Politics and the Arts Conference (International) in Adelaide 2015
The work has engendered great interest and has been well received in all contexts to date.
The Cultural Indicators Pilot Project received a Highly Commended Award in the category of Community Partnerships and Collaboration at the Local Government Professionals SA, Leadership Excellence Awards in 2016.
Project outputs and outcomes
See above regarding specific outputs.
Project distribution
Printed copies of the Framework and Guide have been distributed to all SA Councils. It is also available in pdf form and xls (spreadsheet) format, available here and distributed on USB with the printed copies.