Evaluation Practices for Arts and Culture Leaders

Overview  

How do you know whether your work is making a difference? Who gets to decide what matters, and how can evaluation help you learn, strengthen relationships, and make more informed decisions?

Evaluation in Practice is a hands-on, experiential course for cultural leaders who want to develop meaningful and practical approaches to evaluating their programs, projects, and organizational work.

Rather than treating evaluation simply as a process of measuring outcomes or meeting reporting requirements, this course explores how evaluation can become an ongoing practice of learning, reflection, relationship-building, and accountability. Drawing on regenerative evaluation principles, participants will consider how evaluation can build capacity, strengthen relationships, and contribute more to the people and communities involved than it asks of them.

Indigenous evaluation approaches are integral to the course, inviting participants to consider how knowledge is created, whose perspectives shape an evaluation, and what responsibilities come with gathering and using information. Through attention to relationships, reflexivity, reciprocity, and relational accountability, participants will explore how evaluation can support learning, strengthen relationships, and contribute to community well-being alongside documenting results.

Description

Participants are invited to bring a project, program, or organizational challenge that they can explore throughout the week. Through guided exercises, practical examples, peer exchange, and facilitated reflection, they will progressively develop a learning framework that identifies what matters, how they will understand change, and how learning can inform their work.

The course combines structured instruction and practical application with creative activities, movement, embodied practices, and opportunities to connect with the surrounding land. These approaches invite participants to engage with evaluation not only as an intellectual or technical process, but also as a practice shaped by lived experience, relationships, values, and different ways of knowing.

Program highlights

• Develop a practical learning framework for a project, program, or organizational challenge. 
• Gain experience with adaptable evaluation tools and templates that can be used to plan, implement, and communicate evaluation activities.
• Build foundational data management skills, including approaches to organizing, documenting, and working with qualitative and quantitative information.
• Explore creative and participatory methods for gathering and interpreting evidence, including ways to involve communities in defining what matters.
• Examine the opportunities and limitations of AI in evaluation, with practical considerations for its ethical use in organizing, analyzing, and interpreting information.
• Apply Indigenous, relational, and regenerative evaluation principles to consider how evaluation can support reciprocity, shared learning, community well-being, and organizational capacity.
• Create a practical action plan identifying next steps for introducing or strengthening evaluation practices in their own work.

Requirements

This program is designed for arts, heritage, and creative industries professionals working in leadership, programming, strategy, community engagement, research, or evaluation.

No previous evaluation experience is required. The course introduces foundational concepts and provides guided opportunities to apply them. Those with evaluation experience will have space to critically reflect on their existing approaches and explore new ways of working.

It is well suited to: 

• administrators, managers, and directors in arts and heritage organizations and creative industries
• creative producers and consultants working with arts organizations
• education and engagement specialists in these sectors
• community-based arts and heritage workers in urban and rural settings 

Applicants working outside the arts, heritage, and creative industries must demonstrate in their application how their work will benefit from this program.

Eligibility

Applicants must be 18+ at the time of the program start date. 

Domestic and international applications are welcome.

Visa Eligibility Information: 

• Please note that Banff Centre programs do not meet the eligibility requirements for a Canadian Student Visa.
• If you are accepted into our program, you must obtain a Visitor Visa to enter Canada. Accepted participants are responsible for identifying and complying with the immigration requirements to enter Canada as a visitor from their country of origin. If you require a Visitor Visa please check the current expected processing times well in advance of applying.

Inclusivity Statement

We welcome applicants of all ages (18+), backgrounds, gender identities and expressions to apply. Artists from historically underrepresented and equity deserving groups are especially welcome.