Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our webinar where we will be covering the arts and culture finance approach to creating a monitoring and evaluation framework. My name is Nick, the Impact Manager; and I will be joined later in the webinar by one of our investees, Craig Pennington, from Future Yard.

We have the chat feature turned on. Feel free to comment as we go along and have conversations within that. We also have a Q&A box in which you can post any questions you may have as we go along. We will do our best to answer these at the end of the session. Closed captions are available and this webinar will be record and will be made available on our website soon after for anyone who couldn't make it today. Finally, we would be grateful for feedback you have on the webinar so a survey will be sent out after this, at the end of the session.

We are going to start off with a brief introduction to Nesta Arts & Culture Finance and social investment. After that, an introduction to monitoring and evaluation framework, why you might find it useful to your organisation and the key elements such as evaluation questions, indicators and methods. And, lastly, how to bring these elements together to create a monitoring and evaluation framework. After the presentation, you will hear from my colleague Seva giving you information about the fund and how to apply at end of the presentation.

After that, I will speak with Craig from Future Yard about monitoring and evaluation and we will have time set aside for questions from the audience. Before we kick off, a little bit of background on Nesta and arts and culture finance. It is a charity that supports innovation for social good and it launched a strategy focussing on a fair start for every child, a healthy life for all, and a sustainable future where the economy works better for people on the planet. Always enabling the arts culture and economy, around ten years ago, Nesta began to work in the emerging field of social investment and in 2015 began to experiment with bringing this concept to creative social enterprises in England through the Arts Impact Fund. From there, Arts & Culture Finance emerged, giving funds to the arts, culture and heritage in the UK. Across our funds we supported around 40 cultural enterprises so far across a range of art forms, businesses and places, from music to museums, theatres, dance companies and everything else in between. On our website you will find information on all our funds and case studies of every investment we have made to date. So what do we mean by social investment and repayable finance? To put it simply, repayable finance is the umbrella term used for any funding you have to pay back. We define social investment and impact investment as a type of repayable finance that is interested in the specific social outcomes delivered by investees. By that definition, all of the investments in Arts & Culture Finance is social investments since the assessment in social impact forms a key part of our process. In most cases, social investment takes on the form of a loan, although it can include equity and can be very flexible as a financial tool, can fund specific projects but also characterize unrestricted or revenue spend in the charity sector.

Without further ado, I am going to move to monitoring and evaluation framework. This section of the webinar provides an introduction to monitoring and evaluation, information about key elements involved and an example of monitoring and evaluation framework, to help illustrate what these elements look like in practise. It assumes you have a top-level understanding of what outcomes are and also builds on a webinar earlier this year, creating a theory of change. If you missed the session on measuring impact, don't worry, it is available on our website and we will pop the link in the chat so you can look the at it in your own time. That said, although it is contextual information, knowledge of that is not a prerequisite for this webinar.

So, what is monitoring and evaluation? Well, monitoring refers to the collection, analysis and interpretation of information to information decisionmaking and track progress towards achieving objectives. It takes place throughout a project or programme and tends to focus on processes. Monitoring usually relates to the activities you deliver, who's delivering them and the people you might reach.

conversely, evaluation is the systematic assessment of a project or programme to provide evidence-based interpretation of the extent to which objectives were or were not achieved of it usually takes place at the end of a project or programme and tends to focus on the outcomes or impact that may or may not have occurred. Over the next slides, we are going to explore these elements a bit further before exploring a monitoring and evaluation framework.

there is a number of reasons you want to monitor and evaluate. I will run through quickly five reasons in the arts and culture sector is first, monitoring service users' progress. You might want to find out whether you are making progress towards or meeting your intended outcomes. This can be helpful to you as an organisation, but also for service users, as it can help them see their progress they are making.

Understanding and improving your organisation's work. So monitoring and evaluation can be used to help with this. It can help you identify which of your activities work and if some things work better than others, ie, your strengths and weaknesses. Building this understanding of how what you do works, will also put new a good position to improve your organisation's work. It helps you respond to changes you might see.

Accountability to funders, boards and other stakeholders. You will no doubt all be aware that many funders will want to know if you managed to achieve what you set out to. Many factor that into their decision and ask you to evaluate as part of their funding criteria. Likewise, staff and board may want to know how the organisation's performing to ascertain if it's achieving its mission. Similarly, collaborators or partners might want to know you are capable of delivering the things you say you are capable of. Sharing good practise across the sector. Sharing what works across the sector helps organisations to learn from each other and common straights leadership. It can be significant in terms of sharing information with peers, funders or even customers. And, finally, telling the public about what you do. Communicating impact data can build your organisation's reputation. Excuse me one moment.

I should have mentioned at the beginning I have a slight cough. So bear with me as I re-gain my voice.

So, yes, communicating impact and information data can build your organisation's reputation. The better evidence you have, the more effective and persuasive your communication will be. So, maybe why you might want to monitor and evaluation. I want to talk a little about how you go about conducting monitoring and evaluation. If we can jump to the next slide.

Before you can monitor and evaluate your work, you need to identify why you want to evaluate and the things that you actually want to evaluate. Typically at the center of any evaluation there are a number of different evaluation questions you are looking to answer. Evaluation questions set out what you hope to better understand about your project or programme and articulate the main aspects you wish to explore in your evaluation and help focus the data collection.

It's important that you have clarity about what your project or programme is trying to achieve before you plan your evaluation. A theory of change can help you articulate; and planning tools can help intended outcomes. We have more you can look at with respect to theory of change or planning triangles. As I mentioned earlier our previous webinar explains a little bit of background about theory of change.

identifying evaluation questions can take time, time well-spent. Devising a well-framed evaluation question at the outset of your programme will inevitably pay dividends further down the line. It is important to think about the purpose of your evaluation, identifying why you want to evaluate your project or programme is crucial. It is likely there are several reasons so you may want to arrange them in order of priority. We will talk about examples of evaluation questions shortly and hopefully that will provide a little bit of context.

Another important part of designing your evaluation is identifying who the audiences are for your evaluation. It will really help shape your evaluation questions and if you have a good understanding of who you are trying to communicate with and what speaks to those audiences it's more likely that it will be of your use to your organisation, the evaluation. You may consider if it is possible or appropriate to involve some of your stakeholders in the process of forming evaluation questions. As to developing your evaluation questions there are some questions you might want to ask yourself: Who are the key audiences? But particularly: What do the audiences want to know? What evidence do they need of your outputs? What outcomes are they interested in? What speaks to them? Likewise, what type of data do they value, quality of data and evidence or qualitative or quantitative? Are there specific tools that appeal to them more than others?

Alongside this, you may want to consider if there are opportunities to build on your theory. In particular you may want to think about the evidence you have to support your theory of change and identify any assumptions that you have made and any gaps in the existing evidence base. You can consider these within your evaluation and see if you might be able to provide the opportunity to test those assumptions or take steps to address gaps in the evidence base that you have.

There is a range of different types of evaluation that can be useful to you and their uses depend really on the type of work you deliver and what phase of delivery you are in. For the purposes of this session, we're going to look in a little more detail of those more commonly social impact measurement in the arts and culture sector; process evaluation and outcomes or impact evaluation, namely.

process evaluation is similar to monitoring and it's concerned with understanding how well your programme is working. It takes place throughout the programme and sets out to check if your programme is reaching the target groups, how engaged they are and what they think about your service. It helps you to identify and respond to challenges, identify gaps and determine if your programme is meeting its targets.

Usually this is done by monitoring key users’ engagement and feedback data on a routine basis throughout your project. We will talk more about that in due course.

Outcomes for impact evaluation seeks to understand the overall effectiveness of the programme. This usually takes place after the programme is run for a sustained period of time and sets out to understand how the programme has affected the target group. It helps you understand if your programme is bringing about the intended changes and can increase the effectiveness of your intervention. Typically, this is done by comparing the status of service users before, during and after the programme or making comparisons with similar groups outside of the programme. Impact evaluation is similar to outcomes evaluation but is concerned with sustained changes brought about by the programme in the long-term and it seeks to understand the extent to which these changes can be attributed to your work.

For me, one of the most straightforward way to understand the differences between these different types of evaluations is thinking about the types of data involved in collecting it. So -- thank you for bearing with me. I still have a little bit of a cough.

This slide builds on a really useful resource from nvc * capital, helps you understand what types of data are useful for process and for outcomes impact evaluation. Process tells you about the characteristics of your service users and engagement, the extent to which people engage with yourness how they engage with it. Feedback data helps you understand what people think about programme and whether it's working in the way it was intended. In terms of outcomes or impact data, outcomes data tell you about the immediate changes experienced by users as a result of the service and impact the long-term changes experienced by users as a result of the service.

Process data covers what happened, who came, how engaged they were and thought about the service impact data is more involved what changes took place as a result of the services you deliver.

It's probably helpful, then, to look at the evaluations questions you might want to explore along the different types of data to exemplify the differences between process and outcomes/impact evaluation. So when we look at evaluation questions, when we are thinking about users questions, the types of questions you might be asking yourself are how many people did you reach? Did you reach the intended target group?

When we think about engagement questions: What is the attendance rate of the service? How engaged are people when they attend. Feedback questions are more concerned with do people enjoy the programme, how does it make them feel, what do they like most or least. Hopefully these will be familiar to you, and many people ask service users and is a helpful way of designing programmes that really meet the needs of people that you are working with.

When we think about the outcomes questions, these become a little more specific and a little more in-depth; so: What are the short-term changes people experience in attitudes, behaviours, knowledge or skilling?

Impact questions are even more in-depth than that: Did these outcomes that you may or may not achieve help people make transformative changes in their lives. We are working in increasing depth the further down we go. When we think about outcome and impact; we are asking detailed and specific things about what might be happening for people engaged in our service.

Lastly, I wanted to exemplify a couple more complex evaluation questions because I think it is important to understand how they rely on a mixture of process and outcome data to ensure those questions can be thoroughly addressed.

So, first example we might have is a programme where you are asking yourself in and evaluation, what types of people benefit most from our service? If you wanted to answer that question there are a number of different things you need to know and those fall into different types of data so you might need to know in terms of user data what levels of m & e health problems are experienced by the people you are reaching: Mild, moderate, severe. You would cross-tabulate with outcome data, changes in level of self-awareness, self-esteem, self-confidence and self-worth. In this question: Not just are you reaching the right people but are you having the changes you hoped for the people you intended to reach.

Another example: What level of engagement is needed to achieve a set level of increased social connectivity. Engagement data alone will not help you answer that question. It goes some way to answer it, giving you attendance rate: You understand how often people are coming to your service but it needs to be combined with outcome data in terms of how you answer that question properly. So you need to understand not just the attendance rate of the service users but the change in social connections for the users and their understanding of social connectivity. Looking to understand not just were they in the room but are things changing for them.

Once you have a clear idea of what your process and outcomes evaluation questions are, the types of data that might help you to answer them, you also need to focus in and identify the specific information you will gather to help evidence that and how you will collect that data. This may be familiar to you, because these elements, often called indicators, send methods. I will define those. Indicators refer to the specific observable and measurable data to measure how your programme is doing. Methods, refer to the means and ways you collect the data. For example, if an evaluation question is looking to understand if your programme is reaching the intended target group, the indicators might be the number of participants reached so what's the scale of your intervention and the demographic characteristics. So, their age, ethnicity or gender. So you understand if you are reaching the people you meant to, set out to. This is crucial in getting a clear picture. In terms of the method you might use for that it could be participant registration forms completed at sign up so you might need to collect that information once at the beginning of your project but it will give information about who is involved in your project and what their characteristics are.

as you select your indicators and methods, there are a number of considerations and these in many ways tie back to things we talked about previously, such as your audience and what appeals to them. It is worth thinking at this stage what methods might be most useful to you. Quantitative methods help you understand the scale or frequency by expressing amounts or proportions numerically. For example, you have probably all completed survey questions, assessment scales, ratings scales and questionnaires and indeed there may be questions in our survey at end of this.

Qualitative methods help you understand opinions and experiences. Explains opinions through words. You might be familiar with these: Focus groups or reflective diaries. All of this is qualitative methods or information and help you understand more about the opinions and experience of individuals involved in your project. It can be really helpful to use a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods because this will enable you to get a more detailed picture of what is occurring in your evaluation.

The process of using multiple indicators or methods to answer the same evaluation question is known as triangulation. Triangulation can help you improve the reliability of your evaluation and by comparing differently perspectives or mossed, you can explore variation inconsistencies and alignment which add depth to your analysis and interpretation.

Lastly, I think it's important to say it can be really tempting to measure everything. But you should consider if your evaluation activities are proportionate to your project or outcome. The size, significance and risks associated with your project should be a guiding factor. Generally, bigger and more significant projects are likely to require more robust evaluation.

Likewise, it's important to consider the practicalities of data collection and analysis. One-hour video footage takes an hour to film but could take ten or more hours to analyse. Don't overburden yourself collecting data you don't have the capacity to analyse. So, some important, cans in terms of thinking what information you might collect and how you might use that information.

Lastly, a checklist before you start to finalise your evaluation plans and it is really helpful to run through this as you develop your evaluation: You should think about why it's important to evaluate the project or programme; why for you as an organisation do you want to evaluate this project or programme?

What do you want to get out of that evaluation?

What is in it for you as an organisation, what information do you need to extract from it. How do we use the findings and who would your key audiences be. If you can understand the answers to these four questions, it will really help you target your evaluation and your efforts will be worthwhile. Hopefully that gives you a good overview of monitoring and evaluation and some aspects involved within it. What I want to do lastly is provide an example of a monitoring and evaluation framework.

A monitoring and evaluation framework sets out clearly all of the elements that you need to consider to help you answer your evaluation questions. It draws a line between the evaluation questions you are asking and it helps connect them to the indicators and methods that you plan to use to answer those questions.

It also helps you think about who is going to be responsible for collecting that data and at what point will they collect it? So, to talk through the example, we have an example of a number of different evaluation questions here, ranging from users’ evaluation questions right to outcome evaluation questions.

For users' questions, the question we are looking to answer: Did the programme reach the intended target group? Have we the right people in the room, everyone we hoped to reach? An indicator might be the number of people you have, in this case, looking at young people. It might look at demographic information, their age and ethnicity, gender identity. The method for doing this would be registration forms.

And your data collection owner, essentially, the person who would do this collection, hands out the registration forms, is likely to be the workshop leader. And the collection interval that is at registration: You only need to collect the information once, understand who is signed up for your project, who is in the room. Once you have that information you can track attendance so far time. But you only need the demographic information at the outset. There we set out the question, the indicator, the method. Who's going to own that process and when they're going to collect it?

Moving on from that, it's not just enough in many cases to know if you reach the intended target group; you want to know how effective your project is and how engaged people might be. When we think about engagement question, how fully did young people engage with the programme? Indicator, straightforward; young people's attendance at the weekly workshops; are they coming week after week or only attend the first session, do not come back? The method for collecting would be the attendance log, record who is in the room every session and the data collection generally for this is workshop leader. The collection interval changes because we collect weekly. We need this information at every session. Do it when every session happens so we understand from week to week.

When we think about feedback questions, a real problem one might be how did the workshops make young people feel, how did the service users experience it? For example, did it make them feel safe? Did it make them feel supported?

indicators could be young people's reflections on how they felt in the workshops; so you could ask them how they experienced this. The method for this, potentially a one-to-one reflective interview. Ask them how the workshops made them feel. This process, in this instance, we suggest might also be conducted by the workshop leader, but also another member of the organisation. When we think about the interval, this is not information we need as regularly. It might be good to collect it at the end of every term: Are we on track are people experiencing what we hoped, do they have feedback for us to develop our service?

Finally, the outcome questions: What difference did the programme make to young people's well-being? This could be done through participant self-assessment and you could use a scale to do that. It could be done on paper, you could do it online. In this instance, we are talking about doing it with the m & e, well-being scale. This could be administered by the workshop leader again. The crucial difference, we want to do it at the beginning and end of each term: Want to understand how things change over time. So ask at the outset and end.

Hopefully that gives you a good overview of constructing a monitoring and evaluation framework. If you have questions, please send them in through the chat, through the Q&A and we will do our best to come back to you. In the meantime I want to hand over to my colleague, Seva, Head of Arts & Culture Finance, to tell you about some of our funds.

You will see the resources, we will share the slides at the end. I want to draw your attention to manning triangles and theory of change. You can look at that if you want more detail. Have a good look at those at the end of the webinar. I will hand it over to Seva.

SEVA: Thank you. Our main open fund is the Arts & and Culture Finance Impact Fund for flexible, repairable finance from £150 all the way up to £1 million in the form of loans and we are open to other equity agreements and participation agreements. This is a secured and unsecured basis. This means in some cases we look for assets in the applicant organisation that we can take security over, so, in the worst case scenario, if it cannot repay, we could recover. A typical example is building for this purpose. This is something that we would look for in bigger loans. So if they are over half a million pounds, for example, capital projects that require a large amount of investment and where there is proxy security available, we know that not all organisations have assets for this purpose, so we are also prepared to lend. In cases where there is no security at all, for example, to develop new activities or grow existing ones.

In terms of the pricing of those loans, the presence of security has a bearing on the interest rates of the loan, so we price according to our perception of financial risk. So things like how new and innovative a new project looks like, how much experience, track record, the management team has and, of course, the availability of any security, will have the impact on the possible interest rate of the loan.

In terms of timings, this fund is making investments until 2023. It is able to offer finance repayable by the summer of 2030; so for unsecured loans in particular, there is a relatively long repayment horizon. There is a 1% arrangement fee on all loans and no early repayment fee. If things go better than expected, you are able to repay the loan whenever you want. We take a pretty flexible approach to structuring the loans so we look at a case-by-case basis. Obviously, impact assessment is really important to us and I hope you have a sense of how you might talk about that and articulate that through this webinar. In terms of process, to we try to be as kind of straightforward and open and accessible as possible. So, all you really need to do in order to kickstart that process is submit an enquiry form on our website. Takes about five-ten minutes to fill in, basic contact information for your organisation and give us a bit of information on who you are, what you do. We'll then arrange a brief kind of 30-minute conversation on the phone or zoom to get a sense of your history, activities and what you need the investment for; to understand whether it meets your proposal meets the basic eligibility criteria. If we think it does, we will ask business plans, accounts, strategic plans, any information that will help us build up a picture of what you're about and whether the investment case is viable.

That kind of -- if we think it is, it kickstarts a back-and-forth process of questions and answers. You have to be patient with us. We do ask a lot of questions and we also try and visit each applicant in person, possibly see your work in action. But certainly to meet the management team and maybe one or two of the trustees. If all of that goes well, we'll then write an investment application on your behalf that goes to our investment committee. Our investment committees are made up of investors as well as a few independent members and that committee has the final say as to whether a loan is approved or not. They meet quarterly.

So, we will take a number of proposals to each quarterly committee. It takes -- everyone asks how long does the process take? It really depends on how ready you are and how quickly you can supply us with accurate, quality information. If you have all of your ducks lined up in a row, we can move pretty quickly, like within a month from first contact to getting paper to our committee. But typically the process tends to take between two and three months.

But we always say: please, have a conversation with us early, get in touch early, because we always kind of appreciate a heads-up on this; and provide advice on the information that would be helpful for us to see and whether what you have got at the moment is appropriate for our purposes. Very happy to talk about the process and any other aspects of social financing in the Q&A. Right now I am going to hand it back to Nick for the Q&A with Craig.

NICK: Thank you, Seva. It gives me great pleasure to introduce Craig Pennington to you, a co-founder of Future Yard. We want a little time to talk with Craig. Thanks for joining us, Craig. To contextualise the things we talked about thus far, your experience: To kick off, can you tell us a bit about Future Yard, what it is, when it started and what you do.

CRAIG: No problem. Thanks for inviting us today. It is a pleasure to be here. Future Yard is a community music venue and hub which is based in Birkenhead, on the sunnier side of the River Mersey, a relatively new organisation in the sense that we did a large pilot project, a festival in 2019 and opened our venue.

We only have been open seven, eight months because of the pandemic. The whole concept with Future Yard is that it's about reimagining the role of a live music venue as a space for bringing about social change. So we have a live music venue, the heart, soul and anchor of the organisation, which has high quality programming, mix of touring artists and stage for local talents. Alongside that, we run a series of training programmes giving young people the opportunities to develop skills to go on in the live music industry. And the third is about arts development and helping new artists helping them understand the way the modern music industry works and give them tools to professionalise and build a career. You put all three into a building, create collisions in this dynamic space and put that in a place which currently doesn't have much in the way of creating artist activity and a place of acute social challenge and real need. Hopefully, that can be a really strong intervention that can bring about dynamic, meaningful change for local people.

NICK: Fantastic, thank you, Craig. I want to pick up a bit on your background, how did you end up co-founding Future Yard, what is your background, what have you done previously. You have done a lot of things in the past.

CRAIG: My background is in regional music organisations, so I founded a music publication which has been writing about and supporting new music in Liverpool for the last 12 years.

Also I have a background in producing and festivals. I used to run a Liverpool international festival Psychedelia in 2015. I am interested in the involvement of music cities, communities and the economies they can play bringing about change in places. I was one of the people behind the establishments Liverpool's music board with Steve Rothham (phonetic) a few years back. My interest is in music, really, but how it can be used as a powerful way of bringing on change in places and that was always the idea and the vision with Future Yard:

How do we utilise something which is such a key part of the historical narrative and the story, Birkenhead, this is the place that gave us ** and Elvis Costello and amazing backstory of artists that come from this part of the world but with little or no infrastructure that up to that point existed. So, yeah, music and how music can change the world. That's my thing.

NICK: It is clear how you describe Future Yard and how you bring it together. You are talking about this world and how that hope others. You are playing Saturday this weekend.

CRAIG: Yeah. We are a 350-capacity venue. I think that shows the fact that they are coming because they want to support the space and they see the power of venues like Future Yard, especially in a context where music venues in city centres has never been more precarious, it is hard to maintain and solidify the position of these spaces. I think developing new models, new approaches, new ways of sustaining them, rethinking their outputs is absolutely central. We are a community interest company, non-profit established to bring about meaningful and dynamic social change. That's not traditionally the way music venues would be structured.

NICK: Yes, yes. There is a lot to pick up on. I will come back to audiences and the way you are thinking about those. I wanted to quickly touch on your experience of monitoring and evaluation from your perspective. You have been involved in this work, thinking in this way of actually what's effective, what is working, what doesn't. In terms of the more formal things in terms of monitoring and evaluation, where do you place yourself in terms of having experience of that to date?

CRAIG: I am an absolute convert. Before starting Future Yard and establishing a CIC and really trying to solidify and understand the reasons and methods we were going to use to bring about the social change that we were trying to bring about in previous times looking at -- for a long, long time we never received any kind of funding or grant from them for our work. So we never really were channeled down and evaluation pathway. Which is similar to what you have described today.

Since kind of going on that journey I am absolutely enthralled with the process because I find it incredibly useful to be given framework frameworks to help you understand and measure the impact you are trying to create. We have spoken before, Nick, but one of the best funders to invest in Future Yard and support we do was youth music and youth music are very prescriptive in terms of the methodologies they hope to be adopted by their grantees and a lot of what we since developed and built in the evaluation framework is conversation was Youth Music & Arts and understanding that relationship with that funder, so I think it's invaluable and sits being well alongside traditionally, in a straight commercial environment, understanding your audiences is an economically driven motivation. You want to understand audiences so you can sell more tickets. Sell them coming into the building. Similar techniques can sit in both spaces.

If your motivation is bringing about social impact and social change, you can adapt some of those techniques from the more commercial context, I think that's really, really useful.

NICK: Absolutely. I completely agree. You hit the nail on the head in terms of from my perspective what is most important: Future Yard have ownership over what you are doing with monitoring and evaluation and primarily useful for you. You have gone on the journey with funders, you are thinking about what works for Future Yard and what is useful for Future Yard; and that's much better for the conversion that happens never intentionally: Sometimes people do things because they need to fill a requirement.

Really, I think the key thing is if your organisation understands why it's doing it and what is useful to you, you can siphon off to interested stakeholders and thinking up on that point, the audience point is interesting to talk to you about the venue. You say you think about audiences a lot. I would be interested to know your thoughts about how you think about audiences for your evaluation and who are the people you most want to engage with your evaluation.

CRAIG: It is interesting because in the moment we are interested in differentiating between who are -- a lot of time there is a crossover between the two: Who are our customers and who are our community. Because the way that we measure or success with those different audiences is very, very different. So with our local community and neighbourhood -- I mentioned before we are situated in a corridor of three of the most deprived wards in England.

So, the measures that we are adopting in terms of the way that we are doing in that space is all about -- we want a training programme, sound check, designed to give young people to get the skills to go and work in the music industry. We want to look at how many young people in those areas are engaging with our programme and what they are going on to do once they have engaged in the programme, how much progression is there in the programmes we offer. In terms of audiences, who is buying tickets to see OMB and OMD and the heads that come through the door is different. A small organisation with a small team, you only really can deal with processing all of that if you have a very, very strong understanding of what you want to capture, how you are doing it, when doing it, where the data is living. Unless you have a very rigorous process you committed to, you just won't do it because you will get lost in the kind of the melee of the process of especially the small team. Having the frameworks in place is so important.

NICK: One thing to pick up on is the past you looked at monitoring and evaluation frameworks, bringing things together for different stakeholders. With that in mind and thinking about how you have both the things around audience, demographics, reach and spend and evaluations and evaluation data, what is has your experience been in putting together evaluation frameworks and how have you found collecting those together and making a structure for it? How have you got on with that?

CRAIG: It is an ongoing process. I wouldn't say we have a perfect system that is absolutely foolproof and couldn't benefit from any improvement.

I think engaging with your team is really important. One of the examples you showed earlier, Nick, identified who was collecting data at which point during the process in the programme. Having a team -- we have a team of learning mentors that deliver the programme I mentioned before. Making sure the learning mentors intimately understand the programme and the process: why we are asking those questions; how that information goes to shape future information and work and success is really, really important. Otherwise it becomes an admin exercise, which seems: What is the point why are we doing, asking these questions? A really strong engagement in the team, making sure there is plenty of time for reflection in the team, I would say, is the most important thing. Making sure that process is harmonious.

NICK: Definitely. We had a conversation about this in the past. But actually that understanding of not just who's collecting information and involved in that, but also their input into it can be really valuable.

For example, when we talked about the example of questionnaires, I know from experience that some practitioners tell you, if you work with young people, put a question in front of them they may not respond or fill it in the right way. Thinking how to frame that, and having the workshop leaders understand that, how to explain it to young people so they are informed on what they are completing and why. You can have the most beautiful framework but if you have not talked to the people collecting that information it can go to waste and not work. That is a crucial point.

I should mention: we are able to move into audience Q&A here. If you have questions for either Craig, myself or Seva, please do drop them either in the Q&A and the Chat; otherwise Craig and I will keep chatting and we probably could both chat until after the cows come home.

There was a question from Thorsten about distinguishing between process and outcome, impact this process, how much; and two is: How well? And three: Is anyone better off?' That is a good way of distinguishing them.

I am curious to ask, building on your different experiences, what do you feel like you have learnt so far about what Future Yard is doing and particularly about the work you are evaluating. You have had to adjust to different changes in delivery due to the COVID-19 pandemic. What would you share with other people?

CRAIG: We opened during the pandemic and the first thing we learned, the idea of opening a music venue in the middle of a pandemic is interesting. Piqued people's interest, imaginations. Conversely, we have had an amazing response, both from the media, but also from local people. I think that if music and culture . . . cultural activity in that space is important to you, it's more important to you now than it ever has been. I think the power of music to bring people together, that collective experience, I mean, not that it needed proving to us, but certainly over the past six months there has been this gradual relaxing of restrictions. I think we're even more committing to the idea that we can use music as a strong leader for bringing social change in the part of the world that we are working.

That would be my biggest kind of takeaway at the moment, I suppose is a quite top-level one.

Also the focusing in really, the time we spent over the past 18 months in around the area where the venue's based, of the challenges that people are facing. The challenges to just kind of day-to-day getting by, people's lives, especially somewhere which has such acute challenges. I think that it's incumbent on all of us, if you work in a space that can bring about any kind of meaningful social change, I think you have a responsibility to stretch your business and activities in a way that brings that about. If that answers your question.

NICK: Yes, and I think, picking up on it, one of the things we talked about previously, I think you have a really nice way of identifying the outcomes you identified, one was around resilience. That was picked up, if I am correct in saying, looking at things that both people felt they needed within the local community. Also looking at some of the people you worked with in the local authorities that might be appealing to them and also things that might be interested interesting in the music industry. I am not sure I captured that. You had a nice cross-cutting way of looking at resilience and the people you worked with. Is that about right?

CRAIG: You are right. It is a universal quality: Building of resilience, which is linked to confidence in young people; a transferable skill. Just in people's day-to-day lives that holds so, so many people back, especially people coming from a more challenging circumstance. When you look at skills needed in the music industry, the dexterity is need, the wealth of different types of challenges thrown people's ways on a day-to-day basis. If you look at what is appealing to a potential from that or stakeholder in terms of your outputs what's needed within our sector and the young people, that is why we committed to resilience as being one of the things.

When you look at the three main objectives that we have got within our sound check programme, boosting young people's resilience is one of those three. We use a programme rooted in the live music industry as the vehicle through which we do that. That as a positive byproduct will have a much more long-term tangible benefit in young people's lives.

NICK: We have a question from Jonathan Toddhi, 'Great to hear from Craig and Nick and the sunnier side of Mersey. Can Craig talk a bit about raising finance to get Future Yard off the ground and role of Arts & Culture Impact Fund in this? Don't think you covered this.'

CRAIG: I suppose the impact fund invested in Future Yard to help us buy our building. As I mentioned before, live music venues are incredibly precarious. Some research, 3% of independent live musics in the country own their building. When you look at the impact that has on the sector, in terms of its sustainable, health, capacity to invest in its capital, its property, it is a sorry state of affairs. We were fortunate to finance Future Yard; at the beginning it was initial small bits of grants. We were successful with one of the early ideas to fund a project grant through arts council. But at the lower end of those funds we then pulled together and, you know, made something happen by hook or by crook and since have been able to go on and get some additional investment. And then, you know, selling tickets and making shows work is our bread and butter, looking at funds, revenue earned and investments from strategic partners and stakeholders, in a mix is really important to us.

NICK: Thank you, Craig. We have a question here about any other methods or frameworks that we recommend in terms of measuring impact of specifically culture organisations and projects. There is something in the resources hopefully, will signpost to you, Kristoffer, I think it is worth thinking about theory of change. It is helpful understanding the context of everything you do as an organisation. Likewise, if you want to think on a project level as well within some of the links, you will find about planning triangles, a really good way to help structure your outcomes and how to think about how to monitor and evaluate within that. Lastly, I wanted to ask, coming to the close here, one last question for you, Craig:

What's next for Future Yard?

CRAIG: Next for Future Yard? So, I mean, keep growing, keep putting shows on, rolling out our programmes, our artists. We only have been fully occupying our building a few months. We recently found we have been included in the portfolio for Birkenhead, part of the government's Levelling Up agenda. Birkenhead secured capital works so we hope to create a subterranean performance space running alongside our building as well as add studio space to the premises. That is kind of our medium-term goal, which is very exciting.

NICK: Just a few things in the pipeline.

CRAIG: Again, the whole programme: Understanding our social impact and having a robust evaluation and monitoring framework is central to that as well. So, I couldn't recommend enough: investing the time and energy and understanding your organisation is key.

NICK: Thank you. It is 1:30 and coming to the close of the session. Thank you so much, Craig, for giving up the time to talk to us. It has been helpful contextualising your experience and broadly about your experience in social investing. And thanks to Seva and Louisa and the Nesta team and support. I think we will bring things to a close at this point. Please do fill in the survey if you have enjoyed the session. If you enjoyed or haven't, what we can learn from it. We look forward to putting on new webinars. Keep on our site to see what is coming up next. Thank you, bye.