Bright Culture supported English Heritage with their evaluation of Dover Castle’s Fortress Dover and the First World War project, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
The Project’s ambitions were to build and enhance understanding of Dover Castle’s World War One heritage and story, through re-interpretation onsite, a community events programme and an enhanced learning and volunteering offer.
The commission included developing an evaluation framework collaboratively with the team, which detailed what data was to be gathered, when and by whom – the team worked to this framework as the project was delivered. Bright Culture supported staff and volunteers to undertake evaluation by mentoring, providing advice and expertise and delivering an evaluation training workshop. Evaluation methods included: structured interviewing, online surveys, focus groups, onsite questionnaires and visitor observations.
Delivery concluded with Bright Culture writing the final evaluation report which told the story of the project, highlighting the range of activity that took place, the successes and challenges and the learning that followed. Along with assessing the project against the objectives, outcomes and targets set out in the NLHF Application and Activity Plan and providing a series of recommendations for future activity related to sustaining the project’s legacy and organisational wide learning.
Lisa’s professionalism, experience and ability to see the bigger picture was invaluable during the evaluation of the NLHF supported Fortress Dover project for English Heritage at Dover Castle. The project spanned multiple years and involved many different internal and external stakeholders but Lisa was able to transcend the challenges this presented and deliver a high quality and, moreover, incredibly useful evaluation report. I would readily recommend Bright Culture and, indeed, English Heritage has since engaged their services on the evaluation of a £2.3 million, National Lottery Heritage Fund supported project at Walmer Castle – a testament to their competence and our faith in them.
Hannah Wright, Community Engagement officer English Heritage
