Bright Culture were commissioned in 2018 by Cornwall Museums Partnership to undertake formative and summative evaluation of the Rural Proofing Resilience Programme.
The programme was designed to encourage and enable the cultural transformation of smaller rural, coastal museums across the South West from reliant to independent organisations, to safeguard their future.
Rural Proofing Resilience (RPR) was delivered by Cornwall Museums Partnership, in partnership with South West Museum Development between May 2018 to April 2000. The programme focused on five fundamental areas of museum development: fundraising, finance, business planning, marketing, governance and leadership. With the objectives of supporting museums to diversify income streams, promote positive cultural change, improve leadership, diversify staff and volunteers and support strategic change.
As the external evaluator for the programme Catherine led on formative and summative evaluation of the programme, providing structure, advisory support, external evaluation and analysis of data and evidence. At the beginning of the evaluation process, Catherine worked with the project team to design an evaluation framework and identify some key questions that the evaluation would reflect on and consider throughout delivery and at the end of the programme.
Catherine used a range of different methods to evaluate the programme and collect relevant evidence and data. Methods used included: interviews with participating museums workshop feedback forms, training observations, online surveys to collect quantitative & qualitative feedback from the project team and museum staff, in-depth elearning user testing and team discussions. The final report for the NLHF focussed on pulling together findings from across different elements of delivery, whilst also drilling down into specific learning related to different outputs.