Young Cultural Creators can make a difference to young people, their families, the staff delivering the project and the organisations they represent.

In order to evaluate these differences and make them explicit, begin by identifying the outcomes which you hope will be achieved through the project.

Agree with your partners a list of outcomes for the project. For each desired outcome a checklist of success criteria can be constructed. This in turn can inform what sort of evidence and documentation is collected throughout the project.

Outcomes and success criteria

This list gives examples of how success criteria can be matched to desired outcomes. It can be added to and adapted to fit the specific needs of the partners involved in your own project.

Desired outcomes include:

• young people are stimulated and widen their reading
• young people are inspired to creativity
• young people and their families make more use, and more confident use, of the library, gallery, museum, or archive centre
• a broader range of young people access reading through the library
• project partners have an increased awareness of each other’s resources and activities
• staff delivering the project have increased skills and awareness relevant to their roles and responsibilities

Make a selection from the menu on the right to find out more about each outcome.

Evidence collection

When collecting the evidence to see what outcomes the project has achieved, check through the following points:

• plan into your project enough time for evidence collection
• decide what statistics you need and how you will collect them – eg. number of children, number of sessions
• decide what qualitative evidence you need and how you will collect this – eg. through observation and questionnaires.

Keeping a good documentary record throughout the project will provide you with a lot of relevant material. Personal statements made by participants during the project can be particularly valuable in advocacy about the impact of the project.

Your documentation might include:
• the aims agreed by each of the partners
• a list of desired outcomes
• notes of all planning
• agreed statistical collection
• notes of key activities (as well as the obvious occasions like the workshops this might include what is said on the coach back to school and parent/carer reactions to the display and celebration)
• observations: a project log could be contributed by each partner
• personal journals and portfolios contributed by the young people themselves which, as well as logging their experiences and impressions, might include a self assessment of how they have developed through the project
• questionnaires, case studies, interviews and discussion notes
• photographs and videos can be very powerful documents.