Future Arts Centres is supporting and training arts centres to use a story-based evaluation methodology, Most Significant Change (MSC), to capture impact and measure the impact of arts centres.
We’re pleased to work in partnership with Mark Robinson (Thinking Practice) to create and deliver these learning and training opportunities in MSC.
We’re proud to have now trained thirty-seven arts centres in Most Significant Change.
Our work to equip arts centres includes the following:
Training
In November 2024, we launched a new MSC training programme. The programme includes a mix of in-person and online sessions and is designed to enable people to learn about the methodology, train their teams, implement the technique programme and consider a range of uses in their organisation. Spread over a year, it’s designed to pro-actively support FAC members as they learn, develop and embed MSC.
The training builds on the work and methodology developed by other FAC members through two action research groups.
Action research groups
We held two action research groups on MSC in 2023/24 and 2024/25. Through these, we have shared the methodology, applied to an arts centre context, with 23 arts centres.
Arts centres captured and evaluated stories of their impact; you can read some of those stories here.
Following this action research, we have been able to develop a training programme now available to any FAC member.
You can read more about our other Action Research Groups and the MSC Action Research Group Report.
“The biggest impact has come through people thinking much more about what we do as an organisation. We used the stories in our vision planning – it flipped everything from ‘what do we think we do?’, to ‘what do other people think?’. And we’re not guessing, we’ve got concrete stories and examples.”