Social Impact framework: Literature review

Tender description

Participation in art and culture has proven links to a wide range of social benefits including health and wellbeing, community cohesion, civic participation and education to mention a few. Understanding this impact is important for an artist or cultural organisation for a number of reasons including; demonstrating to a funder or commissioner the impact of the intervention, in helping to share and develop new creative practices or programmes or to make a case for further funding. How these impacts transpire from a particular cultural intervention are often wide-ranging and complex and therefore trying to capture these in a consistent way, through a framework, has eluded the sector to date. Many of these impacts are difficult to measure and value and are therefore neglected or completely ignored in discussions about how best to allocate resources. Against a backdrop of future uncertainty related to the sustained investment in arts and culture both at a national and local level, it is useful and policy relevant to consider wider social benefits which may come about from specific policies encouraging engagement with, and participation in, art and culture in making a stronger case. Social impact measurement is a relatively new field; hence a lot of the methods developed to date to try and capture these impacts have been through experimentation. There is no common language to date on social impact measurement. Despite this a number of social impact frameworks do exist which try to capture the nature of the impact. However, often they adopt a variety of methods to capture these by asking individuals in different ways to plan, measure, value and gauge outcomes.