When applying for a European grant, most of the time you are likely required to define a quality assurance and evaluation strategy to guarantee that the project will reach the expected goals. This guide will help you reach those goals and keep your partners and stakeholders motivated, even if they have been part of the design process. From the idea design to the implementation, each project is a learning practice. Monitoring and evaluation are essential elements of this process. Both should be seen as an integral part of the process and not an add-on.

This toolkit is aimed at sharing an approach to monitoring and evaluation by suggesting using creative games and visual techniques along with standard monitoring and evaluation tools.

The exercises in this toolkit have been sourced from many people that have inspired us. Some are approaches that are familiar and it is difficult to know who invented them. We hope that this guide will serve as tools to anyone in charge for managing European projects or any kind of project and hopefully they will help you to tell the story of your project.

We extend our gratitude to all of the organisations and individual who have supported our project along the way.

In June  2018 Melting Pro welcomed the Connect partners in Rome for the final review of the theoretical modules, teaching methods and a train the training on mentoring lead by Adrian De La Court and Sian Prime of Goldsmith University of London.

Taking the opportunity of the European colleagues’ presence in our city, Melting Pro in collaboration  with the Culture Department of the City of Rome, and the Istituzione Sistema Biblioteche Centri Culturali  organised an event “Connect Rome - Conversations on Audience Development, Cultural policies and Higher Education".

Local cultural professionals attended the event at the Library Institute of Rome, a long-standing and active cultural organisation next to the famous Villa Borghese. The event was organised by Melting Pro and the project partner CKI in collaboration with the municipality of Rome.

This report shares the outcomes of those conversations around four themes, which are central to the training delivered within the Connect project:

Capturing Data

Engagement

Cultural policies

Skills and training needs

The key questions that were discussed were:

·      How can cultural organisations become more relevant?

·      How can they be part of building a different future?

·      What skills do cultural professionals need to develop?

·      How can we understand our audiences?

The event was labelled as a European Year for Cultural Heritage event since it aimed also to reflect on how audience development could make cultural heritage more relevant to audiences, more connected to their needs, more inclusive and sustainable in the long term.

We are hopeful that readers will find the outcomes useful for their job in becoming more audience focused.

ADESTE+ Lisbon Summer School "Empowering audiences, reimagining culture" is the first one of a series of 3 that will be developed in 2019 // 2020 // 2021, in the framework of the ADESTE+ project. It was from September 23 to 27, 2019 at Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.

The ADESTE+ Lisbon Summer School fosters a hands-on approach, which introduces participants to the overall conceptual and theoretical framework of audience development and invites them to engage proactively with participating organizations, practitioners and experts.

This is the first day video:

People and communities as a core value: placing audiences at the centre

Teresa Patrício Gouveia, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
Susana Gomes da Silva, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
Inês Câmara, Mapa de Ideias

Placing audiences at the centre

Alessandra Gariboldi, Fondazione Fitzcarraldo
Anne Torreggiani, The Audience Agency

Placing audiences at the centre – What does it mean?
3 different institutions, many questions

Alessandra Gariboldi, Fondazione Fitzcarraldo
Anne Torreggiani, The Audience Agency
Susana Menezes, Teatro Lu.ca
Sara Duarte, Anabela Almeida, Alfredo Martins, Teatro Meia volta
Alda Galsterer, Fernando Belo, Carpintarias S. Lázaro