The influence of your activities on changes (positive or negative) in your audience and in society, that is impact. It is important to measure this because it provides insight into the intended and unintended (societal) effects caused by you as a cultural institution.
Want to learn more about impact? Read the article What is impact? and discover the value of impact measurement.
How does Festival Cement do this?
Impact usually refers to the societal effect of art, but what makes a work of art valuable to you? Festival Cement - a nine-day theater festival in ’s-Hertogenbosch - conducted several years of research into the experience of a work of art; what personally moves or touches you.
This research revealed an important conclusion: an experience is always subjective and depends on:
- The circumstances you are in.
- The context in which the experience is presented.
- The experience level of the viewer. (Do you often attend art events? Are you able to reflect on them? How easily can you articulate your feelings?)
- The preparation. (Did you read up in advance or do you prefer to be surprised?)
- Expectation.
Is impact always important?
Based on these insights, Festival Cement concludes that the experience of art is so personal and subjective that assessing and measuring the intended impact by an artist is very difficult. Therefore, they developed a way to capture that personal experience.
Slumber: ode to the subjectivity of an art experience
The festival discovered that visitors find it difficult to put an experience into words and decided to develop a product for this. That product is Slumber, an app that helps you create space for your emotions and thoughts around a visit to a performance or exhibition. In an interactive way, Slumber provides tools to explore ‘the wordless.’
Moment of meaning-making
Slumber focuses primarily on the phase after a visit, the process of meaning-making following the art experience. Through associative questions, the app tries to prolong this process as much as possible. What did you feel? Which color best matches this feeling? What did it remind you of? Together with Slumber, you arrive at the impact echo. You know what the art experience has done to you.
Next steps
Testing showed that visitors appreciate that Slumber works in an artistic way. Festival Cement's goal of extending the art experience seems to have been achieved. The next question is how they can turn the subjective and specific information into meaningful data for presentation venues or broader audience analyses. These insights could lead to even more beautiful art experiences.
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