Short Abstract

Reflections and insights from the Bradford 2025 Evaluation Team on building and nurturing a collaborative and sustainable culture of learning; and using and valuing data and insights in the context of a unique, complex and rapidly evolving cultural delivery organisation.

Description

Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture (CoC) was a district-wide celebration of culture, creativity and heritage across Bradford’s diverse communities and places. With thousands of events involving millions of people from Bradford and beyond, Bradford 2025 delivered an incredible cultural and creative programme including multiple art forms, local, national and international collaborations and commissions; spanning cultural learning, sector development, community-led approaches and socially engaged practice.

Preliminary findings show that Bradford 2025 successfully delivered its key outputs and outcomes although evaluation activities still continue apace to demonstrate progress towards longer-term impact and ambitions.

Whilst the design and detail of the CoC programme was still ‘work in progress’, a small in-house evaluation team was designed and developed from scratch to support the implementation of a comprehensive evaluation strategy, using Bradford 2025’s story of change, developed with local stakeholders as part of the CoC bidding process, as its starting point. The emerging team built and nurtured multiple relationships, networks and partnerships, formal and informal, to create an effective, collaborative and sustainable evaluation and research network to deliver the evaluation. This was in the context of a rapidly evolving delivery organisation, initially without any data strategy, infrastructure, governance processes or pipelines and whose organisational culture, values and ways of working were still emerging.

This presentation explores some of the highs, lows and learning points from the Bradford 2025 evaluation team’s efforts to develop, embed and maintain a culture of learning; work collaboratively; and create an environment in which data, insights and evidence were valued and used transparently at all levels. We will share the challenges of doing this this whilst simultaneously building and adapting data collection, management, analysis, visualisation and dissemination approaches to respond to a unique, dynamic and complex programme of cultural and creative events and activities, from its runway, through take-off and flight and into landing.