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Our third Happy Museum purpose, to value ‘happy’ museums, builds on the first work we did with Tony Butler on a work-based learning programme at MEAL. As a paid-up social enterprise, the museum was keen to prove its impact and commissioned us for an Social Return On Investment (SROI) analysis106. We have found the SROI approach very effective because it supports collaborative working by consulting with partners and recognising their contribution. It also values less tangible outcomes, and evaluates the difference we make over the long term, including with preventative services. For MEAL, it showed the fundamental importance of the cultural assets, the hidden value of family outcomes and the need to work with partners to enable participants to progress. The fourth key learning was that it made participants very happy, but at the time, there was no accepted practice for valuing happiness. To address this gap, in the Happy Museum project we commissioning Daniel to do the first Wellbeing Valuation in the cultural sector using a ‘monetisation’ approach in the report ‘Museums and happiness: The value of participating in museums and the arts’.
2.3 The need for a wider approach What we’ve learnt has informed our belief in the need for a wider approach – a whole quality/value framework for culture backed by the forum to discuss it. Figure one above showed why we might evaluate culture. This section looks at how and what we evaluate. We start with some principles. Both the SROI Network and Inspiring Impact have published excellent general principles for measuring impact107. We add these three: To empower people we need to speak plain English to participants – from homeless people volunteering at London Transport Museum, to local museum trustee Lady Celia Forbes – are involved in the conversation. Rather than inputs, outputs and outcomes for example, we talk about what we invest, what we do and the difference it makes. To learn, we also need to define what is unique about culture. A sports programme, for example, may develop self-belief and build a team in the same way that a cultural programme does. But it probably doesn’t encourage the ability to imagine different futures that can result from cultural work. Through Happy Museum, we’ve consolidated our investment language by identifying the social, cultural, financial and natural resources. At the same time we are starting to work on how the ‘returns’ – the difference we make – can be grouped into social, cultural, economic and environmental affects (sometimes benefits, sometimes losses). To value culture, we need to quantify outcomes, and be aware that value is created and lost at all points in the story of change. We are all too aware that many resist valuation because the arts are ‘priceless’. Our view is that the arts are being valued, but by the few cultural leaders who hold the purse strings. Econometric or consultative approaches make valuation transparent and shared.
106 MB Associates, Investing in culture and community. The Social Return On Investing in work-based learning at the Museum of East Anglian Life. 2011 107 SROI principles can be found in the guide at www.thesroinetwork.org/publications/cat_view/29-the-sroi-guide and the code of practice from Inspiring Impact at www.inspiringimpact.org