Hey, I’m Aden Date
I help arts organisations understand and communicate their value
Evaluation and strategy services that help you understand your audiences, adapt to changing demands, and advocate for the work you do more effectively.
Tell the story about your work the world needs to hear
You’re leading a fabulous arts organisation, and the value of the work you do is clear when you speak with the audiences you delight and the artists you support.
However, the value of the work you do somehow vanishes when you’re asked to put it into a PDF. The transformative impact you achieve is suddenly reduced to pastel bar charts, “so what” demographic statistics, and quotes without context.
As a result, you might also find yourself telling a slightly different story for each funder or audience, and none quite line up with the stories that you share internally — the excited, wild stories of transformation that happen every day.
The end result is that evaluation becomes fragmented and just another obligation. Strategy, advocacy and evaluation don’t talk to each other. There are spreadsheets everywhere and nobody seems to have the full picture.
There’s gotta be a better way, right?
Take control of the narrative
An evidence-backed story about the work you do is the single most effective tool for maintaining relevance and funding
And it doesn’t need to cost the Earth.
Evaluation doesn’t need an eighteen-page data framework, an lawyer-approved MoU with a sandstone University, or fancy software that overclaims and underdelivers. It just requires a clear description of what you do, why you do it, and some evidence as to whether you’re on track or not.
Evaluation is where strategy, learning, and advocacy come together. Arts organisations that invest in evaluation have a sharper focus, make a bigger difference for audiences and artists, and can speak proactively to funders in a language they understand.
Good evaluation saves time, improves learning, and brings in funding.
“Aden is highly professional, inquisitive and thorough, and his collaborative approach makes him very easy to work with. He has developed a clear evaluation framework that will guide the strategic development of our boorda yeyi program and we greatly value the trust, expertise and thoughtful process he brings to this project..”
Alana Culverhouse, CEO, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts
Who I help
You’ve got a great project and it needs to be evaluated
Project-based funding often carries an evaluation requirement. Some organisations just commission a report and get on with it, but smart organisations use the project as a chance to build evaluation capacity internally and align strategy, learning, and advocacy.
You want to level up your strategy
Five-year strategic plans are dead in a sector that changes as quickly as ours. Good evaluation turns your strategy into something actionable and adaptive that directly supports your advocacy goals (and gives your board something positive to talk about).
Funders are asking for it
Evaluation reports that look like a spaceship dashboard — all numbers, bar charts, and statistics — simply don’t cut it anymore. Funders want to hear the stories behind your work and to know what difference their investment made. They’re invested in this shift. Heck, they might even pay for you to do this work.
A story-first approach
impact is a story, not a statistic.
Stories are how we understand the impact of our work. We’re shaped by the conversations we overhear, the debriefs we have with our artists, and the earnest emails we get from our biggest fans. This is what we share in meetings, and it’s where we get juicy quotes for our annual reports.
My approach centres on building a simple system around stories so that the data you are already collecting informs your strategy, learning and advocacy.
This is rigorous, real work and it’s what progressive funders want. “Stories” are only fluffy if we collect them without clear intention.
Stats without stories tell us nothing.
Stories with stats tell us what matters.
A process that puts you in charge
→ why
The best evaluations bridge strategy, learning, and advocacy. However, it’s important to know what our near-term goals are: A funding application, a report, or a new strategic plan. This also includes knowing our funders needs and taking their concerns into consideration (without being dictated by them!).
→ whaT
Most evaluation consultants will begin with a Theory of Change — a massive framework that tells you what work you need to be doing. Instead, I help you start where you are with the stories and stats are you already collecting. Avoid duplication and build evaluation around how you already work and think.
→ how
A Theory of Change is a living strategy that communicates how the work you do makes a difference. It’s an internal and external resource for strategy, learning, and advocacy. It doesn’t need to be long — we can build one in three months, three hours, or three minutes depending on your organisation’s capacity.
→ who
Depending on the project, we’ll decide what is conducted in-house by you (with support) and what is conducted by me or another external consultant. My goal is to support you to bring as much in-house as possible so your evaluation is affordable and futureproof. I don’t want dependent clients.
sector evaluation scan
A brief report on the state of the sector.
Commissioned by Creative Australia, written by me, and written for you.
“Aden led us through a complete overhaul of our social impact assessment and evaluation processes. He understood our need to be self sufficient in many aspects of evaluation and trained our team in undertaking these processes themselves. Thanks to Aden CAN is now able to communicate our impact in a way we have not been able to before. .”
Miranda De Baughn, General Manager, Community Arts Network
Indicative costs
Every engagement is slightly different. contact me to discuss your project.
For project-based evaluation:
Project-based evaluations should allocate 1-2% of their budget for evaluation (inclusive of my fee and likely on-costs, e.g. software or artist payments). If you’re in the planning or application phase, you should add it as a line item (if your funder hasn’t requested it already).
For organisation-wide evaluation:
Organisation-wide evaluation should last for a full strategy cycle (~3-5 years) and the cost will mostly be borne up front.
Large organisations (over $5m p.a.) should expect to spend $50,000+ building a sustainable approach to evaluation.
Medium organisations ($1m - $5m p.a.) should expect to spend $10,000 - $50,000 building a sustainable approach to evaluation.
Small organisations (under $1m p.a.) should expect to spend as little as $5,000 - $10,000 building a sustainable approach to evaluation.
The main factors that impact costs are the complexity of the project and the extent to which data collection can be done in-house. Organisation-wide evaluation can and should draw on both strategy and project-based evaluation budgets if done correctly.