Date: Monday, October 6, 2025
Hi, I’m Patricia Moore Shaffer, founder of ArtsInSight, a division of Shaffer Evaluation Group. This month, I am closing a four-year engagement with a complex, arts- and humanities-based social change initiative designed to advance climate equity and resilience in a large U.S. city. I want to share some lessons learned about evaluation methods that can help capture the depth and complexity of this type of initiative.
Initiatives that braid arts, culture, and community change often evolve in highly dynamic ways. For this project, the evaluation design was modeled on developmental evaluation—with the evaluator embedded on the project team and participating alongside community partners in project activities—to capture learning as it unfolded. This approach allowed me to collect data and interpret findings using rapid feedback loops, and to revisit assumptions about the initiative as new data emerged. This recursive process improved validity and built trust with stakeholders who saw their experiences reflected and refined over time.
Here are a few lessons I’ve learned along the way to inform your work.
Leaders of complex, arts- and humanities-based initiatives may need evaluator assistance to develop a road map for change. Effective tools for framing an intervention include theory of change, stakeholder analysis, and causal loop diagrams.
Complex initiatives are rarely implemented in a planned, predictable way, often changing in response to new learnings, barriers, and changes in context. Evaluators should maintain flexibility with their evaluation plan, including iterating the plan over time.
Any social change initiative will experience a considerable lag between the interventions and results. Measure early indicators (or indications) of progress toward change, such as growth in partnership activities or increased public receptivity toward the arts and humanities.
The nature of complex initiatives makes it difficult to demonstrate causality related to social change outcomes or even early indicators. Instead, use evaluation tools such as contribution analysis to focus on the contribution of the initiative to outcomes and cast a wide net for outcomes by using tools such as outcome harvesting and ripple effect mapping.
For more information on evaluating complex, place-based social change initiatives in the arts and humanities, tap into these resources:
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