Date: Wednesday, September 3, 2025
Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
My name is Elena Chernock and I am a Director on the Research & Evaluation team at Third Plateau. I bring over 20 years of experience in the arts and culture sector, having served as a teaching artist, program director, and evaluation consultant for nonprofits, foundations, and government agencies. My role working both within nonprofits and supporting them externally has afforded me a deeper understanding of the disconnect between what evaluation can be vs. what it is for most organizations.
For many organizations, evaluation remains an external process, often required “to prove impact” alongside funding. Program directors are commonly expected to evaluate and report on program impact with very little training, and the cost of hiring an external evaluator is prohibitive for many nonprofits. For these reasons, evaluation is often seen as a burden, a hindrance to the work happening on the ground and a barrier to impact, rather than a driver of it.
But at its best, evaluation can be an empowering tool that centers community voice in program design and supports internal learning and strategic decision-making.
The Arts & Culture Evaluation Lab is an innovative and accessible approach to embedding evaluation capacity within organizations and fostering a culture of continuous learning practice. In Spring 2025, Third Plateau, with grant funding from Contina Impact, launched a 10-week capacity building pilot with a cohort of 13 national arts and culture organizations and 21 of their leaders. The lab was entirely free for participants and included content-focused and working sessions, peer-learning, and customized evaluation coaching and support. Primary topics covered included:
The lab was designed to be applicable and responsive, modeling formative evaluation practices throughout. Each week, we shared back what we heard in the weekly survey and how we planned to adapt our curriculum in response. This helped us better meet organizational needs and tailor the content to be actionable.
The impact of this approach was immediate. We found that 76% of participants have already started applying new knowledge to their organization’s evaluation work; the remaining 24% are planning to apply what they learned over the next 3-6 months. In addition, cohort participants shared how this format helped them integrate meaningful evaluation into their work:
As the field of evaluation works to shift away from historical gatekeeping practices and towards more community-centered approaches, capacity building cohorts are one way to offer a structured, accessible, and non-traditional community of practice. This model is a cost-effective way to democratize evaluation and support organizations as they learn to leverage data-informed decision-making and storytelling.
If you’d like to know more, we’re continuing to reflect on this learning experience and the future of this work on our Third Plateau blog.
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.