Data patching and public value

28 Aug 2014

What relevance does the art of quiltmaking have to measuring the social impact of the arts? In her second of three posts, Catherine Althaus offers some helpful insights into how the metaphor of the quilt can aid the telling of more persuasive stories about  public value.

Anyone who has seen the Winona Ryder movie How to Make an American Quilt will know something of the significance of quilting in culture. In fact, Indigenous cultures around the world often use blankets or quilts as expressions of honor and esteem including to recognise elders in their own communities, or those of other communities they visit.

The blankets piece together materials and symbols of particular meaning. They are more than just physical materials stitched in a pattern. The materials themselves, as well as the way they are put together, are educative and pass knowledge across generations. They often tell a story.

Furthermore, the process of quiltmaking is community building. Quilting invites participation and expression. The process, as well as the ‘product’, speaks to issues of social justice. A quilt promotes peace and harmony. It can be an expression of celebration or protest.

What have quilts got to do with public value in the cultural sector?

I believe that quilting can be a helpful metaphor for the process of data patching. By this I refer to the piecing together of various pieces of quantitative and qualitative information and evidence to build a narrative that can be used to establish the public value of cultural activities. It also involves using diverse data arguments piggybacking off other non-contested public activities, by connecting arts activities to other public enterprises and programs to boost their overall public value. For example, arts mentoring programs might be used as part of an anti-bullying campaign, public art might partner with new infrastructure project proposals, or a graffiti program might help provide a crime prevention strategy.

Telling a story of public value is more than just writing a case study. It is more than identifying audience numbers. Data patching suggests you need to draw together a number of different pieces of evidence into a coherent and persuasive narrative that will demand your funder/investor to either retain existing funding or inject new capital. The data patching implied by quilting serves the scientific need to triangulate data and collect meaningful evidence, as much as imparting this information in a transformative way and as a thing of beauty.

Remember my previous post on using storytelling to establish public value to funders and investors? There I proposed that a metanarrative has to be identified and then reframed in order to move along a traditional bias that discriminates against cultural activities in favour of more tangible social programs such as health and education. Data patching provides you with one of the important tools to identify these metanarratives and act to change them.

For the arts practitioner seeking funding or justification of public value, you may want to consider the process of quilting as a way forward to how to conduct your data patching and storytelling. Imagine yourself inviting funders and investors to be part of an arts program public value quilting circle. What will be the purpose of the arts program quilt? What story will it tell? What materials will you use? What community will be invited to design and make the quilt? What purpose will it serve? How will you assess the quilt? Either imagine the answers that your funders/investors would make to these question or perhaps even consider inviting them to participate in such an exercise. In establishing answers to these questions, you may find narratives, designs, materials or processes that speak to the evidence you have to piece together to satisfy the needs of your public value audience.

All aspects of public expenditure are subject to scrutiny but some areas have more success than the arts in defending their position on public value. You may want to check out these areas to see what data patching they have performed, or to put it metaphorically, what quilt have they produced?

Additionally, the entire arts sector itself may wish to envisage itself within a societal quilt. What place does it hold in such a quilt? What vision does the arts community have on this question vis-à-vis funders, vis-à-vis audiences or the broader community? If this vision is not the same, there may be some merit in exploring whether this matters and what to do about it.

The beauty of the quilting metaphor is that it reminds us that data patching must be more than just stitching together pieces of information into random patterns. Data patching requires meaningful connection of quantitative and qualitative information that tells a story and that produces a tangible output or outcome (a blanket!) that can be shared with the funder. If you match the right blanket with the right investor and include them in the process of making the quilt, you have a much better chance of success in persuading them as to its benefits and value.

In the evaluation and social research context, quilting is powerful because it:

• involves design (LOGIC MODEL)
• brings together diverse materials (DATA PATCHING)
• invites participation and community building (COMMUNITY FOCUS & METHODOLOGICAL DIVERSITY)
• conveys continuity and change (PROGRAM LOGIC AND CAUSALITY ISSUES
• tells stories (MARKET AND SOCIAL RESEARCH SENSEMAKING)
• plays a practical role (PROFESSIONAL FOCUS)
• emphasises outputs and outcomes (PERFORMANCE)

When you next have to provide a story of public value, be sure to identify whether your analysis demonstrates these features. Not only will you produce a thing of beauty, you will ensure it is powerful in its ability to fit your cultural activity within a broader system of social, economic, political or environmental value. In this way, you will be able to tell a story of public value that holds currency within a context of scarce resources.

Catherine is Associate Professor, School of Public Administration, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Catherine joined the University of Victoria in 2008 and was recently appointed Associate Professor. There she teaches across the public administration, dispute resolution and community development programs. Her subject areas include policy processes, evaluation, comparative politics and governance, public and community leadership, and community change management. Prior to her time in Canada, Catherine held a number of policy posts in the Queensland Government within the Queensland Treasury department and Queensland Office of the Cabinet. She continues to act as a curriculum, economics and public policy consultant for a range of clients across Australia and Canada. Catherine’s academic training is in economics and politics and public policy and she is currently on sabbatical leave in Australia and England, acting as Visiting Fellow with the School of Politics and International Relations, Griffith University, and then Visiting Scholar with Las Casas Institute at Oxford University. Catherine recently presented at the Brisbane symposium Effecting social change: knowing what works and when to use it, hosted by the Queensland chapters of the Australasian Evaluation Society and the Australian Market and Social Research Society.

Featured image: Freeimages: fabric2