Self Assessment and Monitoring Strategies

In the last few years, we have seen a large number of online assessment and monitoring tools being developed to support cultural heritage organisations in their digital transformation. This is a result of a policy-driven trend in the cultural and creative sector for institutions to measure and demonstrate their performance as well as assess their capacity for digital transformation, especially for the purposes of securing public and private funding. The questions and guidance that these self-assessment tools offer, provide a good indication of what is perceived as digital transformation in the heritage sector and how institutions are encouraged to translate it into concrete digital strategies.

What is self-assessment?

Simply put, self-assessment is an opportunity to reflect on how far you’ve come and take action to determine where you want to go next. It’s about benchmarking your current activities against your goals and targets. More concretely, self-assessment is usually a list of questions about different processes and activities that an organisation asks itself in order to monitor its performance. The act of raising those questions within the organisation is one of the goals of this process. These questions can cover many different operational aspects - from curation and programming, to fundraising, staff development and competencies with digital technologies.

Why is self-assessment important?

A number of online assessment and monitoring tools for cultural heritage organisations have been developed over the last five years, and you will have an opportunity to test them out in the next part of the course. This interest in self-assessment strategies points us to the growing push for data-driven organisational culture - a mindset where decisions are informed by systematic gathering and analysis of data. Here data is considered not as a reporting instrument but rather a tool to constantly monitor and steer your performance towards the organisational goals. Data-driven culture can enable organisations to become more agile and responsible to internal and external forces as they can use insights from data to iteratively adjust.

Data is also an important advocacy instrument. As visualised in the figure below, self-monitoring data can influence decision makers - these can be internal (senior managers, department heads) or external (funding bodies, policy makers, heritage networks). For instance, within an organisation self-monitoring data can help managers better distribute resources between different departments or identify topics for new projects and staff trainings. The Enumerate surveys conducted over a number of years by Europeana are a great example of data being used to influence external stakeholders. Enumerate aggregates self-assessment data from individual organisations across Europe to provide a landscape overview of the status quo in the sector. This helps policy makers assess where the sector is succeeding and where additional support (policy changes, funding, capacity building) is needed. 

How to benefit from self-assessment?

To fully benefit from self-assessment, it is important to involve a variety of representatives from different departments within an organisation in this activity. Self-assessment tools cover many areas of work and require in-depth understanding of procedures and processes at different departments and levels. 

While each organisation might devise their own self-assessment strategies and identify self-monitoring questions that are specific to their needs, the use of already existing tools is beneficial for multiple reasons:

• It enables organisations to benchmark themselves against other organisations in the same region or similar context which can be used to identify areas of potential improvement or complementarity. 
• It gives organisations a fresh outsider perspective by challenging them to answer questions they haven’t thought about before.
• It standardises data collection activities across a large number of organisations which provides decision makers with a comprehensive picture of the sector that they can use to make decisions regarding funding, talent development, policy, etc. 
• It contributes to the creation of a critical mass of data about the impact of the sector which helps to raise awareness about its contribution to society and economy. 

In the next section of the course, you will be asked to try out existing self-assessment tools and test your knowledge about self-assessment.