The Heritage Lottery Fund has, over the past 13 years, given £4billion to heritage projects of all kinds. As the Fund has matured a greater emphasis has been placed on the evaluation of the social and economic outcomes of this funding. In 2004 we reported on progress with evaluation of the programmes targeted at particular types of heritage (Clark, Citation2004). The greater challenge has been to evaluate the outcomes from the Fund's generic programmes, which can fund any type of heritage and which between them account for over two-thirds of total funding. This article reviews the Fund's experience over the last 3 years in developing and implementing an evaluation system using the Public (or Cultural) Value framework. It presents some initial results from the research so far completed and reviews how far the framework has been useful in suggesting research priorities and organizing findings. Keywords: heritageevaluationlotterycultural valuesocial impacteconomic impact Acknowledgements Our thanks go to Robert Hewison and John Holden for working on an earlier draft of this article and who introduced us to Public Value. Gail Fawcett, Helen Monger and Isla Campbell at HLF have all contributed to the management of the research programme, whilst Catherine Ware has played a major role in helping HLF to make use of its internal data. Our thanks also go to each of the research organizations involved in the work who have made an important contribution to the development of the programme including Steve Mills at BDRC, Jenni Jordan at Applejuice, George Barrett and Louise Scott at Ecotec, Matt Rayment at GHK, Anna McPherson and Paul Drury at The Paul Drury Partnership and James Morris at IPSOS Mori. Notes 1. A joint programme run with English Heritage. 2. A joint programme run with the Big Lottery Fund. 3. The plan was extended from 2002–07 until 2008. 4. At the time of writing, Defra were developing indicators for well-being. A summary of the work can be found at http://www.sustainable-development.gov.uk/what/priority/wellbeing.htm. In a presentation to the Sustainable Development Commission (Anon, Citationn.d.), suggested indicators include health, how we spend our time and relationships. Dolan, Peasgood, and White Citation(2006) also suggest ways of looking at well-being. 5. Capital projects are re-sent the survey 5 and 10 years after completion. 6. HLF has undertaken customer care surveys since it was set up. In 1995 Contract Compliance Monitoring and Standard Output Data, and Customer Care Surveys were brought together into a single contract, undertaken by IPSOS Mori. The raw data on Output Data has been analysed internally by HLF (Maeer, Citation2006, Citation2007) and on Customer Care (Monger, Citation2006, Citation2007). 7. These figures do not include "Awards for All", the grant programme for awards of under £5000 that HLF contributes to. 8. The inclusion of a project under any of these topics does not preclude its inclusion in another – so these figures cannot be summed. 9. All results are the mean of the first 2 years of fieldwork. 10. The sample across all sites is 878 respondents. 11. These results are for the smaller sample of respondents across all sites that were able to make the comparison, since they had visited the site before the HLF project took place. 12. These figures do not include Awards for All, the grant programme for awards of under £5000 that HLF contributes to.
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Clark et al. (2008) studied this question.