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Impact Toolkit

At ArtsWave, we believe that the arts contribute significantly to the quality of life in our community. ArtsWave's Measuring the Impact Toolbox is designed to strengthen the capacity of arts organizations to collect and apply impact data. The lack of rigorous and reliable impact data is a significant barrier to increasing community impact, comparing data across organizations, and documenting impact to maintain and grow funding. The main goal of the Toolbox is to develop a compendium of resources that will enable arts organizations to more readily and systematically use data and outcome measures to increase their community impact.

Cultural Equity Toolkit

Measurement Basics

A logic model is a systematic and visual way to present and share your understanding of the relationships among the resources you have to operate your organization, the activities you plan, and the changes or results you hope to achieve.

There are multiple methods and tools that can be used to collect data, but you must decide which method(s) will best address your measurement needs. This guide summarizes the pros and cons of the most common methods for data collection.

Choosing the right type of chart depends on the characteristics of the data and the relationship you want displayed. This summary will help you pick the best chart for your needs.

Survey Design Tips

Whether you’re designing an online, paper, kiosk, or mobile survey, this survey design checklist will help you build a better questionnaire.

One of the most frequent mistakes made in survey design is poorly written rating scales. It's hard to create a good scale. Instead you are better off rewording your question slightly so that you can use one these common rating scales.

Measurement Workshops

One of the most efficient ways to gather information about people is to have them complete a survey. However, for this to be successful, survey questions must be written in a way that motivates and allows respondents to provide accurate answers. This workshop is intended for individuals who wish to gain a basic knowledge that will allow them to develop their own surveys or evaluate the quality of surveys that have been developed by others.

The main purpose of this workshop is to provide a common understanding of the basic concepts of impact measurement and ArtsWave’s Program Theory for Impact to support successful completion of the Impact portion of the Annual Impact Grant Application.

The main purpose of this workshop is to help you make sense of the data you have collected. While the primary focus is on survey data, the concepts are transferable to other types of data.

The main purpose of this general capacity-building workshop is to prepare your organization to begin impact measurement.

Additional Resources

Data Collection


An audience response tool that you can use to gather live responses via text, web, or twitter. Pricing varies depending upon audience size.

An app (for android or ipad) that helps you create quick, easy, and engaging tablet surveys. It is designed to collect data with or without an internet connection. When you’re finished, survey data can be exported into Excel for analysis or you can create pdf reports within the app. Pricing is by monthly subscription and varies depending upon the number of devices and the size of the survey.

A tool that helps you curate material from social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram and more) to create stories. The stories you create can then be shared through a variety of mechanisms.

A web application that helps you create contact forms, online surveys, and invitations so you can collect the data, registrations and payments you need without writing a single line of code. A Survey Monkey product, pricing varies depending upon the number of users, surveys, and reports.

Data Presentation


A web platform for creating dynamic maps and developing location aware applications. Pricing varies depending upon the amount of data you have.

Drag and drop your way to visually stunning infographics and interactive charts. There is a limited-feature free version, but pricing for the professional version is very reasonable.

A free data visualization tool that helps you create interactive graphs, dashboards, maps and tables from virtually any data and embed them on your website or blog in minutes.

A free site where you create, save, and print word clouds in any shape from any body of text.

A one-stop shop for the creation of infographics and data visualizations. It provides a platform for buyers and sellers of infographics to get them made, distributed, liked, commented on, and shared.

A tool for creating word clouds from text you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.