What would it take for evaluation capacity to move beyond compliance to confidence, curiosity, and connection? Over 10 weeks, 21 arts and culture leaders joined us in an experiment to find out. The Arts and Culture Evaluation Lab offered time, tools, and trust for leaders to shape evaluation on their own terms — and in the process, helped us reimagine what capacity could be.
With just enough evaluation capacity, nonprofits can keep pace with the grant; with more, they can begin to keep time with their communities.
This idea animated Third Plateau’s recent Arts and Culture Evaluation Lab. It opened space to see what becomes possible when evaluation is rooted in continuous learning and mutual care. And it shifted the focus from capturing outputs to attending to the deeper patterns and impacts that make the work meaningful — the ones that, particularly in arts and culture, so often evade capture.
What follows are the lessons that took shape in the space we built together: about evaluation, about capacity, and about the conditions that allow organizations to turn measurement into meaning.
In spring 2025, Third Plateau partnered with Contina Impact on a 10-week experiment in capacity building. The Arts and Culture Evaluation Lab was a pilot cohort built to address a persistent gap in the nonprofit sector: how to help organizations make evaluation a meaningful, lasting part of their work. At its core was a simple but pressing question: What would it look like to do evaluation differently?
Our offer was clear:
Learn about evaluation.
Learn in community.
Learn while doing.
Through a structured yet adaptive approach, we provided participants with deeply practical tools and real-time guidance to begin shaping bespoke evaluation practices fit for their missions, resources, and communities. It was built for arts and culture leaders who already see the value in evaluation but have rarely been offered the dedicated time, resources, and partnership to make it their own.
We invited a small cohort of 13 arts and culture organizations from across the country, most of them small or mid-sized, all of them doing deeply embedded, community-centered work. Many had gone years, even decades, without meaningful support to evaluate their programs, despite being asked to prove their impact again and again.
In the space we built together, there were no reporting requirements. No deliverables. Just space, structure, and support. And, perhaps most importantly, a shared belief that evaluation could be more than an exercise in grant compliance. It could be a tool for reflection, strategy, and storytelling, and a way of honoring the communities at the heart of this work.
As professional evaluators, we’ve spent years supporting organizations in measuring what matters to them — but more often, what matters to their funders. This experiment reminded us what evaluation can be when the pressure to prove gives way to a desire to learn.
We saw participants ask different kinds of questions — the slow and deep ones. We got to see 21 program and executive directors look for the meaning in what they do.
Some explored how to involve their communities in evaluation, drawing from culturally responsive and liberatory practices. Others built new data collection tools from scratch. A few simply gave themselves permission to notice patterns they’d felt for years but never documented.
The process was rarely clear-cut or linear, but it did feel real.
As we watched folks begin to find their own way to evaluation — grounded in relationships, contextual relevance, and rhythms of doing that made sense for their work — how we understood our old friend, capacity, began to change.
Capacity became confidence, curiosity, and a willingness to try without having total clarity. It wasn’t, as so many presume, some transfer of technical, specialized knowledge. It was something more: the conditions that allow people to trust what they know, elevate the voices of their communities, and make meaning into movement, on their terms.
While grant funding from Contina Impact allowed Third Plateau to offer this cohort at no cost — and provide the tools, space, and support for participants to begin building their praxis — some conditions were, and remain, beyond our control.
After all, one program can’t buy arts and culture leaders more time. It can’t conjure new funding to invest in the people power required to sustain equitable, participatory evaluation. It can’t untangle the funder-grantee dynamics that govern what gets prioritized — and too often, continuous and strategic learning doesn’t make the cut.
We also couldn’t change the broader moment arts and culture organizations are navigating, one marked by active threats to their communities and operations. In the final weeks of the program, one participant shared that their organization would be closing due to government funding cuts. Others were actively in the struggle to stay afloat, fighting to keep their doors open as support for their work recedes.
Capacity building alone can’t change the world unless these dynamics shift, too.
What we offered may have been just a drop in the bucket. But, in just 10 weeks, we reached 13 organizations and 21 leaders — unusual for most traditional third-party evaluations. It was still only a drop, but it was one more drop. And in a desert, that counts.
Capacity, at its best, is not the thing that papers over the cracks. It’s what helps us stay in the room long enough to do the real repair. It’s built slowly and in relationship. Held collectively, not individually. Not measured in checklists, but by what becomes more possible as a result. The Arts and Culture Evaluation Lab was one imperfect but meaningful, 21-leader-sized step toward that kind of capacity.
What made this approach work was its mix of flexibility, trust, and participant-led design — elements that transform evaluation from a static deliverable into a living practice. It points toward a way capacity building can be both deeply human and strategically innovative. And for funders, it’s a chance to back not just technical skills, but the conditions that make durable cycles of learning possible.
In just 10 weeks — and with a single philanthropic investment — we saw what becomes more possible when evaluation is rooted in trust, flexibility, and care.
As evaluators and social sector professionals, we hope it’s not the last. Not because it needs to scale in size, but because it invites us to scale differently: through trust, practice, and the quiet work of staying with the hard stuff together.
And that’s work worth doing, again and again.
With deep gratitude to the 13 organizations and the 21 leaders who shaped the Arts and Culture Evaluation Lab and the learning it made possible: Asian American Arts Alliance, ArtsECO, BTC, Broadway Advocacy Coalition, Great Lakes Children’s Museum, Indigenous Cultures Institute, International Arts & Artists, Leap Arts in Education, Life On Art, Made Space Seattle, Project Commotion, Washington Filmworks, and West Chester Dance Works.
Lance Bitner-Laird (he/him) is an Associate Director on the Research and Evaluation Team at Third Plateau. He helps clients make data-informed decisions, measure and evaluate impact, and build evidence-based cultures of practice. He previously worked at Mathematica, using data to inform social sector clients like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Lance holds a B.S. in Sociology, with High Distinction, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
