DCTV

“Founded in 1972, DCTV is one of the nation’s oldest and most honored media arts centers. It is located in a landmarked firehouse in New York City where community screenings, discussions, youth media, continuing education programs, and affordable filmmaking resources exist side by side with DCTV’s award-winning documentary productions.”

In 2022, DCTV received a professional development grant they wanted to use to promote and encourage a greater culture of evaluation within the organization. They had already invested in a new system to help centralize their information, and felt this was a good time to invest in some strategic and skills building work for their team, to help them decide what impact questions they should be asking, what information they should be collecting and how to set impact evaluation and reporting priorities. 

We designed a custom two session professional development course for the programs and leadership teams focused on impact evaluation and creating an organizational culture of learning. Our first session focused on the “what” “why” and “who” of impact evaluation. ‘Why are we doing this?’ ‘What do we want to learn?’ and ‘Who will be involved?’. We left the group with some questions to help them prepare for the second session. After reviewing some key concepts such as output vs input, and metrics and indicators, we worked with the team to put these concepts into action. The group chose a DCTV program which we used as a live example of how to build a framework for evaluation, and set metrics and indicators.