The Celebration Evaluation
Bank of Ideas — Belfast City Council
Bank of Ideas is a participatory budgeting programme run by Belfast City Council that gives individuals, unconstituted groups, and small community organisations a low-barrier route to small grants for creative community projects. Each year, project holders develop their ideas, pitch publicly, and the wider community votes on who receives funding. The celebration and evaluation event marks the close of each funding cycle, bringing all funded project holders together in one room to reflect, share, and look ahead.
The Celebration Evaluation
Turn your end-of-programme party into a complete mixed-methods dataset — by embedding your evaluation questions across five creative stations: a quantitative sticker wall, a qualitative zine, a narrative journey roadmap, a public blue sky futures wall, and an anonymous bank vault. Participants make, score, map, and dream. You walk away with everything you need to report.Phase 0 — Before You Start
Your objective is to design five stations that together cover quantitative, qualitative, narrative, aspirational, and anonymous data — and to embed your evaluation questions so completely inside each activity that participants never feel like they are being assessed. Plan the evaluation and the celebration at exactly the same time, because they are the same event.
Ask yourself before you design anything:
- What are the 3–5 things you regularly claim about your programme — and which are evidenced versus believed? Every belief is an evaluation question waiting to be answered.
- Do you need to measure what the programme delivered (organisational outcomes) or how it changed people (think, feel, behave differently)? Both need different stations.
- Which questions need a number, which need a story, and which need a safe anonymous channel — because not everyone will say the hard thing in public?
- Who will photograph every completed output before anything leaves the room — and have you confirmed that with them in advance?
- Has your artist facilitator seen an example completed output and do they understand the evaluation question sitting behind each activity?
Surface What You’re Actually Trying to Find Out
Before you design a single template, list the statements you make most often about your programme. Sort each one: is it something you know through evidence, or something you believe is true? Every belief is a gap in your data. For each belief, ask why — at least twice. The residue of that questioning becomes your evaluation questions, and those questions become the hidden architecture of every station you build.
Action + Tip
- Action: Write your 3–5 core programme claims on separate sticky notes. Mark each K (know through evidence) or B (believe or feel). For every B, push harder: why do I believe this, and how would I know if I were wrong? Use each answer to generate one concrete evaluation question.
- Tip: Separate your organisational questions — did the process feel accessible, were people supported? — from your participant-change questions — did they build confidence, did connections form? These types of questions need different stations. Mixing them in a single activity muddles both the making experience and the data you get back.
Design the Five Stations — Questions First, Format Second
Each station reaches a different type of participant and answers a different type of question. Design them as a suite, not as five separate activities. Together they triangulate across number, story, image, aspiration, and anonymous honesty. The sticker wall and the zine are deliberately paired: one produces the score on each outcome theme, the other produces the story behind it, from the same person in the same session.
Action + Tip
- Sticker Wall — Quantitative: Print a large-format poster with five outcome statements — Engagement, Belonging & Connections, Confidence & Skills, Well-being, and Creativity & Enjoyment — each running a 1–10 horizontal scale. Pre-print each participant’s name on a sticker sheet. They place their sticker on the scale for each statement. The whole wall photographs as a complete dataset in seconds.
- Zine / Collage — Qualitative: Fold A4 paper into a four-page booklet. Print one of the five outcome themes at the top of each page with a generous blank space below. Provide cut-out images so participants can respond through collage as well as writing. The zine gives the qualitative story behind each sticker wall score — pair the two outputs in your report.
- Journey Roadmap — Narrative: Design a single illustrated template with a visual route and labelled waypoints matching your programme stages: first contact, development, public moment, results, what’s next. Participants fill in what happened at each stage, mark their magic moment, and note what they plan to do next.
- Blue Sky Wall — Aspirational: A large, publicly visible display where participants write their hopes and visions — for their project, their community, or the programme itself. This station is celebratory and social by design: people read each other’s contributions and conversations ignite. The wall belongs to everyone in the room.
- Bank Vault — Anonymous: A sealed physical container where participants post anonymous cards carrying critiques, concerns, or feedback they would not say in public. The vault prop signals clearly that honest, private feedback is actively wanted and will be protected. This station catches the data that every other method misses.
- Tip: Place a completed example output at every station before anyone arrives. Participants should be able to see what a finished response looks like without needing it explained verbally.
Brief Your Facilitator — On the Why, Not Just the What
Your artist facilitator needs to understand the evaluation question sitting behind each activity — not just the instructions for running it. A facilitator who knows you are trying to find out whether participants felt genuinely free to be creative will ask very different follow-up questions than one who thinks they are simply running a collage workshop. Brief them the week before. Not on the morning.
Action + Tip
- Action: Write a one-page brief for each station covering: the evaluation question it answers, the participant instructions, one example of a rich response, and two prompting questions to use when someone is staying surface-level.
- Tip: The facilitator’s job is not to explain the activity — it is to create the conditions for depth. A single well-placed question after someone finishes (“what surprised you most about that?”) can double the richness of a response.
“If you had to point to one thing on your map you genuinely didn’t expect — what would it be?”
“Forget the practicalities for a second. What would you do next if anything were possible?”
“You’ve given it a seven on the wall — what would have made it a ten?”
Run the Room — Celebratory First, Evaluative Always
On the day, participants should feel like they have come to a celebration that also happens to generate insight — not a review meeting with craft supplies. Set the room so stations run around the edges, food and social space sit at the centre, and people can move between activities in any order. The sticker wall works best near the entrance. The vault should sit somewhere slightly apart so participants can approach it without an audience.
Action + Tip
- Action: Assign one person to each station for the full event. Their role is to notice when someone is staying surface-level, ask a depth question, and ensure every template has something substantive on it before that participant moves on.
- Action: Plan for 20–25 minutes per participant at the zine and roadmap stations. The sticker wall should take under five minutes. The blue sky wall and vault can remain open throughout.
- Tip: If you have to choose between running all five stations thinly or running three well — run three. A well-facilitated zine and roadmap with a functioning vault will produce better data than five rushed stations. The sticker wall is always worth keeping because it is fast and produces immediately usable numbers.
Harvest the Data — Photograph Everything Before Anyone Leaves
Your data lives on paper and it is perishable. Assign one person whose only job at the end of the event is to photograph every completed zine page, every roadmap, the full sticker wall, every blue sky card, and every vault card — before a single item leaves the room. Do not rely on collecting physical items after the event: things get taken home or lost in the clear-up.
Action + Tip
- Action: Give your data harvester a checklist: sticker wall (full shot plus close-up per question), all zines laid flat one page at a time, all roadmaps, all blue sky cards, all vault cards. Upload to a shared folder the same evening.
- Action: Sort all outputs by station into labelled folders after photography. Vault cards must be kept separate and handled only by the evaluation lead — anonymity must be protected all the way through to the final report.
- Tip: Photograph the sticker wall while it is still mounted — the spatial clustering of names across the scale is itself data. A group of names bunched low on Well-being tells a different story than the same average score spread evenly across the range.
Zine / Collage → sort pages by theme; identify recurring images, phrases, and metaphors; treat image choices as data.
Journey Roadmap → read for the moment change happened, not just whether it happened; note how many roadmaps name a concrete next step.
Blue Sky Wall → cluster by theme: more funding, collaboration, continuation, systemic change.
Bank Vault → read every card before categorising; never attribute vault content to named individuals in any report or conversation.
Mechanism Map
- A celebratory end-of-programme gathering of all funded project holders in a single venue
- Five physical stations: sticker wall, zine/collage, journey roadmap, blue sky wall, bank vault
- Pre-designed templates with evaluation prompts built into the making instructions
- A facilitator at each station who understands the evaluation question behind the activity
- A designated data harvester with a photography checklist ready before the event begins
- Quantitative scores across five outcome themes, spatially visualised on the sticker wall
- Rich qualitative narratives and imagery from the zine, paired to those same scores
- Programme-arc stories revealing when and how change happened, from the roadmaps
- Forward-looking aspiration data from the blue sky wall for strategic planning
- Honest unfiltered critique from the vault that surfaces what every other method misses
- A full photographic record that doubles as reportable visual evidence
- Participants who leave feeling heard, celebrated, and part of something ongoing
| Station & Output | What It Shows | Reporting Strength |
|---|---|---|
Sticker Wall Named 1–10 scores across five outcome themes from all project holders in a single session |
An immediate visual and numerical snapshot of how participants rated their own experience of Engagement, Belonging, Confidence & Skills, Well-being, and Creativity. Spatial clustering on the scale reveals whether high scores are unanimous or whether outliers are pulling the group mean. | Strong for benchmarking and funder reporting. Directly comparable across cohorts if the same five statements are used each year. |
Zine / Collage Qualitative written and visual responses keyed to the same five themes as the sticker wall |
The story and imagery behind each score. Participants described gaining confidence to take on a creative space of their own, forming unexpected partnerships, and experiencing the collective gathering as transformative. Image choices reveal what participants associate with each outcome theme — often more honestly than words alone. | Strong for illustrative evidence in reports and for surfacing unexpected outcomes the original questions did not anticipate. |
Journey Roadmap Completed narrative timeline templates mapping each project holder’s full programme arc |
Reveals when change happens in a programme, not just whether it happened. Multiple participants identified a high-stakes public pitching moment as the point their confidence shifted — regardless of outcome. Several roadmaps showed concrete future plans demonstrating sustained impact beyond the funded period. | Strong for demonstrating depth of change over time. Roadmaps provide ready-made narrative case studies that require minimal editing for reports. |
Blue Sky Wall Public aspirations and futures statements, visible and discussable in the room |
Surfaces strategic themes including desire for an ongoing community of practice, calls for longer-term funding pathways, and ambitions for wider reach. Also captures individual project aspirations signalling sustained creative ambition beyond the grant cycle. | Useful for strategic planning and programme development. Strong for demonstrating participant investment and collective forward momentum. |
Bank Vault Anonymous critique and feedback cards deposited privately during the event |
Captures what does not appear in any other station: concerns about process, requests for structural changes, frustrations participants would not voice in a group setting. This is the most honest signal in the whole dataset — and the one most likely to drive meaningful improvement in the next cycle. | Essential for programme improvement. Must be handled anonymously throughout — never attributed to named individuals in any output. |
Pair Every Number With Its Story
Cross-reference each participant’s sticker wall scores directly with their zine pages — a person who scored themselves 4 on Confidence but filled their zine with images of open doors and new beginnings is telling you something the number alone never could. Report the score and its story together, always.
Let the Images Argue the Case
Photograph all zines and roadmaps flat, then print a curated selection directly into your report as primary evidence — a spread of completed collages showing what “belonging” looks like to thirty different people is more persuasive to most funders than any bar chart carrying the same information.
Read the Vault Before You Write Anything
Read every vault card before drafting a single line of the report — the anonymous feedback will almost always reframe at least one finding. If several cards raise the same concern, that concern belongs in the body of the report, not in a footnote, even though nobody said it publicly.
Because we used a Creative Celebration Evaluation, participants in our community funding programme felt celebrated and safe enough to share both their proudest moments and their most honest critiques — giving us the quantitative scores, qualitative stories, and anonymous insights we needed to demonstrate impact and design a better next round.