Assessment isn’t just about measuring impact, it’s about clarifying your intent so your outcome will be more impactful.

Assessment is essential for æffective artistic activism. Without some form of evaluation, how can you know what sort of affect your project generates and the effect it has?  But assessment isn’t just about measuring impact, it’s about clarifying your intent so your outcome will be more impactful. 

We’ve put together this toolset to help you plan, strengthen, and evaluate your creative projects. These tools are not going to tell you what to do or how to do it, instead, they will guide you through a series of questions so you can discover these things yourself. Using creativity for social change demands accountability, and artistic activists need to learn how to evaluate their work themselves.

These tools are based on years of research and practice that we put into something we call the Æffect Assessment Methodology. This is not a one-size-fits-all evaluation method. It was designed to be as flexible, and contextual, as the practice of artistic activism. 

All these tools are absolutely free and Creative Commons licensed, so we encourage you to adopt them, adapt them, and make them work for you. 

A fantastic step-by-step guide to planning artistic interventions that have impact – and to help you assess whether you have met your goals

Brett Davidson, Director of the Media and Narratives Division of the Open Society Public Health Program

The Æffect App

An online, digital mentor for planning affective and effective creative interventions. The Æffect App is built upon a series of prompts and reflections to help you develop stronger projects, evaluate their impact, and plan next steps. The app provides helpful examples and useful resources, and can generate a report of your process at the end. https://aeffectapp.org

The Æffect Worksheet

The Aeffect App in worksheet form, ready to print and fill in by hand or use as a digital, fillable PDF form. The worksheet provides explanatory text to take you through the prompts step-by-step and leaves you with full documentation of your process. PDF Worksheet, Google Doc Worksheet

The Æffect Script

The Aeffect App in bare-bones script form, this is a comprehensive set of more than 50 questions to help you reflect upon Goals, Audiences, Ethics, Intervention, Metrics, Evaluation, and Iteration. Perfect for adapting to your own needs. Script, also available in Spanish and French

10 Questions…

…for Planning an Æffective Project. A brief overview of our assessment methodology in the form of ten questions to help you think through your project, clarify what you want to do, and reflect upon your process and progress.  Pdf or G-Slides Workbook 

Measurement Tools

The types of tools to measure æffective impact are only limited by your imagination. Anything that can help you determine whether your project has done what you wanted it to do and reached who you wanted it to reach can be an evaluation tool. Here are some suggestions to get you started. Tools.

Æffect Adaptations

Since introducing the Æffect Assessment Method a few years ago, it has been put into practice in the US, the Western Balkans, and West Africa. Each time it is applied it changes to fit the needs of the artistic activists using it and the context in which they are working. Here’s a developing archive of how it has been adopted and adapted.