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Guide on non-user consultation in museums

This guide was developed by Christina Lister as part of a project on non-user consultation for the South East Museum Development Programme. It focuses on methods that are accessible and achievable for small- and medium-sized museums and that can be scaled up, if desired.

Working with Public Service Commissioners

This quick guide for the arts and cultural sector documents learning from the Cultural Commissioning Programme’s work with five locality projects, based in Birmingham, Derby, Manchester, Torbay and York. Groups of arts and cultural organisations in these localities were supported to strengthen their involvement with public service commissioners by working collaboratively.

Art Therapy in Museums and Galleries

This is the website for the British Association of Art Therapists‘ Museums And Galleries Specialist Interest Group. We aim to be a positive and inclusive professional network for Art Therapists who are BAAT members and who are involved in, or interested in, developing work with museums and galleries.

Making Sense of Social Prescribing

‘Social Prescribing’ is a mechanism for linking patients with non-medical sources of support within the community, including cultural provision. Find out more about how it works in this guide from the Social Prescribing Network.

Heritage Counts 2017: Heritage and Society

Looking for evidence to support advocacy or funding applications? The report Heritage and Society is produced each year by Historic England on behalf of the Historic Environment Forum (HEF). The objective of this document is to provide bite-sized facts and figures that demonstrate the importance of heritage to society. These facts can be extracted and used by anyone who seeks to understand and evidence the social values of heritage in order to make the case for heritage.

Getting Started with Commissioning: a toolkit for arts and culture organisations in the South East

Creative Future shares advice for adapting to the shift from traditional grants to tendering and commissioning.

Age UK’s Wellbeing Index Summary

Reseach indicating that taking part in ‘creative activities’ such as the arts has the most direct influence in improving a person’s wellbeing in later life. The activities that older people took part in included dancing, playing a musical instrument, visiting museums, photography, singing, painting and writing.

Inspiring Impact

Inspiring Impact is a UK-wide collaborative programme, working with the charity sector to help organisations know what to measure and how to measure.

Five Ways to Wellbeing

This document, produced by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) on behalf of Foresight, sets out 5 actions to improve personal wellbeing: connect; be active; take notice; keep learning; give.

Creative & Credible: How to evaluate arts and health projects

Creative & Credible supports arts and health organisations and practitioners to: engage with evaluation creatively; improve your practice; make well-informed spending decisions;  strengthen the evidence base around the benefits and impacts of arts and health projects. Creative & Credible was created by Willis Newson and The University of the West of England, with funding from ESRC.

What Works Centre for Wellbeing

The What Works Centre for Wellbeing aims to improve the wellbeing of the people in the UK by bringing together the best evidence, making it easy to use and easier to make. The Centre's website hosts research documents, research guidance and policy discussions.

Age of Creativity

Age of Creativity is a national platform for everyone who believes that creativity can support older people to enjoy better health, wellbeing, and quality of life. Find inspiration for your work, opportunities to develop your practice and resources to support your expertise. You can upload and share your own information with the network and you will also receive regular updates by email.

Arts for health and wellbeing: an evaluation framework

This document from Public Health England provides effective ways to document and evaluate arts projects and programmes that seek to improve health and wellbeing.

Museums for Health and Wellbeing: A Preliminary Report from the National Alliance for Museums, Health and Wellbeing

Museums for Health and Wellbeing: A Preliminary Report from the National Alliance for Museums, Health and Wellbeing. This report describes the wealth of activity around health, wellbeing and social care that museums and galleries are already offering across the UK. In order to understand this emerging field of practice, a scoping exercise was undertaken by the Alliance between September 2015 – February 2016 to map health and wellbeing activity across the UK museum sector. Due to the magnitude of current work and the speed of growth, the results presented in this report represent the tip of the iceberg of work in this field. The results of this research are available on the Alliance website which contains over 200 resources and a searchable database.

Mind, body, spirit: How Museums Impact Health and Wellbeing

This publication reports the findings from a year-long action research project funded by Arts Council England and initiated by the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries based in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. It sets out to show how museums are well placed to respond to changes in public health, using their collections to improve the health and wellbeing of individuals, to counter health inequalities within communities, and contribute positively to the goals of public health bodies.

National Alliance for Museums Health and Wellbeing

The National Alliance for Museums, Health & Wellbeing is a place where information about museums and health can be shared; to improve existing practice, help build resilience and provide resources and support for those individuals and organisations working in this area of activity. The Alliance is funded by Arts Council England.

Symposium: Children and World War 1 - programme

This symposium entitled CHILDREN & WORLD WAR ONE: myths, images and engagement will take place on Thursday 23 October at the University of Worcester.

Materials from Museum2Museum: 'New Visions for Museums & Public Health'

Materials from the Kent & Medway Museum2Museum session, 'New Visions for Health & Well-Being' held on Tuesday 30th September, 2014 at The Beaney in Canterbury.

Cultural Commissioning Resources from Know How Non Profit

The Cultural Commissioning Programme has collated a range of resources for those wanting to engage in public service commissioning and for commissioners such as local authorities, clinical commissioning groups, NHS and others wanting to work with arts and cultural providers. Lots of useful information for arts and cultural organisations wanting to engage in public service commissioning (also for public service commissioners wishing to use arts and cultural providers to secure better outcomes) is presented on the Know How Non Profit website.

Cultural Commissioning Resources from NCVO

The Cultural Commissioning Programme has collated a range of resources for those wanting to engage in public service commissioning and for commissioners such as local authorities, clinical commissioning groups, NHS and others wanting to work with arts and cultural providers. The resources include guidance and case studies and are presented on the NCVO website.

Arts Commissioning Toolkit

Arts and commissioning toolkit produced by Royal Opera House Bridge, Artswork and Kent County Council.

'The Art of Commissioning' Cultural Commissioning Report

'The Art of Commissioning' Report published by the Cultural Commissioning Programme  to influence commissioners to improve their commissioning and procurement approaches to enable smaller organisations to engage with them.

Related resources

Related case studies