Services
CDN provides services to help organisations to develop their planning and evaluation skills. Councils and arts organisations wishing to embed CDN’s frameworks into their practice can engage us for comprehensive support and advice. CDN provides a range of support services, that are tailored to an organisation’s specific needs including the creation of plans, planning for outcomes and evaluating activities.
Consultancy Services
For those wishing to up-skill and embed our planning and evaluation frameworks into their practice, CDN offers a consultancy services ranging from workshops to full delivery. Services include research and evaluations, project and strategic planning, training and consultations. Out intention is to transfer knowledge about our frameworks to the sector; therefore, all our services are designed and developed to up-skill organisations. With this approach, future iterations can be managed and implemented by practitioners experienced in working with our frameworks.
Mentoring
CDN offers pre-planning workshops to organisations wishing to adopt our Planning and Evaluation Frameworks. Workshops are available both in person at your location or online. Workshops will provide an overview of our frameworks as well as offer practical instruction on how you can use them to plan effectively. In Australia, these workshops are supported by the funding that CDN receives from the Australia Council for the Arts, and in most cases are available to your organisation for free.
Plan Doctor
CDN offers a Plan Doctor Service for all councils and arts organisations wishing to build their cultural development plan based on the CDN Framework. This service includes email advice, over the phone advice, teleconference meetings, and requesting feedback on draft plans.
We encourage you to contact us in the early stages of developing a draft.
Takso
Takso is the online, outcomes planning platform, created by CDN in conjunction with the sector. The platform enables better planning, execution and evaluation of cultural activities. The system incorporates our three frameworks which themselves were developed from years of research and consultation with the sector. The system is designed to facilitate activity planning and captures the full narrative of the activity cycle from inception to reporting. Takso’s ability to capture all data makes it a powerful aid to research both within an organisation and wider research projects,
Why Us?
CDN is recognised nationally and internationally for its expertise in cultural development planning, research and evaluation. Our Planning and Evaluation Framework has been endorsed by the National Local Government Cultural Forum (2013-2018) and has now been adopted by many councils in Australia. Our Framework has gained worldwide recognition via an MOU with international local government peak body United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG). CDN’s Framework is designed to assist managers to plan and communicate their activities, underpinned by an outcomes-focus and evidence informed practice.
CDN has delivered workshops and services to over 2000 people nationally and internationally and have been engaged by Councils and arts organisations including, most recently the City of Melbourne, City of Adelaide, City of Perth, City of Parramatta, City of Casey, Nillumbik Shire Council, Shire of Yarra Ranges, Tamworth Regional Council, Many Hands International, and the Province of Jeju, South Korea in collaboration with the State of Tasmania. CDN has also delivered four major research projects across ten councils in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.
CDN has a long association with RMIT university, working with the university on joint research as well as guest lecturers. Our relationship with the university enables us to draw on expertise and services of the university in our work.
Our Frameworks
Created through 14 years of research and consultation with the sector, our frameworks assist organisation to connect their projects and activities to goals within their organisation’s strategic plan, enables consideration of relevant evidence, articulates what projects intend to achieve and identifies key factors that lead to change.
Our frameworks include outcomes from all five domains of public policy (cultural, social, governance, economic and environmental), each with their own set of measures. Our Schema of Measurable Cultural Outcomes enable for the first time, contributions from the cultural domain of public life to be acknowledged and assessed using a systemised approach that can be aggregated across activities. This not only enables the full narrative of cultural activity to be captured but facilitates reporting against an organisation’s main strategic goals.
What People are saying about our Frameworks and Services
“Excellent. rigorous and highly useful and practical tools.”
“This work is ground breaking and has given us a reliable and evidence based framework that can apply at any scale of local government.”
“…we’ve observed from the first two evaluation activities run in 2018 using the [Takso] processes that the sessions with our participants to collect their responses has given then the opportunity for much more in-depth consideration and reflection of their experiences. The qualitative feedback in particular is very informative. The staff feel that the evaluation with them is also more worthwhile.”
“working with outcomes as part of our strategic planning has given me a new way to speak to the rest of my organisation that we didn’t have before.”
“We were floundering in the development of our Tourism, Arts and Culture Strategy. This workshop was refreshing as we had all the Councillors and staff on the same wavelength and I believe we can now complete the development of the Strategy.”
“The workshop articulated the way forward to achieving my thoughts allowing others to understand what I have been trying to explain for some time. I feel I have gained the tools to better effect change into the future.”
“This workshop gave us part of our strategic puzzle. The information challenged our thinking and was presented professionally.”
To get in touch with us please email contact@culturaldevelopment.net.au or call: 0416 508 610