Sinzer news

Europeana Foundation weaves together thousands of cultural heritage and technology professionals and organisations from across Europa who are all committed to the vision of transforming the world with culture. The Foundation has a network of data partners: over 3,700 institutions and aggregators provide cultural heritage collections for publications on Europeana. In addition, there are many EU-funded projects that contribute to, improve or use the Europeana services. It is Europeana’s job to coordinate activities, connecting projects and people working in the same areas and ensuring that their focus and work is in sync. The Foundation also advocates changes and policies aimed at fostering a strong digital cultural sector for Europe, and develops and maintains the technical infrastructure that underpins this. Part of Europeana’s strategy to promote and support digital cultural heritage, is the launch of three websites which focus on digital cultural heritage of photography, fashion and research.

With the aim of supporting the Foundation’s impact strategy until 2020, a special taskforce within Europeana started developing the Europeana Impact Framework in 2016. This framework consists of five ‘lenses’: 1) Utility 2) Community 3) Education 4) Existence 5) Legacy, each linked to an expected impact:

• Socially, by contributing to a sense of shared identity across Europe; of connectedness through culture;
• Economically, by reducing costs for cultural institutions or by enabling new and creative business;
• Innovatively, by making the network of cultural institutions stronger, more innovative and better equipped to handle challenges of the digital future.

The draft framework has recently been tested on a long-running service “Europeana 1914-1918”, which had the following objectives: 1) to explore the social and cultural impact of this service and 2) to use learnings from the test in order to transform the framework into an impact assessment tool for Europeana and its partners. 

Consultants of Sinzer will critically assess and possibly re-define (parts of) Europeana's current framework, as well as test the Impact Framework by using it to measure the impact of the three websites (photography, fashion and research). Besides fine tuning the impact framework, this test is also geared towards understanding the actual impact delivered through the websites for multiple stakeholders, in order to use these findings to continuously improve and maximize the impact delivered.

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According to a recent JP Morgan/GIIN survey among impact investors, 94% considers measuring social and environmental performance very important because it’s part of their mission. In fact, every impact investor included in this survey thinks impact measurement is important. Most impact investors currently focus on standardised output and outcome indicators to measure their performance, either from the IRIS database or from their own choosing.