The World Rowing Championships (WRC) took place at Amsterdam’s Bosbaan from 24 to 31 August 2014. In organising this event, the World Rowing Federation (FISA) raised the bar for world class rowing events. Athletes, spectators, sponsors and rowing fans around the world followed the event on different media platforms. Those who were able to attend in person enjoyed an exciting sporting competition, as well as Amsterdam’s scenic sites and festive atmosphere. Behind the scenes, hundreds of volunteers worked to make this event possible.
Denim Democracy from the Alliance for Responsible Denim (ARD) is an interactive exhibition that celebrates the journey and learning of ARD members, educates visitors about sustainable denim and highlights how companies collaborate together to achieve results. Through sight, sound and tactile sensations, the visitor experiences and fully engages sustainable denim production. The exhibition launches in October 2018 in Amsterdam and travels to key venues and locations in the Netherlands until April 2019. As consumers, we love denim but the denim industry, like other sub-sectors in the textile, apparel and footwear industries, faces many complex sustainability challenges and has been criticized for its polluting and hazardous production practices. The Alliance for Responsible Denim project brought leading denim brands, suppliers and stakeholders together to collectively address these issues and take initial steps towards improving the ecological sustainability impact of denim production. Sustainability challenges are considered very complex and economically undesirable for individual companies to address alone. In denim, small and medium sized denim firms face specific challenges, such as lower economies of scale and lower buying power to affect change in practices. There is great benefit in combining denim companies' resources and knowledge so that collective experimentation and learning can lift the sustainability standards of the industry and lead to the development of common standards and benchmarks on a scale that matters. If meaningful, transformative industrial change is to be made, then it calls for collaboration between denim industry stakeholders that goes beyond supplier-buyer relations and includes horizontal value chain collaboration of competing large and small denim brands. However collaboration between organizations, and especially between competitors, is highly complex and prone to failure. The research behind the Alliance for Responsible Denim project asked a central research question: how do competitors effectively collaborate together to create common, industry standards on resource use and benchmarks for improved ecological sustainability? To answer this question, we used a mixed-method, action research approach. The Alliance for Responsible Denim project mobilized and facilitated denim brands to collectively identify ways to reduce the use of water and chemicals in denim production and then aided them to implement these practices individually in their respective firms.
Due to their diverse funding sources, theatres are under increasing pressure to demonstrate impact on society. The Raad voor Cultuur (2023) for example advised the secretary of state to include societal impact as an additional evaluation measure next to artistic value. Many theaters, such as the Chassé Theater and Parkstad Limburg Theaters, have reformulated their missions to focus on impact of performances on visitors. This is a profound transformation from merely selling tickets and filling seats, and requires new measurement instruments to monitor, manage, and improve impact. Currently available instruments are insufficient, and effective monitoring is crucial to larger future projects that theaters are currently planning to systematically broaden impacts of performances on their communities. The specific goal of this project is to empower theaters to monitor and improve impact by developing a brief experience impact questionnaire, taking existing data from student projects conducted at the Chassé Theater about performing arts experiences on one hand, and experience impact theory innovations on the other, as starting points. We will develop potential items to measure and benchmark against established measures of valued societal outcomes, such as subjective well-being and quality of life. These will be measured in questionnaires developed with project partners Chassé Theater and Parkstad Limburg Theaters and administered before and after performances across a wide range of genres. The resulting data will enable comparison of new questionnaire items with benchmarked measures of valued societal outcomes. The final product of the project will be a brief impact questionnaire, which within several brief self-report instruments and just a few minutes can effectively be used to quantify the impact of a performing arts experience. A workshop and practice-oriented article will make this questionnaire implementable, thereby mobilizing the key enabling methodology of monitoring and impact measurement in the performing arts sector.
Due to their diverse funding sources, theatres are under increasing pressure to demonstrate impact on society. The Raad voor Cultuur (2023) for example advised the secretary of state to include societal impact as an additional evaluation measure next to artistic value. Many theaters, such as the Chassé Theater and Parkstad Limburg Theaters, have reformulated their missions to focus on impact of performances on visitors. This is a profound transformation from merely selling tickets and filling seats, and requires new measurement instruments to monitor, manage, and improve impact. Currently available instruments are insufficient, and effective monitoring is crucial to larger future projects that theaters are currently planning to systematically broaden impacts of performances on their communities.The specific goal of this project is to empower theaters to monitor and improve impact by developing a brief experience impact questionnaire, taking existing data from student projects conducted at the Chassé Theater about performing arts experiences on one hand, and experience impact theory innovations on the other, as starting points. We will develop potential items to measure and benchmark against established measures of valued societal outcomes, such as subjective well-being and quality of life. These will be measured in questionnaires developed with project partners Chassé Theater and Parkstad Limburg Theaters and administered before and after performances across a wide range of genres. The resulting data will enable comparison of new questionnaire items with benchmarked measures of valued societal outcomes. The final product of the project will be a brief impact questionnaire, which within several brief self-report instruments and just a few minutes can effectively be used to quantify the impact of a performing arts experience. A workshop and practice-oriented article will make this questionnaire implementable, thereby mobilizing the key enabling methodology of monitoring and impact measurement in the performing arts sector.Societal issueThe specific goal of this project is to empower theaters to monitor and improve impact by developing a brief experience impact questionnaire, taking existing data about performing arts experiences on one hand, and experience impact theory innovations on the other, as starting points. Benefit to societyWe will develop potential items to measure and benchmark against established measures of valued societal outcomes, such as subjective well-being and quality of life. Collaborative partnersChassé Theater N.V., Parkstad Limburg Theaters N.V.
