National Museums Liverpool Terracotta Warriors Exhibition Evaluation

National Museums Liverpool is looking to commision an agency to undertake a project evaluation of our recent China's First Emperor and the Terracotta Warriors exhibition at the World Museum. Organisations are invited to put forward proposals based on the requirements outlined in this brief.

Opening on 9 February 2018 through to 28 October 2018, China's First Emperor and the Terracotta Warriors featured more than 180 spectacular artefacts from museums across Shaanxi Province, more than half of which have never been on show in the UK before. This landmark exhibition told the story of the formative years of the Chinese nation, from the pre-unification Qin Kings, to China's First Emperor, Qin Shi Huang's rise to power and the legacy of his achievements in the succeeding Han Dynasty.

Bidders are asked to submit a formal tender for the China's First Emperor and the Terracotta Warriors project evaluation. We require the development of a comprehensive evaluation document that will provide us with a wealth of information about the success, impact and legacy of the exhibition. Utilising our existing project analysis information, the report should build on this detail to review the impact on our staff, the exhibition project planning and delivery processes, and organisational operation. This will enable us to evaluate key lessons learnt and define the legacy of the exhibition.

The exhibition attracted over 600,000 visitors, including nearly 100,000 visitors from the group travel market. The delivery of the exhibition required a whole organisation approach, new ways of working, the tender and procurement of a new ticketing solution, large scale recruitment and training, with an overall focus on quality, pricing, strategy, cost management and income generation.

The report will need to include an internal survey of staff who worked on delivering the exhibition and those not directly involved in delivering the project but who were potentially impacted by the size, scale and resource requirements dedicated to its delivery. The information gathered would inform the future approach to large-scale exhibition projects and how to best leverage the legacy of the exhibition. We would expect the research sample size to be sufficient to be able to provide a robust series of results.