The Arts Council of Northern Ireland's Five Year Plan ‘Creative Connections’ sets out the Arts Council’s vision for the arts by placing them at the heart of our social, economic and creative life. A series of objectives have been designed to support this vision, underpinned by the four broad themes of: promoting the value of the arts; strengthening the arts; increasing audiences and improving organisation performance.
The Council’s research programme supports the objectives identified in the Five Year Plan. Research conducted independently, or in partnership with others, provides the Arts Council with the strong evidence base needed to inform thinking at all levels within the decision making process.
This report is one of a number of occasional papers published by the Arts Council. It provides an independent review of the effectiveness of the Support for Individual Artist Programme (SIAP), a major funding programme of the Arts Council. The report details the findings from an extensive survey of recipients and asks whether current supports meet the needs of practicing artists.
Contents include:

• Effectiveness and efficiency evaluation of SIAP
• Positive/negative experiences of applicants to SIAP
• The extent to which the outputs and impacts of the programme has changed or evolved
• Benefits to the community made possible by SIAP
• The appropriateness of the mechanism used to distribute funding taking into account possible changes in the external environment
• Good practice benchmarking
  The link below goes directly to the 3.55 MB (PDF) report.

http://www.artscouncil-ni.org/news/2007/images/FinalSIAP.pdf