I gave evidence today to the Warwick Commission on Cultural Value. I spoke on two topics – digital issues in the British cultural scene and philanthropy. My evidence paper is below – basically i say that the societal changes in the use of digital technologies are vast and the arts has not kept up with this. I am struck that the arts seems to be sleep walking along in the comfort zone of an analogue world, guided by boards of people at the end of their professional careers who are not of a digital generation. To stay relevant arts leadership needs a revolutionary approach to digital issues, particularly leadership – their slow pace of evolution risks them being left behind.
Skills are also vital and I draw upon the excellent work Sarah and Emma have done on the TAL/Culture Vulture digital engagement in the Tees Valley. The evidence also talks about philanthropy – i’ll blog more on that over here.
The commissioners gave me a good hearing and were engaged and I am grateful to them for the opportunity.
Whatever the potential digital technologies hold for the cultural sector, that potential is unlikely to be realised without stronger digital leadership in the infrastructure and institutions of the sector. To bring this about requires strong leadership from funders and those who make appointments as well as embracing, celebrating and rewarding grass roots digital talent. There is clearly some good work going on, but it seems to me some way short of the whole – more or less where the government was before Lane Fox’s report. The sector needs a cultural change programme to embrace the potential of digital to transform cultural value in Britain.
Evidence paper:
Two issues for the Warwick Commission on Cultural Value: strategic response in the cultural sector to changing digital consumption and production patterns and 360 giving – steps towards greater transparency in giving and fundraising
I was asked to give evidence to the Commission originally on the basis of the work I have done with my wife Fran on modern philanthropy, but also based on my experience of digital issues in the public sector over the last 15 years and running a digital start up for the last five years. My biog can be found http://www.linkedin.com/in/wperrin I was heavily in involved in policy on technology and media regulation when a civil servant in DTI and Downing Street from 1994 to 2009. Talk About Local, my company grew out of the 2009 4IP experiment, training people in deprived and isolated communities and now advises leading media brands across the world on using digital media.
1. Digital
There have been huge shifts in people’s media consumption and communications patterns in favour of digital media. Digital technologies and media have been transformative and disruptive across society in the production and consumption of goods and services and increasingly in public discourse. The cultural sector is not immune to this.
A simple indicator in the cultural sector is expenditure on computer games, which overtook box office cinema receipts [as long ago as 2004] and expenditure on music in 2008. In 2013 expenditure on computer games is now £2.2billion – roughly double cinema box office receipts and four times the 2012 West End theatre receipts of £529m. Computer game expenditure is also double the value of album and single sales (£1.04bn). The biggest selling DVD Skyfall (Bond) sold 2.96 million copies, biggest selling album, One Direction’s Midnight Memories sold 700,000 copies but both combined are overtaken by the best selling computer game Grand Theft Auto V 3.67 million copies. This clear monetised expression of cultural value is skewed heavily towards the under 40s, the generation that will be (or not) the next theatre and exhibition goers.
NESTA, ACE and AHRC surveyed a wide range of sector bodies in 2013 for the Digital Arts R&D fund:
‘Tate Modern, noted that ‘Digital activity is forcing us to rethink out creative practice. For over a hundred years our activity has been grounded in displays in buildings. The affordances of digital means we are rethinking this.’
Whilst leading edge, big-budget institutions like Tate Modern might be enjoying the challenge the situation in the wider sector seems weak:
‘Over 60 per cent of arts and cultural organisations report that they are primarily constrained in their digital activities by a lack of staff time and funding, and over 40 per cent report a lack of key technical skills s’
This contrasts with the ponderous tone of ACE in 2010 when the iPhone was already four generations old:
‘We recognise that the change driven by new digital technologies provides both opportunities and threats. The way that people experience arts and culture is changing; and so too is the type of arts and culture they enjoy. We will use our influence and investment and work in partnership with organisations such as the BBC, the British Film Institute, Channel 4 and technology companies to help equip arts and cultural organisations to navigate this new landscape. As the world evolves, the range of artists and arts and cultural organisations – and the types of arts and culture – supported by the Arts Council must evolve too.’
The NESTA/ACE/AHRC Digital R&D fund is a good initiative but at a strategic level it does feel that the cultural sector is coming very late to the party. For instance, I am struck that until summer 2012 the Heritage Lottery Fund did not award grants at all to wholly digital projects.
Even in 2013, the Minutes of the 14 November ACE National Council Meeting don’t show any sense of urgency to embrace digital media:
National Council members observed that we were at the early stages of a ‘revolution’ with lots of changes to come. These changes would require new skills and new ways of working both within and outside the Arts Council.
It was agreed that there would be no minimum digital requirements for organisations to be considered for National Portfolio funding at the next funding round.
In response to a query on whether the Arts Council had the expertise that it needed to support the sector, it was pointed out that the Digital Action Plan included proposal to strengthen training for Arts Council staff to ensure that they were better able to support and monitor arts and cultural organisations in relation to their digital performance.
My company, Talk About Local in partnership with Culture Vulture in Sheffield was delighted to win an ACE grant to work with artists and makers in the Tees Valley to help them with their digital skills. Whilst we motivated a good small group to publish online and find their feet in social media, we are concerned though by the extent of the skills deficit on the ground and also by the lack of interest and urgency in digital skills. Our work on Talk About Arts, Culture, Place in Tees Valley continues. http://talkaboutlocal.org.uk/shared-resources-talk-art-culture-place/ However, in our work in communities across the country, Talk About Local finds it rare to encounter artists and makers making full use of digital media.
Despite this work with ACE, my perception is an outsider one. The cultural sector seems to have many similarities to the situation I encountered in central government when I worked on strategic digital issues there under both Labour and the coalition governments. The critical issues appear to be a lack of both digital leadership and, flowing from that incentives for systematic behaviour change. I was involved in a number of mainly unsuccessful initiatives in central government to tackle the problem of an increasingly digital population and an analogue government. We didn’t manage to break through until there was decisive leadership.
Martha Lane Fox’s report in 2010, accepted enthusiastically by Francis Maude created a new team, Government Digital Service with the right talent, the right bureaucratic levers and, critically, buy-in from bureaucratic leaders too. Martha and Francis clearly and demonstrably put digital leadership front and centre in the government’s reform programme and made it vital to the future of government services and administration, going well beyond ‘digital corner’. Their objective is not just cheaper public services, but better, more effective, transformed services that make the most of the new digital capability and respond to the expectations of a digital Britain. I am on the Government Digital Service’s Digital Advisory Board.
I can’t quite see an analog to this process in the cultural sector. A cursory examination of boards that govern arts institutions at all levels shows few clearly digital people. And Antony Lilley deserves a knighthood for the number of times he is wheeled out at events as a friendly digital person. From a tech sector perspective, the heavy reliance on the broadcasters as founts of digital wisdom seems odd – their technologies are inappropriate for the vast majority of arts organisations.
Whatever the potential digital technologies hold for the cultural sector, that potential is unlikely to be realised without stronger digital leadership in the infrastructure and institutions of the sector. To bring this about requires strong leadership from funders and those who make appointments as well as embracing, celebrating and rewarding grass roots digital talent. There is clearly some good work going on, but it seems to me some way short of the whole – more or less where the government was before Lane Fox’s report. The sector needs a cultural change programme to embrace the potential of digital to transform cultural value in Britain.
It’s puzzling though that given the trends in digital consumption and technology have been self evident for over a decade, that the sector has not grasped this before the last few years – if I was in charge this apparent strategic failure would worry me more. Indeed, the Warwick Commission’s own briefing document pays only lip service to digital technologies, with the occasional sentence here and there that look like they have been tossed in as an afterthought.
2. – Philanthropy and better grant making through transparency
Society will only make best use of resources, especially at times of scarcity if it has sufficient information to make informed decisions. No financial or investment market would work without information about basic investment and performance. Yet the cultural sector as a whole seems to have only scant data on what is granted to what and how effective that grant was. ACE is making steps in the right direction, but could go much further.
For philanthropists, grant making too often takes place in the dark – you don’t know who else has given to an organisation, what they thought of them, what happened to the money etc. It costs substantial staff time to do due diligence on an organisation that in fact several other grant makers have already analysed and granted or not. Grant makers generally publish lists of grant buried in the pdf of their annual reports – if they were to publish grants as an easily digestible spreadsheet to open standards this could transform understanding of who funds what in the sector.
My wife Fran and I in 2013 set up ‘360 giving’ an emerging campaign for transparency in grant making in the UK. We both have a background in transparency and open data. Fran, who set up The Indigo Trust is a lifelong philanthropist, frustrated by the opacity of the grant making sector. We are both trustees of The Indigo Trust and graduates of the Institute for Philanthropy’s Philanthropy Workshop. Fran is also Chair of ‘Publish What You Fund’ the leading in international aid transparency organisation, I am a member of two government sector transparency panels.
360 giving has a ‘moonshot’ ambition that, within 5 reporting years 80% of grants made by UK charities, foundations & other grant makers are reported as open data to agreed standards and 50% by number/volume.
We want to bring about:
A clear information landscape for grant-makers in the UK showing who has funded what, where, with how much and for what
Improved effectiveness in grant making and greater scope for informed strategic philanthropy and collaboration
Transparency for the public, taxpayers and authorities.
This can be as simple as publishing a lists of grants with basic information as a basic spreadsheet online (rather than putting them in the pdf of the annual report). Such publication allows others to gather the data and manipulate it, perhaps combine it with others to better inform decision making. In the US, the Foundation Center has been supporting greater openness about foundation giving for some time, but it has been slow to take hold in the UK. We are delighted that NESTA has recently come on board to help us at Indigo run the campaign with our co-founders the Nominet Trust.
ACE commendably publishes grants back to 2009 to a very basic standard on data.gov.uk.
The past year has seen several big funders beginning to publish in an open format. The Big Lottery Fund (BLF) has led the way by publishing a huge data set of their grants going back to 2004. According to Dawn Austwick, the new chief executive, data about grantmaking is
‘a resource that should be available to others to enrich our thinking and understanding of what is working’.
Nesta, too, is experimenting with how to publish its grants and the Gates Foundation has committed to publishing its grants within the year. Nominet Trust has decided to publish its grants. We understand that the Heritage Lottery Fund is also looking at publishing its grants as open data.
When BLF published its grants data, Nominet Trust analysed common areas of funding which showed that the two have funded 20 charities in common, with one, the Alzheimer’s Society, funded 62 times. This simple comparison could lead to greater collaboration and sharing of experience between the two funders. As Dan Sutch of Nominet put it,
‘an individual grantmaking organization might not alone make a huge difference in sharing their grants data, but when they are combined across multiple grantmaking organizations, then we might generate some real insight.’
The richer the available data, the better the investment decision. According to Marcelle Speller, founder of LocalGiving.com,
‘To not share data makes it even more difficult to know if you’re making a difference.’
The arts sector is home to some quite outstanding best practice in how data can be manipulated to make art itself via http://data.culturehack.org.uk/ which benefits from ACE and other funding.
There is substantial potential for ACE itself, with its strong statistical capability to take the next logical step and link to the very basic data on grants, basic evaluation and feedback gathered from each project. At the simplest level think of this as extra columns in the spreadsheet. This would mark ACE out as one of the most transparent funders in the world. But ACE at present doesn’t seem to show any appetite for doing this and recently has firmly turned down an FOI request that could have started the journey http://siwhitehouse.co.uk/blog/2014/01/15/why-is-the-answer-still-no/#more-819 to the bafflement of FOI experts.
We notice that information about ‘private’ philanthropy in the arts in the UK is sparse – trusts, foundations, individuals – particularly those giving at a local level to non-national institutions. The Warwick Commission staff, despite trying hard were not able to turn up information that they or I felt was genuinely useful or granular (their paper is attached). The Institute for Philanthropy similarly drew a blank in the UK, but produce some useful American research. The American situation is of course very different, with a complex set of motivations leading to ‘more’ local giving to local cultural institutions. In the UK local giving to local cultural activity seems underdeveloped, but I don’t have data to back this up, though that may in itself be an indicator. I note that Turner Contemporary in Margate has made a big push for local individual patrons, with some success.
As well as grant makers, beneficiaries of grant-making waste a lot of time trying to work out who funds what. And much of the above, mirrored, applies to them also. There is no reason why beneficiaries couldn’t publish as open data information on where their funding comes from.
William Perrin
22 January 2014
E&oe
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[…] Warwick Commission today on a range of digital issues and philanthropy. The digital stuff i cover over there but here is the section on philanthropy and transparency. I call in particular for the Arts […]