Councils must recognise value of cultural investment

Any shortfall in local authority arts funding will not be made up by Arts Council England, its chief executive Alan Davey has warned, and he urged councils to recognise the social and economic value of their cultural investment.

Speaking at the Local Government Association’s annual culture, sport and tourism conference, he said the arts were poised to play an even bigger role.

“There are numerous examples of arts organisations generating huge amounts for their local economies” he said. “Recent economic impact studies have shown that in its first year of operation the Sage in Gateshead contributed £43 million to the North East economy; in the South East the De La Warr Pavilion contributed £16 million; Pallant House Gallery in Chichester £2.7 million.

“The arts also attract tourism and business, creating the kinds of communities that people want to live in.”

The speech came as anxiety mounted for local authority commitment to the arts in the coming two years of tighter budgets. Until recent years, local authority funding of the arts had always kept pace with the Arts Council’s and was usually slightly ahead, but it has fallen dramatically. Although it is difficult to measure because arts funding is often buried in leisure and tourism budgets, some estimates put the figure at around £220m a year in England, less than half ACE’s current annual commitment.

“We’ve got to have grown up conversations about our shared ambitions for the arts, and how they contribute to what people really want in their communities” Davey said. “We need to make sure that in ten years we still have an infrastructure that works.”

‘Candour and challenge’ in new system

Arts Council England is launching a new framework for funding regularly funded organisations, including an online self-evaluation process.

The new structure is to be set in place in May to “provide greater clarity and reinforce the importance of artistic excellence at the heart of the funding relationship”, and is the result of last year’s extensive consultation. The framework will come into full effect in 2011-12

It follows the launch of the peer appraisals for clients receiving more than £5m a year in subsidy already under way, alongside which the new framework will run and is part of the new thinking in Arts Council funding which after the “reinvestment” cuts of 2007-08, a PR disaster for ACE which was partly blamed on the remoteness of the council’s national office from its clients.

“Regularly funded organisations are vital partners for the Arts Council” said Althea Efunshile, ACE’s chief operating officer. “This document sets out a renewed basis for our relationship with them and describes new ways in which we will manage those relationships in the future, relationships which are based on partnership, openness and mutual respect.”

The National Theatre had been one of ACE’s strongest critics two years ago, but its executive director, Nick Starr, said this week: “The new framework is a positive step forward. It reinforces the straightforwardness of the Arts Council’s approach to the organisations it funds. Peer appraisals will make a valuable contribution to this and are being developed in the spirit of candour and challenge that characterises the Arts Council at its best.”

No prizes for which option is chosen at the Management Centre’s National Arts Fundraising School, but how? Practice manager Moi Tu explains.

It’s hard not to be gloomy. Everyone expects cuts in statutory funding no matter who wins the election. There are continued falls in corporate giving. The Olympics are sucking up lottery cash. So is this a time to simply hunker down and cut back – asking the one violin player the orchestra can afford to play louder and collecting together a full season of theatrical monologues for the main stage?

“No” says fundraising guru and director of the National Arts Fundraising School, Bernard Ross. “It’s an incredibly tough and competitive market for arts fundraising” he says, but argues “success means you have to work in an integrated and innovative way, pulling out all the stops to ensure success.”

“All the stops” for Ross means coming on the longest residential training course in the arts and cultural sector – the National Arts Fundraising School. The school is an intensive – some say, eye-wateringly intensive – six-day training programme, exclusively tailored for fundraisers working in the arts and culture. Despite its hefty £1,785-a-place price tag, the school attracts 25 fundraising professionals twice a year, and has been doing so for 21 years with almost 1,000 alumni now out there working in the sector. These alumni come from theatres, museums and galleries, film schools, mixed media, archives and local authority cultural departments. And they’ve been successful with a recent research follow up showing alumni raising funds upwards of £100m.

Why does the School seem to succeed? Ross points to three factors.

First, the school is run by The Management Centre (=mc) which doesn’t just work for the arts and cultural agencies but also numbers high achieving charities like The Red Cross, The National Trust, and UNICEF among its consultancy customers. So the result is that the programme offers expertise and ideas from the very best fundraisers around – in and out of the cultural sector. We share what really works, and tell people candidly what doesn’t.

Second, the 18 different modules that form the school are integrated and constantly updated. The modules cover essential fundraising approaches from writing a strategy to crafting proposals, tax breaks to running a major appeal, and sponsorship to legacies. But in recent years there are new modules on social media and major donors, and each programme is different and tailored, thanks to an intensive online survey completed by participants before they come.

Third, the school delivers results. A confident Ross has no qualms backing his bold “this works” claims with a money-back guarantee. The marketing brochure for the events is quite explicit: “You get your money back if you don’t raise a sum equal to the course fee within 12 months.” He’s sure this is the only fundraising programme in the world to offer that simple unequivocal commitment.

All very impressive. But what do the alumni make of this? “Inspiring, life-enhancing and fun” says the former development director of the National Gallery, now chief executive of The Charleston Trust, Colin McKenzie, a well-respected fundraiser joined one of the earliest schools. “Every success I’ve had in the last 20 years owes something to the School – not only to the fundamental principles of fundraising and good practice that it teaches, but also to the awareness it instilled in me that there are endless possibilities within fundraising”.

The school has also proved to be a huge source of confidence and inspiration for newer fundraisers such as Lisa Bradshaw, development officer for the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art. Lisa attended last year, just two weeks into her new role and with little fundraising experience; seven months later she secured two foundation grants totalling £75,000. On top of her financial success, the school offered a networking opportunity and support network. “I was never made to feel under-qualified or inexperienced” she says. “There was a real mix of fundraisers, people who’d been in it for years and years, and those who wanted to learn more about particular areas. The school put everyone on a level playing field, which is partly why we’ve all stayed in touch since”.

Critics may wonder what would happen if every arts fundraiser attended the school – surely this would just raise the stakes and make the playing field even more competitive. It’s all relative, right?

Bernard Ross believes that the sector has lots of opportunities. “The coming cuts send a simple message: arts organisations can no longer survive, far less thrive, at the mercy of statutory funding. What we do is help apply the creativity and innovation people bring to their cultural work to their fundraising. With that approach there’s never a shortage of sources of money for the persistent fundraiser”.

The next National Arts Fundraising School runs on 18-23 April (fully booked) and 7-12 November in East Sussex. The school features three leading fundraising consultants and guest speakers including Jenny Oppenheimer from The Pilgrim Trust, who will provide insights on foundations, and Howard Lake of UK Fundraising, who will tackle social media fundraising. Visit: www.nationalartsfundraisingschool.com

More than 25% of arts organisations eligible are failing to claim Gift Aid, according to Arts & Business analysis.

Colin Tweedy, Chief Executive of Arts & Business said: “In a climate of recession where the arts sector is increasingly asking the government to consider further tax incentive schemes, it is vital that Gift Aid is seen to be successful or further schemes will not be considered” said Colin Tweedy, chief executive of A&B. “Clarity around tax benefits is essential for philanthropic giving to grow in future years.”

A&B’s 2008/2009 Private Investment in Culture survey suggests that whilst large and medium organisation are claiming Gift Aid (87%), only a small proportion of small organisations (12%) are.

The Arts Council has announced the eighth and last round of Sustain awards. Almost £47m has been issued form lottery funds to help organisations hit by the recession since the fund was created last summer, since when 147 have received grants.

The last list is worth £5.9m and benefits:
• Young Vic Theatre Company, London – £1,210,000
• English National Ballet, London – £879,248
• Opera North Ltd, Leeds – £800,000
• Northern Ballet Theatre, Leeds – £735,000
• The Brewhouse Theatre & Arts Centre, Taunton – £487,500
• Serpentine Gallery, London – £472,000
• Arnolfini, Bristol – £367,500
• Theatre Royal Stratford East – £290,000
• Bedford Creative Arts – £175,000
• Theatre Royal, Wakefield – £158,000
• Plymouth Arts Centre – £140,000
• Picture This, Bristol – £100,000
• Spacex Ltd, Exeter – £75,000

“Now we must look ahead” said ACE chief executive Alan Davey. “Our experience with the Sustain programme has identified a need for the kind of support that builds resilience in the long term. We are looking in particular at addressing the needs of smaller organisations and will be announcing a specific scheme shortly.”

NSA will make UK global leader, says PM

The £13m National Skills Academy for cultural and creative skills which will give industry-led training for the creative sector in the Royal Opera House production park in Thurrock has been given the Prime Minister’s go-ahead. Work starts on the academy in November and it will open in 2012.

Its first focus will be the expected need for 30,000 skilled backstage and technical theatre staff by 2017.

“The National Skills Academy is in line with many of the government’s objectives on skills, training, apprenticeships and regeneration” Gordon Brown said. “It will help to support young people in the creative industries, and is of international importance for a live performance sector that generates over £6 billion per year for the UK economy.

“The National Skills Academy will position the UK as a global leader in cultural skills and training, plug the creative and cultural skills gap and deliver what employers and young people need to boast skills, access and jobs in the vital creative industries sector” he said.

The announcement confirms funding for the new building from the Homes and Communities Agency, and comes in the first year of the academy’s existence, said its managing director, Pauline Tambling. “Along with the support of our 20 founder colleges and industry members, this building has brought us even closer to realising our vision of an internationally acclaimed technical theatre and live music sector supporting the best stages in the world” she said.

Three month Festival 2012 announced

In her first pronouncement since becoming director of the Cultural Olympiad in January, Ruth Mackenzie has announced a three month-long festival covering the Olympiad summer in 2012.

Festival 2012, running from Midsummer’s Day in June to September, will be a “once-on-a-lifetime” street event that will be a showcase for British talent, she said.
Meanwhile she and her team of advisers will “shape and edit” events already planned in the run-up to the Olympic summer.

There is now a budget of over £75m, including £3m pledged last week by the British Council. Another new sponsor, adding to the commitment of BT and BP, is Panasonic who will support the Olympic film programme. Most of the money is coming from the Legacy Trust, the Olympic Lottery Distributor, the Arts Council and now the British Council.

Mackenzie also announced that some of the budget has already been committed to ten commissions, which she was announcing for the Unlimited programme of work by disabled artists, launched by Tony Hall last year.

The first commissions, worth £400,000, have been placed in the regions of the four UK arts councils to emphasise the national nature of the Cultural Olympiad, and include the Candoco Dance Company and Graeae Theatre in London; the visual artist Maurice Orr in Northern Ireland; Fittings Multimedia Arts in the north-west; Janice Parker’s piece for disabled dancers, and Ramnesh Meyyappan’s play Snails and Ketchup in Scotland; a storytelling project by Chris Tally Evans, and a collection of monologues for deaf and disabled performers by Kaite O’Reilly and the LLanarth Group in Wales; Jez Colbourne and Mind the Gap with a ‘siren symphony’ called Irresistible, and Bipolar Ringmaster’s Stumble danceCircus in Yorkshire.

THE OTHER POINT OF VIEW
Well, not knowledge anyway, says Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums, of the National Gallery’s warders

I’ve just returned from the press preview of Christen Kobke at the National Gallery in London. It wasn’t that much different from other previews I’ve been to, so the scene I’m about to paint could apply to almost any opening.

We journalists began by hovering around the paintings, not really understanding much about them or why we were being asked to admire them, waiting for the curator to arrive and fill in the gaping holes in our knowledge of “arguably one of the greatest talents of Denmark’s Golden Age” (according to the press release). When the curator appeared, so did a number of National Gallery staff, straggling in from other departments, only identifiable by the tags hung about their necks. Presumably they, although expert in their own fields, were not completely up to date with the Danish Golden Age either, and wanted to find out more.

We all – press, assorted National Gallery staff from other departments and those directly associated with the exhibition –trotted after the curator for fifteen minutes, learning everything we could about Kobke. There were only two people in the short string of galleries – the exhibition only spans three small rooms – who didn’t move around with the crowd. They were dressed differently to the rest of us, in dark suits and ties. They hung around in the adjoining gallery, sometimes making small talk to each other, not listening to the curator, not looking at the iridescent paintings. They were the gallery warders. They are also the only people the public will come into contact with when they visit the exhibition.

I don’t believe these warders were particularly lacking in curiosity about Danish art. Indeed, I would like to believe that they’d heard it all before. I would like to believe that a special tour had been laid on for them by the curators, so they would be able to answer visitors’ queries about Kobke’s “simple motifs with a universal significance” and share their enthusiasm for his “unique treatment of light and atmosphere”. Unfortunately, I doubt this is the case (Although I’d be delighted if the National Gallery wrote in to tell us it was).

Why do museums squander their best resource – people? It would take so very little to include these guards in the tour, to hold out a hand of invitation to them. To let them know that it’s important to the museum, and especially important to visitors, that they are well informed about and involved with the art they treasure. It would also make their job considerably more interesting.

At Killhope North of England Lead Mining Museum – the first winner of the Guardian Family Friendly Museum Award – they run an excellent programme to involve front of house staff from the outset. They recognize that the museum’s reputation depends upon them, as they are the only staff with whom visitors will regularly engage. So instead of an interview, Killhope invites prospective candidates for a front of house job along to the museum for a day, just to hang out. They’re observed as they go around; it’s noted how comfortable they are with visitors. It’s only after this has happened that a formal interview is offered. In this interview, they’re told quite clearly that their main job is to work for and with visitors. The slogan they’re given is “to your face, not in your face”, in recognition that some visitors like to be left alone, while others want to ask questions or even be approached. Sensitivity to these different visitor needs is considered crucial in a successful Killhope front of house candidate.

So why do so few museums see their gallery warders, room wardens or assistants as part of their visitor services rather than security? If they did, visitors would not be continually told “Don’t touch!”, “Keep quiet!” or to turn off their mobile phone, but asked, “What do you think of that painting of Kobke’s mother? It’s my favourite”.

Get this bit of a visit right, and the rest will flow from it. You might even get London audiences interested in something as obscure as Denmark’s Golden Age.

Dea Birkett is Director of Kids in Museums.
To order your free copy of the Kids in Museums Manifesto, go to www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk.

As we reported in ai 250, Newcastle’s new Waygood Gallery is five years overdue, and though it should open this summer, its budget has doubled and ACE and the city council are planning to withdraw funding. Pauline Menard reports on what happened

Few people outside the North East are likely to have noticed, but a major row over the future of Newcastle’s Waygood Gallery has been simmering busily for the last few months, with a massive capital overspend, a government minister accusing Newcastle City Council of “misleading” him over the affair, employment tribunals, and various leaked reports and resignations.

Waygood, a largely artist-run space in the centre of Newcastle, was originally due to re-open as a gallery with artists’ studios in 2005 at a cost of £4.7m – the first building in the UK designed by the esteemed Viennese practice Jabornegg and Palffy, who worked on Rachel Whiteread’s Judenplatz in Vienna. At the moment, the final cost looks likely to be around £10.5m, and the gallery may re-open this summer.

However, it now seems as if Newcastle City Council and the Arts Council are going to refuse to fund Waygood and try to get another operator to run the gallery. Newcastle City Council has already pulled the plug, saying “the city council has decided that it cannot move forward with Waygood as the operator”, while the Arts Council meets on March 31 to decide on the future of the gallery, having “formally notified Waygood that we are considering withdrawing funding from the organisation”. Oh, and the district auditor has been called in to investigate as well.

What on earth went wrong? There seem to have been a number of factors, and the city council cannot escape blame for the cost over-runs. Indeed Peter Allen, the city council’s executive member for resources, admitted that one of the questions the council needed to ask itself was, “how did we get ourselves into this mess”.

In November, the gallery was condemned in an employment tribunal. Artist Topsy Qur’et brought the case against Waygood on grounds of unfair dismissal. After an acrimonious case the tribunal found in Topsy Qur’et’s favour, saying he was “without blame”, the evidence given by Waygood’s chief executive Helen Smith was described as “lacking credibility”, and that she acted in a “not normal and unpredictable” way, had “inherently weak” judgement and was “prone to lose control”, and that one of the witnesses called by the management gave evidence that “bordered on the ridiculous”.

After the tribunal, the Arts Council and Newcastle City Council commissioned Susan Royce to write a report on the organisation’s viability.

Although initially refusing to make the report public, a Freedom of Information request extracted a heavily redacted version from the Arts Council. Nearly 50% of the report is a sea of black ink, sometimes inconsistently applied - for example, on one page the size of a loan from the city council to the gallery is redacted, while on another it is left in at £335,000. What was left in includes the statement that Waygood has “a worrying lack of strategic and management skills and experience”, a recommendation that the chair of Waygood, Esther Salamon, resign immediately, and a plan for the replacement of Helen Smith be implemented.

Very unusually for the part-time non-executive chair of a not-for-profit organisation, Ms Salamon was handsomely paid for her work - around £12,000 a year according to the latest accounts. Some weeks after the recommendations were made she resigned, and in the last couple of weeks has been followed off the board by a city councillor and a partner in Evershed’s, a local law firm.

Partly due to the chair’s initial refusal to go quietly, the Arts Council and the city council have clearly lost confidence in Waygood, and another organisation will be brought in to run the building. In the meantime, Waygood are being taken to a second employment tribunal by another member of staff who is claiming constructive dismissal, and in April have to attend the “remedies hearing” of the first tribunal,at which financial compensation to the unfairly dismissed Topsy Qur’et will be awarded.

Tony Durcan, head of arts and libraries at the city council, conceded: “It is not Waygood’s fault that the capital project has cost a lot more money than was originally thought” - begging the question of whose fault it was. And Newcastle’s arts and libraries department do have form in squandering public money - only last year they gave planning permission, under delegated officers’ powers, for an artist to construct a hotel bedroom around the statue of Earl Grey on top of Grey’s Monument – the Newcastle equivalent of Nelson’s Column. They then changed their minds and insisted the project apply for planning permission to the councillors in the normal way, where it was turned down - and between being granted planning permission and subsequently being turned down for it, some £250,000 of public money was spent.

What next? Waygood will limp on for a few months while it still has some funding before probably folding, and confidence in Newcastle’s arts bureaucrats has taken another bashing. But it remains a fact that a very splendid new gallery and artists’ studio complex has been constructed right in the heart of the city centre, so let’s hope that another organisation - the excellent Vane Gallery, currently housed in what can only be described as a dump behind Newcastle station, has been mentioned - will come in and successfully run the gallery that is now nearing completion.

There has come a tide in the affairs of the RSC. Samuel Jones of Demos explains the dramatic way in which it’s turning

A process of organisational change is underway at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Its chairman, Sir Christopher Bland has described the value of the story of this change as being of a company in turnaround.

In 2007, the RSC’s executive director, Vikki Heywood, asked the Demos culture team to observe the change process, and examine what other organisations in the cultural sector and beyond might take from it. In itself, the RSC’s decision to open itself to external scrutiny reveals much. Alongside a desire to contribute to learning, it shows that the RSC sees itself not just as a cultural institution but also as being part of and contributing to the public realm.

In the early 2000s, the RSC had faced severe financial and organisational crisis. Morale and trust in leadership were shattered and the work was receiving poor reviews. Since then there has been a remarkable transformation. The critical and financial success of the work during this time tells its own story. However, the transformation has also been physical – the Royal Shakespeare Theatre has been utterly revamped – and organisational in the way that the RSC operates and relates to its public.

Speaking in 2007 the artistic director, Michael Boyd explained the philosophy guiding the transformation: “ultimately, it’s about love”. In a speech at the New York Public Library in 2008, he spoke similarly of ideas like terror, empathy, compassion, daring and, again, love “without apology”. Such words are a long way from the hard lexicon of management consultancy that often goes with organisational change. However, they run deeper than any bottom line and are at the heart of the organisation and the transformation of its fortunes.

Boyd, Heywood and the management team have taken the RSC’s foundational idea of “ensemble” and used it as a lodestar for the change process. An ensemble is a collective of actors working collaboratively over time. Applied to an entire organisation, it has created a conceptual space in which the RSC’s staff can work together, contributing and recognising the contribution of others to meeting collective challenges.

Within the organisation, budgets have been devolved, giving managers greater responsibilities and ownership over their areas. Strategic vision is discussed with all the staff in workshops using the principles of organisational development. While artistic planning decisions used to be taken by a closed and hierarchical group, now they have been opened to others. Take education, for example. Seasons now relate more closely to curricula, and actors take part in educational training and work with the RSC’s network of partner schools.

Ensemble also helped the RSC respond to difficulty. It has had to go through two rounds of redundancies since 2000. The first, advised by external consultants, was disastrous and the outfall well-documented in the media. The second, managed internally by devolving human resources responsibilities and discussing issues openly went as smoothly as could reasonably have been managed.

The Demos team observed the changing attitudes within and around the RSC over three years, using network analysis to examine the overall effects. When we started our observation in 2007, the networks of informal relationships operating within the RSC were stronger than official working networks. New open plan offices and spaces had enabled new connections to grow. This fostered collaboration, enterprise and new ventures. In 2009, when we interviewed the same cross-section of the organisation, the strength of the informal networks was replicated in working relationships. Ensemble, with the flattening of hierarchy and the greater awareness of others that it encouraged, had brought resilience and flexibility.

Boyd places great emphasis on the trust on which such changing relationships depend, and it will play a big part in the RSC’s future. Trust creates confidence in others and the capacity to accommodate risk and failure. It also allows people to learn from one another. Trust depends upon connecting values and having conversations. One of the RSC’s boldest steps is in seeking to extend the trust on which it depends as an organisation to the public. The new theatre design has halved the maximum distance between the stage and the furthest audience member. In 2009’s As You Like It, Orlando’s poems, pinned up in the Forest of Arden, were painted by the RSC’s technical crew but they were contributed by members of the public. The distance between expert and public is diminished, physically and conceptually.

Demos’ interest in the RSC’s story is as a cultural organisation seeking to be genuinely democratic and to play an active role in the public realm. The story might ultimately be about love, but the successes that the RSC has had and the difficulties it has encountered hold wider interest because, in transforming itself, it is also responding to changes in organisations and the society in which they exist.

All Together: A Creative Approach to Organisational Change, by Robert Hewison, John Holden and Samuel Jones is available on the Demos website: http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/all-together