&Co’s Chief Executive, Alison Edbury, delivered a keynote address at The Westminster Media Forum Keynote Seminar: Arts and Culture – filling the funding gap on 2 March at 61 Whitehall, and shares her thoughts on the day’s ‘Call to Action’.
The Westminster Media Forum Keynote Seminar: Arts and Culture – filling the funding gap stimulated much dialogue and debate on 2 March at 61 Whitehall but I came away thinking, what’s the Call to Action then, and for whom?
Colin Tweedy, Chief Executive, Arts & Business in his opening address challenged us to think about how we can better pull together as a sector to campaign more effectively for the arts, literally, to get people marching down the streets. The recent, and existing campaigns, ‘I Value The Arts’ and ‘Save The Arts’ in his view, have misfired. Why two campaigns? Why can’t we work together? And why the inward focus with the campaign work so far, rather than garnering support from people outside the sector?
I agree with Colin that if a public campaign is to have any influence on public spending decisions, we need to maximise our campaign resources by working more cohesively across the sector, stop lobbying ourselves and start to engage the public at large with what the arts spending cuts will actually mean to them – fewer local libraries, further to travel to your local theatre or gallery, reduced opening hours, less choice, I could go on...but there is no time to waste. If we want to change our future, we need to get local people involved as a matter of urgency.
We also need to act urgently to turn what looks like a potential crisis for arts and cultural organisations into an opportunity. As Liz Thompson, RSC Head of Communications noted in her think piece, ‘it’s up to us to come up with good and creative solutions’, I would advocate that there is a massive opportunity for us to become better connected with our audiences to engage their support both as customers and lobbyists to sustain the sector. But to achieve this we need to have a really good understanding of our audiences that is shared and developed across the whole organisation. The role of audience engagement is not just down to the marketing or communications department, especially in an economic downturn.
To sustain ourselves, we need to increase income earned from our audiences. As the Arts Council England Regularly Funded Organisations Annual Submission 2009/10 report states, 45% of total income for the portfolio last year was earned income. It’s critical that arts and cultural organisations are using their audience data as management information to inform key strategic decisions about investing in programming and marketing spend to maximise marketing potential and monetise audience relationships. As Tim Jones, Executive Director, motiroti acknowledged, this will take some ‘top end business savvy’.
Finally, let’s not be complacent about levels of audience engagement. Lord Shipley’s observation that it’s not a bad position to find that half of the population hadn’t visited a museum or gallery in the last 12 months considering that fewer people have been reported to go to football matches, in my view, is an argument that doesn’t hold sway in today’s economic climate. If half the population isn’t engaged with the nation’s museums and galleries, they won’t be bothered to see them close. Football fans, in their small or large numbers will continue to go to the match despite the spending cuts because they’ve paid for their season ticket and they love football too much to give it up, though the sales on hotdogs may be affected.
The future of football is not in peril, but the future of publicly subsidised museums and galleries is. With only 50% of the population engaged with museums and galleries, the nation has at most, only half a chance to lobby regional and national government to stop, or lessen the cuts.
Arts and cultural organisations need to act urgently to better connect to more people in order to turn their voting power into an effective campaign force. That’s my Call to Action!
Alison Edbury, Chief Executive, &Co
Comments
We have worked in partnership with the Save The Arts campaign since September 2010, and are still working together to maximise the impact and value of both initiatives, particularly now that the STA petition is closed. We are keen to work with other partners and stakeholders. It is true that the reach of the I Value The Arts campaign has so far been predominantly within the cultural sector itself, but we are working hard to break through to the wider public and part of that has to be through active participation in the campaign by arts organisations spreading the word to their audiences and advocating as trusted brands for those audiences to take the risk and pledge support to I Value The Arts.
We recognise that we have perhaps suffered from the swan effect, where on the surface all seems calm and serene but under the water there is constant activity. We're working on communicating the campaign activities better and more transparently. We're working on improving our reach, on articulating the objective of the initiative, and we're working harder than ever to deliver on that objective by providing the public with advice and support in demonstrating their support for continued local arts provision.
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