Unknown Knowns

Facts and figures fascinate me and I guess that as you're bothering to read this blog you might be interested too. Throughout my early career in arts marketing and fundraising I thought that someone 'up there' in the hallowed corridors of the Arts Council of Great Britain and/or Whitehall had the answer to everything and that key policy decisions were being steered by a massive arts corporate brain, packed with robust data and evidence, systematically gathered and expertly analysed.

Years later, with a thicker waistline and thinner hair, I had the privilege of spending some time in those corridors.  I swiftly saw how naive I had been on many levels.

Political issues, with a small ‘p’, tend to have as much weight as any accumulated knowledge or learning in making key judgements.  Arts Council England’s recent decisions on who should or shouldn’t be included in its ‘National Portfolio’ is a fantastic example of this.  Faced with a seemingly impossible task, they expertly shared out a smaller cake without exciting the wrath of politicians, the media or the most prominent voices in the arts community.  But was every individual funding decision driven by their stated ambition to improve access for everyone to high quality arts activities based on all the data and knowledge they had available to them?  I think you’d have to be as naive as my slimmer former self to believe that one.

If they could ignore the ‘realpolitik’ and just rely on the evidence base to make decisions, how high is the IQ of the corporate brain?  While the policy shift to ‘light-touch’ funding and monitoring has meant that knowledge about the performance and impact of individual artforms and touring is in many areas far more patchy than it was a decade ago, we have seen a massive recent shift in what we know about the ‘demand side’: people and their consumption of arts and culture.  From detailed knowledge of different customer segments nationally to robust figures of actual participation at a local level, we now have an evidence base that is the envy of the world.

But my most naive assumption was thinking there was a corporate brain at all.  There are lots of busy individuals with varying levels of knowledge and experience.  Having the time and skills to understand the implications of the mass of information available to them is a challenge.  Being able to disseminate it usefully is even more so.

There are some questions we know we can’t answer with the current range of evidence we have available: in Donald Rumsfeld speak, the ‘Known Unknowns’.  For example, what proportion of the population benefits from subsidised arts activities and how demographically reflective are they of the population as a whole?  However, most of the time I’m in a room with artists, arts manager and funders and there comes a time when someone says ‘We need to know...’, the answer is already out there.  Recent examples:

1.       The levels of cultural volunteering in a particular region

2.       The factors that are more likely to make adults return to the arts in later life

3.       The impacts of discounting and free tickets

The list of seemingly ‘Unknown Knowns’ could go on and on though. 

In such challenging times, we really need this robust evidence base to ensure that informed decisions can be made.  But we also need to ensure that people know that robust data is out there, where to find it and how to use it to make informed decisions. 

David Brownlee, Chief Executive, Audiences UK