Briefing notes for Major partner museums
Goal 1: excellence is thriving and celebrated
Goal 2: audiences and reach
Digital
Goal 3: resilience and sustainability
Goal 4: diversity and skills
Goal 5: children and young people
Monitoring and reporting
Goal 1: excellence is thriving and celebrated
Contents:
The Arts Council’s expectation
Self-evaluation practices
Leadership
International
Fair pay
The Arts Council’s expectation
This briefing note explains what our expectations are for all Major partner museums delivering Goal 1: excellence is thriving and celebrated, and outlines how these should be reflected in organisations’ programme plans and business plans.
We expect Major partner museums to demonstrate a genuine commitment to excellence and ambition. We want you to be role models, at a local, regional, national and international level, in yourmuseological and organisational practices, across all our goals, and be leaders in the museums sector and across the wider cultural ecology. You have a responsibility to work with us and with other organisations to share skills and expertise, and help build resilience of the sector.You should invest time, effort and resources into managing and researching dynamic and high-quality collections, and use these to maximum public benefit. You should seek to reach more people, including children and young people, through quality engaging experiences. We also expect your organisationto be willing to act as a powerful advocate for the sector, in a way that goes beyond its own work.
All Major partner museums will be required to deliver the success measures that underpin Goal 1: excellence is thriving and celebrated. These are:
- museums are delivering cultural experiences that represent the height of ambition, talent and skill
- demonstrating England’s status as a world centre for cultural excellence, more museums based in England are exporting their work internationally and visitors cite the arts and culture as the reason they visited England
- the work produced by museums and arts organisations reflects the diversity of contemporary England
We expect your programme to include specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-based (SMART) objectives to clearly show how you will realise the Goal 1 activities agreed with your Relationship Manager.
Q:How is this reflected in the funding agreement?
A: The funding agreement specifies that:
Self-evaluation practices
Q: What are we expecting to see?
A: Self-evaluation used to inform planning.
We expect all Major partner museums to demonstrate at least one form of regular self-evaluation. The outcomes of self-evaluation should inform their business planning and be used to enable continuous improvements to the quality of their work. They can refer to our self-evaluation[1] toolkit for further support to help re-evaluate their business model.
We are also currently supporting the sector to develop a quality metrics frameworkthat invites consideration of quality from self, peer and public. We may roll this out nationally during the 2015–18 funding period, and we will expect all Major partner museumsand National portfolio organisations to embrace it.
Further information on the quality metrics framework can be found on our website.[2]
Leadership
Q: What is the Arts Council expecting to see?
A: Your ownfunding agreement will specify your contribution to leadership within the sector, as agreed with your Relationship Manager during negotiation.
All Major partner museums will be expected to play a strong leadership role across our goals, including promotingexcellence across the sector.This leadership role may involvesupporting other museums within aspecific geographical area, or it may be about widely sharing a particulararea of expertise that has national relevance. This leadership role may include being a provider of museum development, but it may also include wider forms of leadership.
Some Major partner museums will have specific agreed SMART leadership objectives embedded in their programme plans and business plans, and monitored on an ongoing basis.
International
Q: What do we mean by international?
A: An active engagement with both audiences and artists from all over the world.
Great art and culture for everyone[3]includes a commitment to demonstrating England’s status as a world centre for cultural excellence. In practice this means that artists, arts organisations and museums based in England are exporting work internationally, and that visitors cite the arts and culture as a main reason they visited England.
We also want to support cultural exchange, so that the best of international arts and culture is being enjoyed regularly by the public in this country, and the best of our arts and culture finds new audiences overseas. As part of the application process, we asked organisations to tell us about how they would:
- take an active role promoting strong critical debate and increasing knowledge through wider partnerships, including international working
- seek to export their work internationally and promote international exchange, and how this will add value to their programmes and audience experience
- appeal to visitors from around the world, if applicable
We welcome activity across borders within the UK, but when we talk about international working, our primary focus is on activity from outside the UK which will be taking place in England, or activity from England taking place beyond the UK.
Q: What is the scope of international activity?
A: It may cover all forms of activity and exchange, both import and export, and partnership working.
International includes both incoming and outgoing activity. It covers joint or shared research, object loans, exhibiting, staff residencies and secondments, digital showcasing or creation/distribution with international reach, co-commissions, networking, brokering and showcasing work internationally.
Q: What do we expect from Major partner museums?
A: Clear information about how international activities fit into your plan.
If your organisation plans to work internationally – taking activity out of the country or bringing activity in – you should provide information that covers the following points, at a level of detail suitable to your organisation:
- thetype of international activity that will be offered
- measurementof income from international work. How does it contribute to your business model, and what proportion of your total revenue does it represent?
- estimatesof audiences for international work
- marketing or outreach targeted at attracting overseas audiences, and/or any CRM data they hold on visitors from abroad to your venue
- arecord of countries you plan to visit
- partners(UK and international) involved, either as funders or co-creators. We are particularly interested in work with the British Council and/or UKTI around export, or in any involvement in applications to Creative Europe
Q: What will we do with this information?
A: It will help us to map the extent and value of international arts and cultural activities for the benefit of all our stakeholders.
We use the information organisations provide to develop a picture of the cultural and economic value of international activity. We will aggregate export income. We will learn – and share with organisations –more about how international income contributes to resilience. We will track audiences and partner relationships built globally and share these with organisations and other stakeholders.
Fair pay
Q: How is this reflected in the funding agreement?
A: The funding agreement specifies:
2.2.1Why is this important?
Q: What do Major partner museums need to ensure?
A: Pay must be fair and work experience and volunteer programmes should be of mutual benefit.
The Arts Council is committed to proper and fair pay for those who work in the cultural sector. We expect Major partner museums to ensure that salaries, fees and subsistence arrangements are as good as or better than those agreed by any relevant trade unions and by employers’ associations.
We recognise that there is great value in giving people access to work experience, where it is offered and arranged properly. It should be of mutual benefit, and placements should not be used as a means of attempting to avoidminimum wage regulations.
Where you engage artists to deliver workshops, events, exhibitions and other activities, fees must be in line with recognised codes of practice set by the relevant lead bodies.
Similarly, we understand how important the voluntary sector is to our Major partner museums. Volunteers make an essential contribution to our cultural life. The relationship between a cultural organisation and its volunteers should be mutually beneficial: volunteers should be respected and adequately trained. They should not feel compelled to assume responsibilities that are beyond their reach or experience.
Q: What advice is available about work experience, internships and volunteers?
A: Arts Council England has publishedguidelines to help clarify the legal obligations of arts organisations offering internships.[4]
For general information about the use of volunteers, including legal obligations you might have, please visit the Museums Association website.[5]
Goal 2: audiences and reach
Contents:
The Arts Council’s expectation
Building audiences through SMART objectives
Sharing data: best practice and Audience Finder
Changes in annual reporting requirements
The Arts Council’s expectation
This briefing note explains what we expect of allMajor partner museums delivering Goal 2: audience and reach. It outlines how these expectationsshould be reflected in your programme plans and business plans.
As a Major partner museum we expect you to show how you are sharing your work with as large and wide an audience as possible, especially with those who are currently least-engaged with arts and culture. We expect you to contribute to developing a bigger and more informed audience for arts and culture.In order to help achieve this, you must commit to shared approaches (across arts and museums) to capturing, sharing and reporting audience data.
Q: How is this reflected in the funding agreement?
A: The funding agreement specifies that:
Q: Why has the Arts Council introduced this?
A: It is crucial to the goals of our sector-agreed strategic framework.
National portfolio organisations and Major partner museumsare critical to the achievement of the ambitions laid out in our 10-year strategic framework.[6] The four outcomes above describe what success will look like forGoal 2 – the ‘for everyone’ in our mission statement. We ask our Major partner museums to think about their role in delivering this as they develop their business plan and programme. Describing your ambitions and plans around these outcomes will help your organisation to articulate a shared view ofits own success measures. Importantly, this will also help us to show why we have chosen to invest public money in your activity.
Building audiences through SMART objectives
Q: What’s involved?
A: SMART objectives and a rationale for your organisation’s priorities.
We expect that your audience development planfor 2015–18 embeds the outcomes agreed with your Relationship Manager. This audience development plan, as with your programme, should form part of your organisation’s wider business plan.
During your ongoing contact with your Relationship Manager, we may challenge youto go further or give more details of plans. YourRelationship Managerwill be thinking about your current or recent activity and potential impact, whilst considering your plans alongside the activity of other funded organisations (locally and nationally where appropriate).
Relationship Managerswill also askorganisationsabout the budgets for any audience development work or targeted marketing. You will be required to demonstrateyour plans, and the resources to maintain or introduce an appropriate ongoing programme of monitoring and evaluation around audiences.
It is possible that some Major partner museumswill want to provide a reasonable rationale as to why they are prioritising some outcomes over others. For instance:
- current audiencesare not as representative of the local population as you would expect
- priorities identified as part of your equality action plan may relate to people defined within the protected characteristics[7]
- a museum that currently has high visitor numbers may choose to focus on increasing depth and quality of experience or on increasing digital over physical reach
- you may be a museumwith an audience that is already representative of the local community, and getting more high income customers may be a key priority
- some museums are particularly effective at reaching people who may not traditionally engage in arts and culture
We ask Major partner museums to challenge themselves to set ambitious targets for audience engagement. Plans can include both physical and digital engagement and attendees or visitors, and participatory activity appropriate to them.
We recognise that a Major partner museum may not achieve all the targets included in their plan and this does not meanthat they have failed or underperformed. Taking risks and experimenting around Goal 2 is important and youmay learn more from the things that do not go as well as you had hoped. In conversations with us and in you reporting to us,you will be able to put your achievements against targets into context.It is possible that you will be adjusting your planned activity, including targets, throughout the life of the business plan.
There is likely to be a strong read across between your equality action, digital, touring, income generation and audience development plans. Likewise, you should think about the relationship between plans around Goal 1 and Goal 5. There is no specific requirement about how plans must be articulated. Think creatively about new ways of creating, distributing and presenting art and culture as part of your audience development plans.
As part of the application we asked organisations to describe local or national collaborations that are likely to build larger audiences for arts and culture overall. These should be described as part of your audience development plan on an ongoing basis.
Q: What support is available?
A: Further guidance can be found on Audience Finder[8] and CultureHive.[9]
Q: How will this insight be used?
A: This information is the basis for our ongoing contact with our Major partner museums.
We also hope to identify success stories or lessons learned that will inform practice in the wider sector. We will encourage Major partner museums to share these experiences with peers, and where appropriate to describe them on CultureHive.
Sharing data: best practice and Audience Finder
Q: How is this reflected in the funding agreement?
A: The funding agreement specifies:
Q: Why has the Arts Council introduced Audience Finder?[10]
A: To create a comprehensive system for pooling data.
There are several formal and informal systems that allow organisations to share audience data, and compare the reach and profiles of their audiences. Audience Finder is a shared system designed to pool data from National portfolio organisations and Major partner museums, enabling us to form a much more accurate picture of the area of benefit of Arts Council England’s investment as a whole.
Q: What’s involved?
A: At the least, an annual data upload – the service is free.
As a minimum, we ask all organisations to upload a representative sample of the postcodes of your audiences to Audience Finder once a year. This is a free analysis service, though there may be some resource implications for organisations that are not currently collecting this data.
We encourage you to go further than this, where possible. The more data you put into Audience Finder, the more you will get back. The insight should help you to develop your audience development and business plans.
We also ask you to consider the following data principles as part of your audience development planning:
- collectand share data that is useful. Have a clear purpose, which can be achieved with the resources available
- take a partnership or collaborative approach to sharing and interpreting audience intelligence
- takecare handling personal data. Remember: let the customer decide. Be aware of compliance and good practice whether you are the data controller or not, and note new advice[11] on digital channels. Data protection does not affect the use of data for research purposes[12]
- only share data that you have the right skills and resources to use
- putadata sharing agreement[13]in place. This should address concerns of all parties and can be included as part of a contract
Q: How will the Arts Council use this insight?
A: We may share it and we will publish an annual summary.
The Arts Council publishes a summary of Major partner museum’s Audience Finderdata each year.We consult organisations should we be asked for any specific information on a particular organisation as part of a freedom of information request, and take their views into account before sharing.
In return for sharing audience data on Audience Finder, Major partner museums receive an annual summary of their audiences with comparisons against other local and national benchmarks.
Q: How do we know what constitutes a good representative audience sample size for data collection purposes?
A: If you lack the expertise in-house, there are various options.
Your organisation needs a planned approach to gaining insight into your audiences over the three-year funding period.If you do not have the expertise in-house, you will have to source it by, for example, recruiting someone who is a member of the Market Research Society onto your board.Some organisations have formed partnerships with universities to support their plans around research and monitoring.
It may be appropriate to think about co-commissioning any advice you need with similar or local organisations.
Q: Is there any other support available?
A: Yes, see these two websites:
The National Audit Office sampling guide[14]gives advice on understanding what an appropriate sample looks like.
CultureHive[15] contains advice including toolkits on researching and understanding your audiences.