Illuminations
"While public funds are poured out in feasts of brotherhood, a bell of rose-coloured fire tolls in the clouds." Rimbaud, Illuminations, translated by Oliver Bernard
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Thinking / Illuminate
Illuminating exchanges
I keep making people who work in Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisations wince.
Or get cross. Or laugh, but in a way that suggests repeated banging of the forehead against a hard surface. Usually this is in response to a simple “How’s it going?”. Or ‘How are you finding life as an NPO?” Lately, their pain always relates to one word: Illuminate. This is the new data collection platform, being devised by Big Four consulting firm PWC. (Present continuous deliberate.) It's a thorn in many sides right now.
Varying degrees of joy at ACE strategic decisions and implementation-behaviours are nothing new. It goes with the territory and sometimes inducing discomfort can be a useful thing. And sometimes people like a moan about funders as a relief from other challenges. But I’ve not heard such a negative response to a change in many years. (I’m not primarily interested in criticising ACE, though this does all seem unnecessary right now. If there’s a strong case for change I’ve yet to hear it.)
Illuminate will collect box office and audience survey data from National Portfolio Organisations. Last week, following months of delays, ACE pushed back the reporting requirements for 2023-2024. Box office data covering the period will not be required until July 2024, and audience surveys will not be mandatory until April 2024. So well into the current NPO period. (Arts Professional has more detailed views on shortcomings of the system.)
ACE commissioned PWC to build Illuminate. (You may know PWC from such million-quid-fine-worthy debacles as Babcocks and the collapse of BHS.) PWC won the contract over The Audience Agency, who ACE had funded since 2012 to develop first Audience Finder and then Audience Spectrum. They worked through many challenges and knots over that decade, building expertise, capacity and shared datasets. They turned many – though not all – data sceptics into keen users.
This story illustrates two things of interest and wider application.
Data hunger, learning famine
Some funders’ eyes are greedier than their bellies. This applies to ACE particularly I suspect, because of their overwhelming importance and heft in England. (That’s neither compliment nor criticism, more an observation on the lack of strategic competition they face.) Funders from government on down tend to think more data will mean universally applicable and applied intelligence. All we need is a better framework or system. Then we will have data to inform better performance, better decision-making, and unbeatable arguments for impact. Or so it can seem.
Appetite for such data outstrips the ability to collect and distil it. It over-estimates the ability for anyone, including a funder such as ACE, to learn from it, let alone share and apply that learning. I looked in vain on the ACE website, for instance, for an ACE view of the implications of the helpfully shared NPO annual survey data. (I can’t swear it’s not there, as the site is so labyrinthine.) The Audience Agency do talk about what Audience Finder trends suggest, but presumably PWC won’t be doing that on behalf of ACE?
I am reminded of a recent post by Australian consultant Aden Date on how frameworks for evaluation and data proliferate. Aden compares data collection to nets to catch fish in a river: the size of the mesh makes all the difference. His conclusion is relevant here: “In the cultural sector, our general problem is that our nets are too tight: we’re catching too much and spend more time sorting through data than making effective use of it.” He suggests good frameworks should be “minimally intrusive” and not block the main work. This is very much not the case so far for those folk in NPOs I’ve been talking to.
Aden is writing as Creative Australia comes into being there, with a desire to build a meta-framework for valuing the arts. This echoes the intention behind six projects funded recently by Arts and Humanities Research Council and DCMS. These partnership projects aim to create “a formal and multidisciplinary approach to valuing the benefits of culture and heritage assets to society.” This is, apparently, needed because “there is no agreed approach to measuring the contribution of the cultural and heritage sector, which means that it is often understated.”
Personally, I’m sceptical that would make a massive difference even if achieved. I’ll stick to extracting sunbeams from cucumbers.
Overriding the good enough?
A dispiriting aspect of the Illuminate story is ACE’s institutional forgetfulness of its own investments. I’ve not added up a decade’s worth of funding to The Audience Agency, but I’m sure it’s a lot, even setting aside the sweat of everyone involved. Funders change because the people within them change, and they don’t usually want to carry on doing exactly what their predecessors did. That might be human nature, but it’s sometimes, as in this instance, unhelpful for building capacity within the sector.
I have no privileged insight into relations between ACE and The Audience Agency. I am not commenting on that funding decision specifically, which may be more complex than it seems, but making a wider point. I do, though, have experience as chair of AV Festival of how little ACE allows itself to care about assets and archives it invested in when it stops funding you. This is short-sighted in my view. What if a key principle was building assets and capacity within the sector, not enabling others to work on the sector? What could ACE help build over the genuinely long-term? And how does ACE improve its skills at constructive exit from investment?
So much learning goes to waste through procurement-driven funder impatience. Too often the unyielding search for the perfect is the enemy of the useful good enough.
[Note: Obviously I am a consultant myself, though comparing Thinking Practice to PWC is like comparing my old five-aside team Dynamo Meths to Manchester United. Thinking Practice has worked constructively and happily for ACE on several occasions. I’ve done work I’m proud of for ACE - consultancies can really help with outside perspectives and skills. I have a lot of respect for the people working there. But there are times the organisation finds itself sticking with perverse positions. My interest here is in exploring what may lead to such institutional behaviour.]
/ Practice: appearing at….
You can still book for the National Creative Ageing Conference on 10 October, where I will be talking about the evaluation of the Celebrating Age programme on which I collaborated with Imogen Blood and Lorna Easterbrook.
One more thing…
I want to recommend this essay about The Royle Family by Fergal Kinney. It’s really sharp and touching about Caroline Aherne, the ability she and Craig Cash had of capturing ordinary working class life, and the arcs of her life.
I love The Royle Family, celebrating its 25th birthday and available on I-player currently, because Sue Johnston reminds me of my mum, and Liz Smith of my Nan Peg, and because I spent many nights as a teenager watching the telly with my family in not a not dissimilar lounge, making as many brews and runs to the shop as Anthony. But mainly I love it because of the way it shows how something’s always happening while nothing happens. There’s no major disfunction, no tragedies, although there are deaths. So much ‘representation’ seems to tacitly accept that identity=trauma – and The Royle Family doesn’t. It’s life and life only, and I’ve hardly ever seen that.
Thanks for the share, Mark, and glad my post was helpful.
I'm unsure exactly where the ideological faultline is, or are, or how to shift the lever here. John Keats spoke of Shakespeare's "negative capability," the capacity to be in uncertainty without unnecessarily or prematurely grasping after truth. That capacity - to know what we don't know, or can't know - is essential to making art. What we're learning is that it is also essential to arts governance.
Consultancies like PWC must be happy indeed as the pursuit of perfect knowledge is, essentially, a contractual arrangement without end.
Thanks Mark. As insightful as always and incredibly pertinent to things I’m musing on around data at the moment. Has really helped. And valuable too, the fact that so much useful knowledge gets lost, often binned, knowledge gleaned from valuable schemes of work at substantial cost, because it’s not “new”. Having returned to Glasgow after 30 years I find it sad that so few people around me remember or even understand the huge investment the City made in culture that provided the groundwork for what the sector has now. Yes the City is broke. Yes Glasgow feels run down and there’s not much funding around. But so much went before that is still of value and people need to get over themselves a little, roll their sleeves up and start to rebuild as others did some 40 years ago. Again thanks.