Getting towards Making It Work together

The six arts organisations in Making It Work (Airspace Gallery, B Arts, Bitjam, picl, Restoke) have been working together for almost eighteen months now, funded by the Arts Council’s Catalyst programme to develop new sources of earned income. We’ve been to look at how other organisations are working together in Sheffield and completed training programmes that have varied from video editing and web design to running a community bakery.

Now it’s decision time. We spent a day working together with Anamaria Wills from Cidaco on what we might actually do together for private sector partners, other public funders - what our value proposition would be as a consortium.

We looked at the Stoke we wanted to see in ten years time, as that’s really what unites us. Our practice varies widely from a contemporary visual art gallery and a site-specific performance company to a digital innovation agency. Our individual organisations have very different missions and work in very different ways. All of us however share a common vision to make where we work, and where our audiences and partners come from, a better place. 

We worked in small groups to look at what the Stoke that everyone wanted to see would look like - which contained everything from trams and cycle lanes to more jobs and a better built environment. Then we all devised three projects that sought to embody some of these ideas at a strategic level using a CO-STAR development model which CIDACO use. The groups came up with a new circular bus route for visitors and residents in the city, which would connect the five towns of the city without needing to go in to the city centre and out again; a Stoke Embassy to London to sell the city’s creative and economic offer; and a transition programme for Stoke town following the withdrawal of council employees from the civic centre.

What, from B Arts’ perspective at least, we moved forwards on, was understanding that if we have a logic model in place for the consortium we can collaborate strategically without necessarily needing to create joint artistic work. We used a logic model (picked up on ACE’s Cultural Commissioning training) that starts by describing the Strategic Outcome the consortium has - an over-arching aim which, much like a mission, can't be measured. Beneath it  are Contributory Outcomes - these are aims that we can measure progress against, and which are achievable through the Outputs: the activities the programme consists of.

By the end of the day we’d even got as far as a Value Proposition. Ok, we had two:

• Making a new story for Stoke

• Realising the potential of the people and businesses in Stoke

that describe what private sector partners would gain by working with us. It’s taken us some time, but we finally feel that we’ve got a shared sense of purpose that could enable us to properly Make It Work together. Now we have to see if this is attractive to potential partners who would be interested in working with us on making these things happen. If we know what the joint outcomes should be, then what's the joint programme to achieve this?

bITjAM - What can we learn from the last 18 years of Lottery Funding in Stoke on Trent?

I thought it would be useful to examine lottery funding data spanning back to the heady days of 1995 to get a sense of the successful grants and also get a sense of the type of work that lottery funding used to support. I'm not quite sure how this data fits into helping Arts Organisations moving forward with seeking new ways of generating funds for projects; I'm open to ideas.

Using the Lottery section of the Culture website and searching for Stoke on Trent reveals around 18 years of data which reveals 1223 projects totalling £117,872,724.

Now I thought it would be best to ask a range of questions against this data including:

• Which organisations got what amounts?
• Which types of projects were successful?
• Who funded the projects?
• What was the pattern of funding over time?
• What are the key phrases that repeat in the project descriptions?

The data is not complete as a number of organisations may have selected to keep their funding application confidential so we have to take that into account.

The charts below show some of the data in visual form using Google Charts (it's quick and simple once I completed a little analysis). I also used a few extra tools up my sleeve to link Company names in the list to Companies house to get a sense of the types of company formations involved (Limited by Shares, CiC etc). I've also ran the project descriptions through a little analysis to get a sense of keywords that get repeated in the project titles, I looked for Named Entities rather than the usual word frequency (the type you see in Wordles). This analysis reveals a little more about the meaning of the high frequency words/phrases in the text .

It's up for grabs what we learn from this data, for me the named entities has been insightful however there's more analysis to be done, what can you find? How can we use data like this to move forward?

Here's the link to full data.

Funding over time:

(There were approx 961 awards given to groups with no formal structure recognised in Companies house although company names may have changed, but NOT 961 individual groups, just awards, some groups were awarded more than once. Data to be further analysed)