Reconfiguring the Local Creative by Richard Grassick

Vis u al & Me d ia A r t s in Dar lin g t on

RECONFIGURING THE LOCAL CREATIVE A COOPERATIVE APPROACH TO MARKETING THE ARTS IN DARLINGTON

D M G , B l a n c h e P e a s e A n n e x e , T h e A r t s C e n t r e , Va n e Te r r a c e , D a r l i n g t o n , D L 3 7 A X | 0 1 3 2 5 4 8 8 1 3 9 w w w. m e d i a w o r k s h o p . o r g . u k

Reconfiguring the Local Creative A Cooperative Approach to Marketing the Arts in Darlington The Darlington Context The cultural sector in Darlington has spent much of 2011 engaged in developing a new vision for the arts in the town. In the wake of the coalition government’s 2010 announcements about public spending cuts, Darlington Borough Council took the decision to pass on some of these to the cultural sector. A new way had to be found to sustain and finance the arts in the town. With the founding of Darlington for Culture in late 2010, and the subsequent council-led Arts Enquiry, some of the building blocks that will be needed have been fashioned. But much more will detailed work need to be done. Darlington Media Group has already submitted a proposal 1 to the local authority that offers a model for practitioner-led redevelopment of one arts venue in the town. Here, we offer a practical proposal for developing an economic arts marketing model based on digital technologies. The proposal is currently the subject of an Arts Council funding application. But whether or not this is successful (the fund is highly competitive), we believe there is merit in publishing the proposal in this form, to offer it to the town as the basis for discussion about marketing our future arts offer.

Testing a Proposition Darlington Media Group is leading a partnership with local arts organisations Theatre Hullabaloo, The Forum, and Darlington Borough Council (in relation to public art mapping) to test the proposal that the arts in small to mediumsized towns - which make up over half the districts in England - could better flourish with a genuinely unified and cooperative arts marketing strategy. Our key aim is to create a viable model that can engage local citizens more effectively, creatively, deeply, and coherently in the local arts offer. Our proposition has 3 strands.: i) We shall test the thesis that a local arts offer that matches the population’s sense of place increases and broadens audience awareness and engagement. Funding opportunities dominated by competition between organisations has held back Darlington’s sense of cultural identity for decades. Darlington’s arts offer has been delivered by an undefined collection of council arts service, third sector and informal arts groups, and independent arts professionals, in various venues and public spaces. Consequently, we witness public confusion over the town’s piecemeal-marketed exhibition programme. In contrast, is the local population’s own sense of place. Like many market towns, Darlington’s citizens are strongly focussed on their own town, illustrated by the council’s decision in the 1990’s to create a unitary authority. In 2010, in response to cuts in council budgets, local artists, arts organisations (including DMG) and concerned citizens came together to form Darlington for Culture (DfC) to develop alternative strategies to previously high council arts spending. Subsequently, the local authority set up the Darlington Arts Enquiry with the DfC to draw up a new, more inclusive and cooperative vision for the town’s arts offer. Today, Darlington offers, perhaps only briefly, extremely fertile ground on which to test our thesis. ii) We shall test the economics and effectiveness of moving marketing to a (primarily mobile) digital platform. Small towns have historically been unable to economically sustain unified arts marketing. In large cities, larger markets offer commercial possibilities for building unified marketing strategies (Time Out in London, The Crack in Newcastle). But in smaller communities, the normal pattern is for organisations to market themselves, or at

Blanche Pease - A Practitioner-Led Arts Offer

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best for a limited number to come together for particular, time-limited projects (Art Yorkshire). As audiences look increasing to digital platforms for information, an economic opportunity for smaller communities has arisen. Can an economic business model be developed? To test this, we shall identify a small team to carry out the proposition. iii) Creative work with our artistic partners We shall work with our artistic partners to produce content specifically designed for the mobile platform to deepen the audience’s connection with the creative work of local artists, and prepare them for actual visits to venues. To deliver this work, DMG will employ a developer to build a bespoke mobile app, Around Town. Besides project management, DMG’s role will be to produce cultural content. Details of our previous productions are available online.

Key Project Milestones The project is scheduled to run over 11 months from October 2011, subject to a funding bid to the Arts Council of England. However, we believe the project is strong enough to merit consideration by other funders, and should be of great interest to the local authority. The following timescale could therefore be applied with a slightly later starting date, should this become necessary. O C T O B E R - D E C E M B E R 2 0 11

App development & testing, marketing staff employed

O C T O B E R 2 0 11 - F E B R U A RY 2 0 1 2

Content generation by DMG, arts information network established by marketing staff

MARCH 2012 A P R I L - J U LY 2 0 1 2

AUGUST 2012

App launch - local marketing campaign Live test period. Recruitment of users, interactivity content generation, event bookings Full appraisal of user numbers, traffic levels. App refinements; completion of action research. Findings, packaging of refined app for sale. Report.

Audience Engagement Our model of local cooperation to market a town-focussed arts offer reveals great advantages over competitive working. Our partners - and ourselves - have strengths in certain marketing techniques, and in certain markets. The Forum, for example, is highly focussed on young adults. But none alone can match them with the local population’s sense of place. By bringing the Arts Sector together, we can cross-pollinate. Thus we can work together with The Forum to deepen the reach (video, audio content) into this audience segment. Crucially, we shall do so whilst placing The Forum’s offer within a wider context - music in our town - that will widen audience reach (marketing of Around Town via App Store, Android Market, local PR campaigns). Our project will build on the work published by ACE in 2008, Arts Audiences: Insight2, and NESTA in 2010, Culture of Innovation 3. The former includes a useful segmentation of the Darlington population. Using this approach, audience reach will be diversified (identifying new audiences, merging existing audience networks for individual arts organisations, the well documented extension to lower income audiences). We shall also address Culture of Innovation’s

Arts Audiences: Insight. Arts Council England 2008

Culture of Innovation - An economic analysis of innovation in arts and cultural organisations. Bakhshi & Throsby 2010

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art form development strand through our engagement with Theatre Hullabaloo and The Forum around new product development specifically for the Around Town platform. As a non-profit, our core outcome will be value creation in the Darlington arts community. We are seeking to develop a business model that can produce inspiring content, information gather, manage a database of clients, and deliver new audiences to existing ticketing systems. We believe our own background as a media organisation with objectives that lie precisely in this terrain, and with long experience in managing budgets of up to £500k, will provide a perfect basis for delivering such a model.

The Technology of the App The key technology that will be required for our project is a bespoke app for mobile platforms. We are currently in touch with 3Squared , a Sheffield-Based company with close to 10 years’ experience in the field. 3Squared have developed innovative, technically imaginative solutions to solve their customer’s toughest challenges. They have delivered numerous apps which are available for download on the app store. We are also asking 3Squared to provide quotations for web design that will integrate well with the design of the app. Whilst 3Squared are our preferred technology provider, we are seeking quotations for the above work from two other regional companies.

Value to the Wider Cultural Sector If local arts communities are given a digital media platform and business model to market their arts offer more economically, whilst raising the quality of engagement with audiences, it will help transform the role of Local Arts Development into a more inclusive and vibrant cultural sector that is engaged in much more creative dialogue and interaction. If our Arts Council funding bid is successful, our project will be backed by a small research team. We envisage that the focus of this research will be on both artists and audiences. A key aspect of local art is its constant over-shadowing by national and international art by the media. Very often, this process denies local creative talent serious public consideration. Thus from the artists’ point of view, a qualitative analysis of their responses to more substantial attention being paid to the detail of their artistic practices could be produced. Clearly data on bookings made via Around Town should be recorded. For art such as exhibitions that do not require a booking system, some means of recording attendance as a result of the app will be required. Data on audience awareness of the local arts offer, and in particular of the featured artists during the period of the project, will prove extremely valuable in helping to guide future development and marketing of the app. Our project addresses concerns shared by Local Arts Sectors (LAS’s) across the country. Many small arts organisations do not have the resources to fully market themselves, yet centralised marketing services seem unable to relate to them. Our own sub-region is a case in point. Resources have poured into the creation of Tees Valley, an entity little loved or understood by local people. Yet http://www.visitteesvalley.co.uk/site/events, for example, fails to cover the vast majority of arts activities in the area.

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Resolving this dilemma should be at the heart of our research. Rather than our taking on the whole of Tees Valley with our project, our approach requires participation building amongst LAS’s in each town, and a much more proactive marketing approach than is typically the case with commercial/city/sub-region models. In effect, arts marketing initiatives need to belong to the LAS’s they service. A key question, of course, is to what extent other LAS’s wish to work together, and take ownership of a marketing service. We believe that the current climate of public sector funding cuts will, as in Darlington, focus the minds of artists and arts organisations. But the policy also requires the catalyst of Arts Council financial backing. Most arts organisations will respond positively and creatively to funding that supports their self-organisation. And at a time when localism is now firmly on the political agenda, this could also signal an important new policy direction for the Arts Council itself. The About Town server app will be available for LASs to purchase from ourselves. Part of the fee for this purchase will cover support with initial setting up and delivery. However, clearly the app will require local content to be produced, and this will ideally be carried out by local media organisations. It will therefore be essential that LASs develop a creative working relationship with local content producers. Our experience is that over the past 20 years more and more small video content production companies have been established, in the wake of the transformation of digital video technology. There should be little difficulty finding such partners in most English towns. Can LASs use our proposal as an off the shelf service? From the perspective of individual arts organisations, Around Town will likely be seen as a digital listings service, akin to Time Out in London or The Crack on Tyneside, to which they should therefore be able to submit their programme content for free. But such commercial operations are not primarily driven by, and focussed on, LASs. Moreover, smaller towns are currently in no financial position to produce similar services, nor high value media content. Our critique of existing marketing services suggests that cooperation between arts organisations to collectively own a marketing business could deliver a much more effective service.

Delivering the Project We shall deliver across three strands - technical, structural, and creative.

Technical Around Town will be produced by an experienced applications developer. A web presence will augment, and in design match, this, produced by an experienced web designer. These are both one-off costs. Around Town will be free to download on the client side, whilst the server side will be designed to be adaptable to any LAS. It will link to online booking systems for all content. The process of harmonising such systems - or indeed working with small arts organisations without online booking systems - will be a focus for ongoing research during the period of the project.

Structural The project team will consist of a project manager, a project coordinator, and a marketing assistant. The project manager will coordinate and monitor the project’s strategic objectives, manage budgets, and liaise with researchers). The project coordinator will have an on the ground presence over 3 days a week at our media workshop (with 1.5 days work time allocated to the project) to concentrate on the technical delivery, liaise with the app and website developers, work on post-production of content, and oversee the work of the marketing assistant. The marketing assistant will work 1 day per week. We shall commission an app developer to build Around Town, and design a complimentary website. We shall commission a local photographer to produce a range of stills work throughout the period of the project. We shall commission a voice artist to devise and record a monthly podcast about the local arts offer. D a r l i n g t o n M e d i a G r o u p!

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We shall work with the 5 arts partners below.

Creative We shall work with Theatre Hullabaloo during rehearsals for their operetta, My Mother Told Me Not to Stare. One video piece will be straight documentary, with interviews and excerpts from the operetta. A second will be designed specifically as a mobile device drama. To achieve this, we are exploring with Theatre Hullabaloo shooting discreet scenes with a 360º video camera. 360º video material, when played on a mobile device, interacts with the user in such a way that, as s/he moves whilst holding the device, the segment of the video being viewed changes with him/her. The experience becomes more immersive than is the case as a member of a live audience. We shall work with The Forum on a series of audio pieces exploring the composition and production of new music at their venue. This will be augmented by a 360º video piece shot at a live performance of one of the compositions featured in the audio series. We shall build on Darlington Borough Council’s, online mapping of public art in Darlington, by adding new video and audio content. We shall produce two artist interviews (Paul Dillon and Andrej Balco). Paul Dillon has worked and taught visual art in the town for 30 years, and has a strong personal following. In contrast, Andrej Balco, whose work will feature for the first time in the UK in our own photography exhibition programme, will visit Darlington for the first time in 2012. The Costs DMG has costed the entire project at £43,100. We are committing staff and volunteer time to the proposal, worth some £3,300, and are applying to Arts Council England’s R&D fund for the remaining £38,800. The costs can be broken down as follows: Project Manager (5% of budget)

£2100

Project Coordinator/ Content Editor (1.5 days per week, 44 weeks @ £150 per day)

£9900

App Developer fee

£10000

Web Designer fee

£2000

Marketing assistant 1 day p/w over 40 weeks @£100

£4000

Theatre Hullabaloo facility fee

£300

Audio production - Forum commissioning fee

£2000

Facility fees/travel expenses Paul Dillon/Andrej Balco

£500

Monthly audio blog by voice artist - 6 months @ £150

£900

Video production (6 standard videos) : crewing, equipment & facilities hire

£3300

Video production (3 360º productions) : crewing, equipment & facilities hire

£1650

Stills - photographer fee

£500

Launch marketing budget/ merchandising

£3500

Office overheads, £135 per month x 12

£1620

Server space rental (1 year)

£850

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Total Budget

ÂŁ43120

Darlington Media Group, September 2011

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