London 2012 Impacts: From Collaboration to Celebration

8.9 Creative Scotland could have played a more significant role in co-ordinating the strategic use of social media as a mechanism for promotion, engagement and collaboration around the Programme. There is an opportunity to harness the potential to cross-fertilise promotion and community engagement between projects that perhaps share a location or a theme or context. Creative Scotland could take advantage of the informal but fast-paced discussion environment that make web platforms such as Twitter and Facebook popular and effective tools for marketing and, more importantly, social networking.

London 2012 Impacts: From Collaboration to Celebration

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8.13 The Programme has made a positive contribution towards nurturing collaborations, both at a strategic level and through project partnership formation. However, collaborations need time, trust and understanding on both sides if they are to be strengthened. More longitudinal work needs to be undertaken to assess whether partnerships formed as an outcome of the Programme were sustained. Strategically, though operating in a challenging, complex cultural programming environment, working relationships have been strengthened, which provides optimism looking forward to Glasgow 2014.

By their nature, partnerships are varied by scale, scope, duration and depth. Some of the most important long-term connections or relationships formed may have been as an unintended consequence of funding of the cultural programme. Further attention should be paid to defining the criteria for measurement of partnerships and whether new relationships should be promoted over the deepening of existing ones. Whatever the definitional debates, there is evidence to suggest that many projects were interested in continuing with their projects and partnerships in the future, albeit in a different form.

There is evidence that the Programme provided a unique celebration, creating new contexts, sites and settings for artists and creative practitioners to develop and deepen their practice. New geographical settings were created or utilised and a range of artforms used the existing landscape in innovative and unique ways. Audiences were able to see the best of UK and international culture in Scotland, with the Big Concert at Stirling Castle and NVA’s Speed of Light on Arthur’s Seat good examples. However, there is a need for more robust indicators to assess the quality of artistic production to ensure that these judgments include the experiences of audiences.

Audience figures for participation in events, exhibitions and performances were significant, engaging with large audiences during the London 2012 Festival period. However, in order to assess whether eventled cultural programmes produce additionality in cultural engagement, more systematic audience development work is required to ensure more informed claims about audience can be made for the Glasgow 2014 Cultural Programme.

8.14 There is evidence to suggest that projects experienced a benefit from being involved in the Cultural Olympiad in terms of promotion. National and international profile was enhanced for projects and being part of a national celebration was deemed beneficial. The absence of robust data on employment, international visitor numbers and other indicators associated with investment in the creative economy means that it is not possible to place a an economic value on the promotional opportunity that London 2012 represented.