Let's Get Real 10: Using digital to add value

This phase of our Let’s Get Real skills and capacity development programme took place across an eight month period kicking off in February 2024. Participation was self-funded and costs covered two people from each organisation and included multiple workshops, individual mentoring and expert guidance through a process of experimentation tailored to each participants setting.

By taking part each organisation benefited strategically through:

Evidence and insight that helped them make strategic and practical decisions about thorny challenges.
High quality professional development. The opportunity for two of their team to collaborate with and learn from a supportive, engaged community of peers with a shared sense of purpose and to develop their digital confidence, skills, literacy and understanding.
Tactics for effecting and embedding positive organisational change. Participants were supported to reflect on their current practice, design small-scale experiments and explore ways to embed insights and new ways of working back into the organisation. We help them become effective and confident agents of change which lasts long beyond the programme.
The opportunity to develop strategic influence within the wider arts and heritage sector. Each organisation’s experience on the project will inform collaborative research findings to inform best practice across the sector. We have trusted relationships with a broad range of cultural stakeholders in the UK and internationally. We will publish the project’s key findings in a final report to be shared and discussed with funders, policymakers, strategic sector bodies and academia.

How did this focus on digital and value apply to those who took part?

By taking part in this LGR programme, we supported participants through a process of experimentation and learning to develop their practice and understand more about digital and value. We helped them tailor their individual focus to explore a question or challenge that met their organisation’s needs and priorities.

In our 2023 sector survey asking about challenges around value and digital, questions like this came up:

How might we support digital leads to frame ‘value’ across their organisation’s work, to balance and prioritise the competing demands on their limited capacity and resources?
How might we advocate to leadership the importance of using and investing in digital to add value?
How might we make sure that any value we are adding via digital is strategic and aligned to mission?
How might we ensure that people within our organisation have the necessary skills and literacies to create the value we need through our digital content and experiences?
How can we understand the needs and motivations of our audiences, to ensure that our digital offer can add value for them?
How might we ensure our digital offer is valued by a diversity of different audiences - new and existing?
How might digital add value to the physical visit for our audience, pre, during and post visit, through our events, activities, exhibitions and content?
How might better use of digital support delivery of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion strategies?
How might we evidence and prioritise what will add value for us and our audiences, using digital?

We used these questions as a starting point to help participants think about and plan thier own experiments.