Category: Arts

Why should community arts organisations gather and share data?

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In Nov-Dec 2017 six Birmingham community arts organisations either based in and/or working with a range of communities from Sparkhill or Sparkbrook, came together to produce Spark: South Asian Arts Festival, a number of events designed with and by local people and curated by local arts organisation Ort Gallery. The Festival consisted of two weeks of films, music, arts, crafts, street art, theatre, poetry, food and more.

Arts and Heritage education specialist and Festival volunteer Jess Harrison, working with Pauline Roche from RnR Organisation who managed the social media for Ort Gallery during the Festival, carried out some pilot audience surveys at a few of the many events, and in this post she shares some of her thoughts and insights about small community arts organisations gathering and sharing data:

““We encourage our funded organisations to be more focused on audiences – to reach more people, broaden the groups they come from and improve the quality of their experience” Engaging people everywhere, Arts Council

Why share data?… to provide actionable insight about audiences and non-attenders, to enable communication directly with audiences or participants – Why share data?, Arts Council

Why gather and share data among small community arts organisations?
– Understanding audiences better leads to a) better programming which directly addresses their needs, and b) better marketing which can reach further across or deeper into particular sectors.
– Arts organisations face a number of challenges including lack of funding, facilities and staff; sharing data means that we can use our resources to everyone’s best advantage

My personal experience in gathering data from this festival:
– The benefits: directly engaging with people who’ve come to see shows, particularly asking open ended questions and gathering qualitative data
– The challenges: choosing what data to gather; gathering enough data to be representative and deciding what to do with the data when it’s been collected (ideally, this should be decided by the organisation before collecting the data)

Four practical recommendations for other small organisations collecting data:
– Have a clear idea of WHY you’re gathering data and WHAT you’ll do with it
– Be flexible and diverse in gathering data – be prepared to use a number of different methods (i.e. both paper-based and electronic)
– ‘Stitching’ data types together can give us more insights i.e. “track ticket purchasers, measure and map audiences, note accounts, compare web analytics, monitor social, share data, share donors” Data culture #1: back to (data) basics Patrick Hussey, The Guardian, Mar 29th 2012
– Make active connections with other local organisations in order to share data and practices”

Want to get involved in this local data gathering and sharing?

Following the successful Spark Festival project, there is now a legacy project which is exploring the development of arts activity/community arts activity within the Sparkbrook/Sparkhill area which will include data gathering and sharing.

If you want further details of this project, or our other work around data-informed decision-making, please contact RnR Organisation at RnR.Organisation@gmail.com

Cultivating Cultural Symposium, Local Arts in Birmingham and a Parade

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Cllr Karen McCarthy totally ignored St Patrick’s Festival in her introduction to the Cultivating Culture symposium on 18th March, focusing on Art Soak festival (Selly Oak) and Flat Pack. She promoted engagement in cultural activity as well as utilisation of artistic activity and the engagement and encouraging of individuals in arts / cultural activity – so, are the 80,000 people on the streets of Digbeth on March 16th and attendances at several related events in the week leading up to the Parade on Sunday not prime examples of this?

I’m confident Cllr McCarthy wasn’t ignoring the Irish, or the impact that the festival has on the City. I’m sure she was focusing on the programme funded through the ‘Arts and Cultural’ elements of the City Council, as opposed to a major City event that is supported through the Events Team within the Council.

It does, however, highlight a dichotomy in Birmingham City Council as to what people consider as arts and culture. What is the role of our arts champions within the City? More importantly, there is a need to identify the role of the whole arts champions programme – is it a community development and engagement programme that uses arts and cultural activities as a conduit for engagement, or is it an aesthetic development programme that aims to increase engagement in established or new arts activities?

Whatever the City Council decides, it has to acknowledge the role wider ‘City’ events, the Parade and Festival, Vaisakhi, Melas, Carnival etc play in its artistic and cultural portfolio. At the moment there seems to be an implicit indication that they do not fall into an arts and cultural remit.

Yet the Parade fits all categories. It is nothing without its participants – dance schools, music from a variety of bands, modern, traditional, pipe bands etc., sports organisations – GAA football and hurling clubs. As a Festival, leading up to the Parade, there were a number of events that focused on cultural activities – storytelling, music and dancing, and the art of the younger generation.
Community groups provide and decorate the floats, as well as fund the musicians – they host visiting bands as well as attending the Festival events.

The BBC recently asked the question “Is Birmingham still an Irish City?”. The article cited census statistics and the number of people who had identified as Irish. The Parade on the 16th March 2014 proves that Birmingham certainly is an Irish City – the multi generational presence, children as participants in social and cultural events and people celebrating their culture and heritage.

So I return to my opening statement. In an event promoted by the arts and culture team of the City Council the Parade gets no mention, neither did other ‘cultural’ activities.

The symposium focused on communities of geography, districts / constituencies, the multi cultural powerhouse that is Birmingham. Because those are the things that this department / section of the Council funds, and in an artistic elitist atmosphere, it seems that Parades are not worthy of presence or mention; even though they may tick all of the artistic, cultural, and engagement boxes you could think of designing.

So where do the Irish and their inclusive Parade fit in the cultural life of the City? Where does it fit in a silo focused City Council whose elitist arts programme ignores Parades leaving it to the ‘events’ teams?

Whose responsibility is it to identify the cultural, economic, marketing and community engagement element of the Parade and let it stand alongside local arts events?

One last thought, Birmingham festival website does not include any of the above mentioned festivals, but that’s another story.

Art, design, engineering, Lego and Education

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A teacher at my nephew’s school described a series of drawing he had done as ‘drawings of my childhood toys’. He did not follow her guidance and titled the work ‘my hobbies’. The drawings were of Lego statues he had designed and made, he had designed one online and the design was made and sent to him by Lego.

To the teacher I say this is how to discourage engineers and designers, to my nephew I say keep at it and go for it.

This is art, design, engineering and Lego – this is Civil Engineering

art of brickmontage

– from the BBC website

The world’s biggest display of Lego art is taking place at Discovery Times Square in New York. The Art of the Brick features more than 100 works of art created from millions of toy Lego bricks by sculpture Nathan Sawaya. They include Yellow (bottom left), Skulls (top left) and Swimmer (right). The exhibition runs until January 2014.