Let’s talk about Resilience.

There is a lot of campaigning going on with 2024 being a General Election year. Creative UK for example, launched their bold Manifesto: Our Creative Future. You can read it in full from this link here. There are many things that caught my eye in the Manifesto, but I’d like to focus on one key point today:

“Over 70% of creative businesses report not having enough finance, and 62% believe their growth is restricted by lack of funding.”

The conversations I’ve had in my 121s and OAUK’s monthly drop-ins have shown that Outdoor Arts is feeling the lack of resources very keenly this year, just like many other sectors in the arts. The festivals are having to cut back on their programme due to reduced budgets and increased costs. Artists and companies are seeing much less opportunities to present or develop their work as a result. OAUK is currently running a member’s survey, and the concerns about sector resilience is coming through quite clearly there, too. You can still submit your views through the Survey by clicking here.

When the going gets tough, being able to demonstrate why you should receive the finite resources becomes critical for your continued success (or even survival). Having a strong artistic vision and proving your career credentials is important of course, but if you have a strong narrative on how your creative practice relates to wider society, you might find that extra sense of resilience and worth.

I am not saying that all artists and creative organisations should become solely focused on social impact. But thinking about the wider impact of your artistic work will help you become more inclusive and relevant to a bigger pool of stakeholders. This will make you more resilient because you are opening yourself up to a wider range of engagement prospects and therefore sources of income.

…continued from the membership newsletter (8th May 2024).

Evidencing your impact will enhance your resilience

The questions that could help articulate your wider impact might not come immediately to you, but I have found Arts Council England’s Let’s Create strategy useful for this exercise. The Outcomes of the strategy outlines the different ways that arts can impact on individuals, communities, and possibly the country. You can access this document by clicking here. Let’s Create is quite a wordy document, so I have used their EasyRead version as prompts for this kind of exercise before. You can access the EasyRead here.

Cultural Philanthropy Foundation also launched a campaign called Culture makes… recently, in which it calls on arts organisations to celebrate the 8 types of Impact of Culture. These 8 might also be a good way of thinking about your impact – here’s the link to a short video.

Having looked at the above documents, here are the kind of questions that might arise that are quite unique to Outdoor Arts:

  • Has your work impacted on wellbeing of underserved people? Maybe you spotted them come to you as a passer-by audience. Did you see them leave much happier and fulfilled afterwards?
  • Has your work impacted on placemaking and community building? Did it fundamentally change the way local people think about their town and each other?
  • Has your work impacted on education? Maybe that co-creation spectacle you put on with a school helped its pupils improve focus on learning.

Spending some time articulating questions like these and answering them will hopefully lead to the realisation that there are different kinds of organisations you can pitch your work to. There are non-arts-based opportunities out there such as social prescribing or programmes that tackle loneliness, and you may find willing local NHS Trusts or grassroots charities who might want to partner with you to fundraise for a project.

Creative Lives for example, has a list of potential funders of projects on their website. You can access it here. NHS Trusts are increasingly embedding creative work for patient welfare, too. You can just search “the arts and NHS” to find information online, but here’s an example from East Sussex.

Is evaluation a thing for me?

The set of questions should help you decide on the kind of impact your work can demonstrate, who your new partners and funders might be. The next step is to start collecting evidence through an evaluation process. Learning to do good evaluation might sound like a dry thing to be promoting, but my experience is that most of the creatives are naturally good at doing evaluation. We are curious beings, always trying different things to refine our practice. Evaluation is not all about numbers and statistics – you could see it as another way of engaging with your audience and telling the story of how they’ve changed as a result of experiencing your work.

Here are some of the resources I’ve found for doing evaluation well:

For those who are starting to embark on this journey for the first time, it may take some time for your work to eventually bear fruit. And though it isn’t ideal, you can always start this process by revisiting previous projects and conduct an evaluation retrospectively. You can also use reports from other similar artists and organisations to talk up your own prospect of making impact, too. There are a lot of evaluation reports out there online – here is an example on wellbeing of disabled young people and participatory arts. It contains Outdoor Arts projects led by ZoieLogic Dance Theatre and Stopgap Dance Company.

OutdoorArtsUK are keen to receive a variety of your evaluation reports. This is because our advocacy for the sector becomes more astute and evidence based when we have a good volume of information to work with. So, if you have any impact reports, please email them to us. A link to our email address is here.

Calling on artists, companies, and festivals to do more joined up evaluation and storytelling of impact

I feel that festivals and artists could work much more collaboratively to do evaluation, and working together will help amplify each other’s voice in demonstrating the worth of our sector. For example, many of the better-established festivals have a track record of collecting the economic impact of their festival but has this ever been shared with the artists they have programmed? And artists are the ones who are engaging directly with participants and audiences, so could they be better utilised in collecting evidence for meaningful impact on individuals and placemaking agenda?

OAUK are open to working with interested parties to trial a more collaborative way of evidencing the impact of Outdoor Arts. So, do get in touch!

In the next member’s newsletter blog, we are planning to write about how you can consolidate your mission and vision. Having a strong foundation of artistic and social vision becomes increasingly important as your social impact widens. Mission drift is a real danger of any creative, as success can lead you to say yes to things that contradict what you’re set up to do in the first place.

And if there are any other topics or issues that you’d like us to look into and write about, do let us know!

See you in a fortnight.

Sho and the OAUK Team