Leading the Sector was a professional development course in Digital Leadership for a cohort of 16 leaders from medium-to-large heritage organisations across the UK. It was funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund for Digital Skills for Heritage and led by Culture24.
Now more than ever before, CEOs, senior executives and trustees of heritage organisations need digital leadership skills. They need to be informed about the opportunities and challenges of digital in order to build resilient and successful heritage organisations. Leading the Sector provided the opportunity for leaders to focus on this critical strategic area – whatever their current understanding of digital leadership. Our Pathway resource, ‘Developing digitally literate leadership in heritage organisations‘, explains several of the programme’s starting points and shares reflections, insights and case studies from the cohort.
The course began in May 2020 and ran until early 2021. Our first cohort of senior leaders was drawn from a wide range of heritage organisations working across the UK:
Leicestershire and Rutland Wildlife Trust
National Museums Northern Ireland
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB)
The Hunterian, University of Glasgow
The National Mining Museum, Scotland
The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre
Course outline
Leading the Sector gave leaders in heritage organisations a cohort-based opportunity to:
- explore the characteristics of digitally literate leadership in a small, friendly community of like-minded peers
- apply learning, with support, to build their organisations’ digital maturity and capacity
- understand what ‘digital’ means in a heritage context and where most value lies for their teams, organisation, communities, wider audiences and the heritage they work with
- build personal digital literacy, skills and understanding
The cohort of 16 leaders was taken through a collaborative learning process, over ten months, that balanced strategic and practical guidance, and included:
- Four virtual and in-person workshops across 10 months
- A structured mentoring process, helping leaders to apply learning in their settings
- Being part of a friendly, supportive group of peers all facing similar challenges
- The support of a highly experienced and supportive team of expert coaches.
The course combined strategic and practical guidance and was rooted in a range of approaches developed over the previous three years to inform and support digital transformation in the cultural sector, including One by One, Let’s Get Real and the Digital Culture Compass.
The course was led by Anra Kennedy, Partnerships Director at Culture24, with partners Golant Innovation/The Audience Agency and specialist advisors including Professor Ross Parry, University of Leicester and Dr Nick Winterbotham.
Support and resources
On September 1st 2021 we launched a range of free resources and case studies drawn from the programme in a free online seminar. Reflections, insights and case studies from the programme can be found in our, ‘Developing digitally literate leadership in heritage organisations‘ Pathway resource, published in August 2021.
In September 2020 Anra Kennedy wrote Developing digital leadership in heritage, a blog post reporting on the common challenges that Leading the Sector course participants were facing and the experiments they began carrying out to make meaningful change happen.
Our colleagues at The National Lottery Heritage Fund’s Digital Skills for Heritage initiative, of which our course was only one strand, offered a range of other digital skills support and opportunities. We’d recommend you sign up to their newsletter (https://www.heritagefund.org.uk/email-updates) to keep informed.
Culture24 also publishes a sector skills newsletter which we use, along with our sector-facing Twitter accounts (@Culture24 and @AnraKennedy) to share resources and opportunities.
Finally, Culture24’s Digital Pathways resource bank on digital skills for museums and heritage organisations is continuing to grow. We will be adding more over the coming months, with an immediate focus on remote working and communication. These three resources might be of particular interest to you:
A guide to digital leadership:
A CALM approach to leadership in the digital age
Two case studies on developing digital leadership within museums:
Museum of London’s adoption of new digital practices and processes
National Army Museum’s adoption of new digital practices and processes
Leading the Sector 2022 launched in March to continue to provide the support and knowledge that heritage leaders need to effect confident, well-informed digital leadership.
