Culture24 joined Arts Council England’s National Portfolio in April 2018, stepping into a formal role as a Sector Support Organisation (SSO)
2022/2023
Culture24 are delivering a transitional year of sector support work in 2022/23 funded by Arts Council England as part of their Covid-19 response measures. Our programme of work in 2022/23 will continue to support people working in arts and heritage, enabling them to develop digital literacy and expand digital capacities and confidence via:
- 9 x online courses delivered in partnership with Museum Development England on ‘Digital Leadership’, ‘Digital storytelling with a collection focus’ and ‘Understanding your museum’s digital maturity’, for up to 162 people from 81 museums.
- A ‘New Voices’ digital storytelling online learning cohort programme, supporting 8 small to medium museums to unearth new stories about their collections, written by new voices, for new audiences.
- A Digital Transformation Journey online learning course in partnership with South East Museum Development and SHARE Museums East. Guiding up to 8 small to medium museums through a process of digital transformation to allow them to become more resilient and adapt to the pace of digital change.
- The ongoing creation, sourcing and signposting of relevant, relatable and inspiring resources for the sector on digital skills and leadership via our Digital Pathways website, drawn from our programmes and beyond.
- Building and nurturing communities via our online cohort spaces for people taking our courses, the Culture24 newsletter and our partnership-building and knowledge exchange work.
Our ambition for our SSO programme is to create a step change in museums’ understanding of digital by working with individual museum practitioners and leaders, supporting them to become agents of change inside their own organisations.
Culture24’s SSO work is part of a wider programme of audience development and publishing work including our Let’s Get Real action research; our storytelling platform Museum Crush; our Show Me site for children and a range of other partnership projects and commissions.
2018-2022
Between 2018 and 2022 we delivered a transformational programme of sector support work that engaged hundreds of arts heritage organisations, strategically and practically via:
- 48 x bespoke Digital Literacy Consultancies for CEOs & leadership of Museum NPOs, in partnership with the Audience Agency and Collections Trust
- 3 x 9-month Learning Modules working with a total of 60 practitioners from 30 museums
- 24 x digital leadership/collections/literacy workshops for 480+ practitioners
- Publication and promotion of 50 online resources to build digital capacity
- Support for 200 museums with digital storytelling & marketing tactics via Museum Crush
- Aggregation & sharing of listings from our arts and heritage network
This work is shaped across five areas of activity:
Strategic leadership: collaborations and partnership working with a range of other SSOs and related sector organisations, including: consultancies for museum leadership teams to help them embed digital understanding and literacies across their organisations; membership of boards and advisory groups; facilitating a working group on children, young people & digital cultural learning.
Learning modules and workshops: a programme of workshops and structured learning modules to support museum practitioners develop digital literacies, confidence and skills. Participants are encouraged to explore new ways of thinking about and working with their museums’ digital assets and channels. The programme is being shaped in response to sector needs by working closely with Museum Development Services.
Digital Pathways: an online resource bank offering simple, structured and accessible ‘Pathways’ and signposting the best of existing guidance from a wide range of sources, to address common digital challenges faced by museums. The Pathways and resources will help museum practitioners get things done and build their digital understanding via specialist, contextualised advice.
Publishing support: Museum Crush is Culture24’s collaborative online storytelling platform designed to help smaller museums explore innovative ways of marketing their offer by using their collections. The site is particularly aimed at museums with limited resources who need editorial support in thinking innovatively about the stories they have and how to share them.
Digital infrastructure: A data set of 7,200+ cultural venues & their listings available as APIs to support data sharing partnerships and Culture24’s own online publishing.