Culture24 was an independent charity who between 2001 and 2023 helped arts and heritage people drive positive change inside their organisations, building resilience and capacity. We are now part of The Audience Agency having merged our two charities in December 2023. This site is an archive of our work up until then. To keep in touch and informed about our work sign up for our newsletter and join our community at our new home.
Nurturing skills, support and knowledge
Let’s Get Real (LGR) is our flagship collaborative action research programme that each year supports a cohort of arts and heritage organisations to become more relevant, resilient and responsive to digital cultural changes. This programme continues at our new home with The Audience Agency.
Since 2011 there have been eleven LGR projects, each exploring a different question around digital change, including evaluating success online, developing deeper human connection across digital channels and connecting digital practice and social purpose. Read more about all the phases.
We developed our LGR methodology and apply it to working with more cohorts of people as part of a range of projects with partners in the UK and internationally including:
- DART (a three year project funded by Canada Council for the Arts and working with a different cohort of Canadian arts & heritage people each year)
- Digital Literacy for Leadership collaborative online learning programme (funded by Museums Galleries Scotland and The Art Fund to support established and emerging leaders)
- New Voices Learning Module (part of our ACE funded programme for small museums to unearth new stories about their collections, written by new voices, for new audiences).
We received NPO funding from Arts Council England between 2018 and 2023 to deliver a specific programme of activities that support museums. We then supplemented that with self-generated income from commissions, partnerships, events and consultancy for a range of public, private and academic partners in the UK and internationally.
Creating and publishing resources
Our Digital Pathways website is an online resource bank providing resources to help museum people understand and use digital tools and channels. This is where we capture insights, approaches and experiences from across our different projects and turn them into new, relevant and relatable case studies which are published on the website. We also signpost to digital resources by others, curating a wide range of resources and case studies published by partners and the wider digital community. This site continues to be supported by The Audience Agency.
Policy and research
We have a strong track record of international collaborations and partnership working and this continues in our new home with The Audience Agency. Past projects include:
- A commission from the Europeana Foundation to support the establishment of a Digital Transformation Task Force that will help them consolidate their work in this area and come up with an action plan to drive forward digital capacity building. This commission builds on the report we did for them last year that researched Digital Transformation and the GLAM sector internationally.
- Numerous commissions from the British Council to deliver digital capacity building work for cohorts of museum professionals in Myanmar, Greece and Croatia.
The Museums Support Alliance
Established by Culture24 in 2017 the Museums Support Alliance, an informal forum made up of CEOs and senior leaders from 30+ organisations working to support the museum sector. The purpose of the group is to make museums better together. We develop more relevant, tailored, responsive and coherent services through co-operation and we believe that openness enhances our individual offers to the sector. The group meets two or three times a year and our CEO Jane Finnis is the chair. The Musuem Support Alliance continues to meet and is now led by The Audience Agency.
Our Digital Storytelling sites
Our Museum Crush site curated and packaged museums’ collections to tell new stories that effectively reached and inspired audiences online. It included a well loved, regular email digest to a list of over 15,000 followers. We directly supported 50 museums a year to explore innovative ways of marketing their offer using their digital collection assets using the site as a collaborative online storytelling platform.
Our Show Me website offered a safe, age-appropriate, gateway to arts and cultural collections content for students aged 7 to 12 and their teachers.
These websites are no longer available due to lack of public funding.
Our digital infrastructure
Twenty years’ worth of public investment in Culture24 funded the creation of a flexible, intelligent and sophisticated technical infrastructure that underpined our publishing and online platforms. Our Direct Data Entry (DDE) database was available for UK cultural institutions to use free of charge to upload their event and exhibition listings. This data fed into our family of WordPress websites, creating an online publishing system that was flexible, robust and easy to update and to iterate our products as needed. We shared data and content with a range of partners including Art UK and the BBC (Civilisations in 2018 and the Art That Made Us Festival in 2022). All of our listings data was licensed openly for re-use.
This infrastructure is no longer available due to lack of public funding.