Digital Works Podcast: Fran Sanderson

Episode 32 of the podcast is a conversation with Fran Sanderson. Fran is Director of Arts Programmes and Investments at Nesta in the UK and is in the midst of planning a significant shift in how Nesta manages and deploys its arts investments.

Fran and I were a bit pushed for time but we spoke about:

The risk-averse nature of many funders

“what we have now already is the scaling capital, but that's quite risk averse. You've got to have quite a developed idea before you come to that. In the investment funds, we're seeing a lot of property projects, which is fair enough. That's the thing that people have to invest in. That's the asset that the board understand spending money on. But we do think that's a very narrow, myopic view of what the assets of the sector are”

“I think it is seen as risky. There is a lot of risk aversion. People are worried about spending money wisely. And I think when you look at an area that you don't understand as well, you do look for more detail and more information and you are worried about delivery risk. And you know, I think every funder's nightmare is that they go off and fund a load projects and they've got nothing to show for it.”

The importance of creating space for experimentation and learning in the open

“there isn't often the infrastructure within an organization. So you'll have somebody who might have an idea about what to do, but who do they get to support them to get buy in on the senior team? Even if they could get external funding, how do you get permission to carve out some of your time to do that development work? And there is a huge missed opportunity for shared learning. So developing together, understanding, not just hiding your failures in a box, but letting other people learn from them. And there are so many failures with these projects, all of this experimentation is about failing. Go, well that didn't work. Okay, let's try this.”

“if it's in early stage development, it's actually much more sensible to spend a lot of money on supporting people to spend that grant money well to learn together”

The importance of cultural organisations working with digital creatives

“as a creative working in the UK in particular today, your choices are quite limited about who's gonna pay you. And I think they're only gonna get more limited. So in order for the talent to remain in the independent sector and not all get completely sucked up by the private sector, which is not good for audiences or, or anyone really, and I'm not blaming any creatives who are going for following the money. Like it's really difficult to live as a creative in the uk. But where I see the kind of big picture concern is that, you know, the choices are more limited and increasingly so as the buying power it's concentrated within the private sector.”

Learning from how digital projects were funded in the past

“I think we made a few assumptions that didn't necessarily bear out particularly successfully, I think if we did it again, what we would do is focus on challenges that were universal and that means that the learnings and the research reports that come out of it are genuinely valuable. We would certainly keep in touch with our grantees more and have longitudinal relationships”

Thinking differently about value

“when we are talking to investors, investors like axes, and we have our social axis and our artistic or cultural axis and then the financial axis as well. I think one of the ones, in terms of digital innovation in the pandemic, was what that did for access, I'm worried about that one. The social value of that. And there's a real value to that that I think we may be missing a trick in terms of access and inclusion. And I think for the majority of artists that really at the core of their practice there is some kind of social mission as well as the cultural mission.”

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