Will the imperative to change become too loud to ignore before it's too late?

Over the past week I have read two very different articles which I think say similar things about the cultural sector’s approach to (and problems with) digital.

The first, was this piece from Public Digital’s Laura Bunt, it looks at how the charity sector has been affected by digital change over the past decade or more.

I was struck by the description of the ‘three waves of digital transformation’. In the article Laura describes this as follows:

The first wave centred on marketing and communications. Website redesigns, new ways to reach and engage supporters, digital campaigns to find new audiences and scale our work.

The second wave focused on how charities design and deliver services, perhaps driven by the need to increase reach or reduce the cost of delivery at scale.

The pandemic triggered a third wave: changes in how organisations communicate, work and operate, forced by the overnight shift to remote working and online delivery.

Described in this way, waves 1 and 3 are definitely applicable to the cultural sector.

Wave 1 in particular goes a long way to describing why digital teams (and budgets) are structured in the way that they are in many (most!) cultural organisations.

And the changes of ‘Wave 3’ is something that every cultural organisation is experiencing, to a greater or lesser extent.

Coincidentally, the latest iteration of Culture24’s ‘Let’s Get Real’ programme focuses on the challenges for cultural organisations exploring effective hybrid working practices.

However, despite some flickerings during the pandemic, the sector - on the whole - remains unaffected by anything that could be described as the change outlined in ‘wave 2’.

The shape, format, and specifics around the delivery of the sector’s core ‘service’ (however that is  defined for each individual cultural organisation) remains much as it has always done.

The second article I read was this piece from the always interesting David Taylor, “Classical music audiences are vanishing… why aren’t we doing anything about it?”.

In this piece, David looks at the decline in classical music audience attendance.

“From talking to organisations and musicians across all levels of the industry, in person audiences are down around 30%. My own experience of attending concerts certainly echoes this, with one well established classical event I went to having around 50% attendance, with one of the performances only having 38 people in the audience!”

He points out, perhaps somewhat fairly (although, as always, the reality isn’t quite that straightforward), that this decline doesn’t seem to have resulted in any real shift in what classical music organisations are doing in terms of the product they are selling, or the way they are selling it.

(For what it’s worth it is not just classical music attendance that has dropped markedly since the pandemic.)

Can you imagine Apple suffering a 30% drop in sales and doing absolutely nothing? Or Nike? Or Manchester United? Or Amazon? Or Tesco? Or Disney? No! That would be insane, and we would think they are insane.

I think both of these articles point, or at least gesture generally, to an issue that the cultural sector on the whole (and I am aware there are some notable exceptions) seems to be trying to conjure or return to some sort of (perhaps imagined) pre-pandemic status quo.

That is despite an increasingly fraught funding environment, a cost of living crisis, and the fact that audiences are not behaving in the way they did pre-pandemic, and perhaps never will again.

These shifts require a serious and wide-ranging conversation about what we do and how we do it. I know that simply keeping a cultural organisation running is a gargantuan challenge at the moment, and it isn’t getting any easier.

But there is no point running organisations the way they have always been run, doing the things they have always been done just because they have always been done that way.

I think that digital is part of the solution, you may disagree, but we can’t ignore the fact that the world is changing around us.

I think the sector needs to have serious and difficult conversations about the type of change that Laura describes being part of ‘the second wave’ of change in the charity sector.

I believe deeply in the power and importance of culture and the arts, but unless we change the world will move on without us. We do not have a god-given right to exist in the way we have always done. We need to demonstrate relevance and value, and we need to keep proving that again and again. Tinkering around the edges isn’t going to cut it.

For some this might look or feel like ‘dumbing down’ but unless we develop a better and more effective understanding of what audiences and visitors want and need, and actually deliver something that broadly maps onto that (through the lens of your specific perspective), I think we’re in trouble.

Cultural organisations have so much to offer, they are inspiring, fascinating, thought-provoking. But too often what cultural organisations view as ‘valuable’ is quite a narrowly defined type of activity, often focused specifically on things happening in buildings and on stages in forms that remain fairly unaltered (when it comes to marketing, audience experience, and artistic process).

I’m intrigued for the sector to start to explore what else might be possible, I talked a bit about this in my recent podcast conversation with Label Ventures Partner, Nick Sherrard, I’d recommend a listen.