Contracting expansions

In the current funding climate, justifying your team’s existence is an essential part of the remit for most heads of department. As the axe falls and rises and falls again, the modern funding environment for museums and art galleries needs to re-examine its critical priorities on an almost hourly basis as it strives to find a quart in a pint pot of funding that is soon to reduce to a half.

As part of an organisation that has recently moved from council control to a Trust, these challenges are not unfamiliar to us. Inevitably this work always leads to a deep process of self examination, and a look at the core objectives of the organisation. How best to use the money you have to achieve these objectives and make a lasting impact on the communities you serve will always be of paramount importance.

What makes this process even more complicated here at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry, is that we do not follow a traditional team model. As well as balancing curatorial work, social inclusion, creative programming, marketing and communications, conservation, learning, operations (front of house) and finance, we are able to use the skills and experience of an in-house media team. In our context this means we operate a fully functional recording studio and production-quality editing suite, and have a team of professionals who deliver in-house film making, sound recording, social media content, web design, audio visual gallery installations, technical troubleshooting, project work, audience participation projects, training and education.

I would like to challenge the perception that this offer is an ‘additional’ service: all organisations should now be looking at ways of bringing in these types of services. Expansions, rather than contractions, may just be possible through clever partnership working. After all, reduced funding can provide opportunities to merge services, and this may well be an option in some form for your organisation.

Why? Well, from an inexhaustible list, I would like to highlight some of the many reasons why a media team and all that it delivers has been as vital to the work we have provided as that delivered by learning, social inclusion or any other traditional team. In the past two years we have been engaging and educating young people who have escaped traditional educational methods. Excluded teenagers have worked on our Rap Academy Project tirelessly for eight hours days, five days a week, without missing a second. They have participated in projects that have had a lasting effect on their future employability, confidence and lives. Other social inclusion projects have benefited from input and drive from our media team, engaging the diverse communities we serve, encouraging a personal connection with our collections, exhibitions and content.

From a marketing perspective, we have a head start on promotional films, project evaluations, advocacy, conference recording and technical support, and the delivery of social networking content – all assisting in delivering a jump from 55,000 visitors per annum to the current 320,000 visitors that has been achieved over the past two years. Looking at other areas, our exhibitions programme and permanent gallery spaces have benefited from truly engaging content. Delivered in partnership with the local community, it has enabled us to capture social history and local voices for future generations, as well as ensuring the content resonates with the attending public.

And finally, in an age when the development of commercial income through entrepreneurialism will be high on all agendas, it provides new opportunities. The work of a properly functioning media team within an organisation should be able to provide enough opportunities through commercial film making, paid-for educational outputs and professional development services to be self sufficient, whilst delivering all of the above benefits for an organisation. I would urge you to have the discussion, float the idea and examine local partnerships with organisations with shared funding partners. To resonate with the community you serve you need to move with them, and to move with them is to have media at the heart of any twenty-first century museum.