Making Digital Work – A digital toolkit for Arts and Culture is one of the latest publications available from The Digital R&D Fund for the Arts.
This is a stunning piece of work, encapsulating business modelling, ideas curation and potentiality for delivery , route mapping and success measurement – all through the meta-filter of the arts and culture agenda.
The toolkit is not a complex piece, nor is it exhaustive, but it does contain processes which any arts focused project can use to identify new opportunities, to plan the business case for the digital work, focus on audience and user value, collaborate, design, build and engage, then evaluate and share.
Simple and effective solutions to arts project planning and delivery in the digital domain.
You can view the full document or download sections here…
‘The arts sector is fizzing with ideas and creative ambition. Large and small organisations are using digital technologies to deliver dazzling online experiences linked to live events, useful services for learners, interactive displays in physical spaces and so much more’. Source: The Concept – Digital Toolkit
Whether developing the concept in mind with the Six Hats methodology or taking a more mainstream approach to idea development by using the Business Model Canvas, then the toolkit from The Digital R&D Fund for the Arts offers plenty of opportunity to use the techniques best suited to your management team, volunteers or funders.
We like the Business Model Canvas. Using it with our Third Sector clients is a good way to encapsulate the business argument and key considerations for the community enterprise. You can see an example on www.enterprisingcommunities.today here.
Using it here, in the arts and culture context, the main headings have been adjusted to include clarity of thought in the project overview, sales and marketing, operations and resources, staff and management…and finance too.
Contemplating a digital arts or cultural project then the web lends itself to testing, data collection, evaluation and storytelling derived from a completed project. The digital toolkit contains much that is useful in using and shaping output from new media and new technology, within the context of arts delivery.
We recently wrote, on our Communications EAST Toolkit page about The Growthverse, a very useful web service that can help you decide upon and plan deployment of your new media, user relationships and feedback methodologies. We commend it to arts professionals too. Although it is intended for tech start-ups, there is insight to be gained from exploring it, we would argue.
In summation, this is the toolkit for arts and culture in the digital age, bar none. The closing pages contain useful links, not only to the Digtal R&D Fund, but also to the Nesta Creative Enterprise toolkit, a variety of digital capacity resources from the Arts Council and the Design Council Guide to Design.
If you are a practitioner…connect to the internet and diary some laptop time, you will need it.
