A quick peek at our forthcoming digital campaign, plus new funding
Earlier this year we announced our intention to launch a digital campaign aimed at helping heritage organisations to achieve their own digital goals.
The official launch is still a few months away, but we are busy readying for it by setting up various workstreams, or "tranches".
Different tranches of help
All of the tranches are designed to help heritage organisations grow their digital skills in one way or another. However, they vary in nature depending on where organisations are starting, from a digital perspective.
For those smaller organisations that don’t have much digital experience at all, we’ll be doing some face-to-face outreach to help them understand what’s possible, and why it might matter to them. That's one tranche.
For smaller organisations that already use digital, but who would really like to learn more, we’ll be funding free skills development support to help people up their digital game. We’ll also be making some grants directly to organisations with some digital skills, but which are looking to build more. This represents two more tranches.
For senior leaders and trustees in medium-to-large organisations, we’ll be offering the chance to learn digital leadership skills with their peers.
More details will be available when we formally launch the digital campaign in early 2020.
New funding available for digital skills providers
In order for us to offer the mix of skills development support outlined above, we’ll be making some grants and awarding some contracts over the next few months. This is because as a funder we do not ourselves have the capacity to directly assist heritage organisations to grow their digital skills - we need to fund specialists to deliver that work.
Kicking this off, we’ve just opened up a limited-term funding stream called Digital Campaign Tranche 2. It represents a grant pot of £250,000, and is focused quite specifically on increasing the provision of support for heritage organisations seeking to improve their own digital skills.
You can find application details in the funding section of the website.
Further opportunities to bid for grants or contracts will be publicised on the website as they become live. If you would like to be notified by email of funding and contracts for this digital campaign, please email my colleague: Harriet Hall. We will use this data only for this purpose and then will delete the records. For more information on what we do with your personal data, please visit our Privacy Policy.
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How we are planning to boost the heritage sector's digital potential
In early 2018, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) published a report called Culture is Digital. It was a call to arms to all parts of Britain’s cultural sector to seize upon the possibilities of digital.
A year on, I'm writing today because the story of Culture is Digital is to some extent the story of my role at The National Lottery Heritage Fund, and it is certainly a match that has lit a fuse.
Taking a journey to digital confidence
I joined The National Lottery Heritage Fund a few months after the publication of Culture is Digital. It was my job to make sure that we lived up to the sentiment as well as the detail of the report.
Perhaps the first thing I realised was that we could only help to take the heritage sector on a journey towards digital confidence if we went on such a journey ourselves.
One of my first jobs was to introduce user-centred approaches to design and agile approaches to technology. You can read more about what our new multidisciplinary digital service design team is doing on our blog.
Designing our first digital campaign
We also have a duty to help ensure that the heritage sector itself can use digital tools and approaches to achieve its own goals.
In the first case this means developing an approach to fulfilling our commitment to invest £1million of National Lottery funding to help build digital skills in the heritage sector.
I started this planning exercise by talking and listening as widely as I could, to help me co-design a specific digital campaign that would deploy the £1m as usefully as possible.
It will be more formally launched later in the year, but I want to share one of the most important lessons I took away.
A sector with very different needs
When it comes to digital, right now the entire heritage sector can be very roughly divided into two different kinds of organisation.
The first is already somewhat digitally confident. They might be world leaders like the V&A, or they might be much smaller, but they fundamentally know what they want to achieve and their only real barrier to success tends to be time and money.
We believe that our main open funding programmes are definitely for them.
It is essential that people pitching excellent digitally enabled ideas get listened to and assessed by an organisation that is itself digitally confident. This is why we are appointing a new Head of Digital Policy who will oversee the digital skills development of all our colleagues.
The second kind of heritage organisation is in a very different situation. It lacks the digital confidence to know what parts of digital really matter to them: should they be focusing on social media? Should they be putting their collections online?
For these organisations, we will be launching a range of interventions that aim to help them up. We’ll be reaching out directly to make a case that there might be benefits to certain digital skills, if they’d like to have a go. And then we’ll be offering help to those who decide to give it a shot.
And lastly, we will also be offering tailored help to any leaders and trustees who lack digital confidence themselves, and don’t necessarily know how to go about building their own capacity.
What's next?
Coming soon will be a tool built in partnership with Arts Council England. It will be a free online service to help cultural organisations work out how digitally mature they currently are, and in which areas they might need to improve.
The next two years is going to be an extraordinarily busy time for us on the digital front. Please keep an eye on the website and Twitter for more developments over the summer.
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The role of heritage in uncertain times
Here are some of the things we discovered:
In the era of fake news, the heritage sector must be a place of trust and expertise
In her keynote, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage, University of Edinburgh, Melissa Terras, said that memory institutions have an important digital role to play in this age of fake news.
She said that the heritage sector must continue to offer a trustworthy voice that is impartial yet authoritive, show different perspectives and amplify voices that need to be heard.
The heritage sector has to be the place for nuance, legacy and discussion.
She added that we can no longer assume: "build it and they will come”. Memory institutions have to accept they are part of an evolving digital environment that cannot be controlled.
Archives need to better reflect diverse communities
Dr Clare Watson, Director of The Media Archive for Central England, said: "People like to engage with their own histories and stories. If they are not represented, there are limits to how much they can engage with an archive."
Bo Olawoye, Creative Engagement Manager, Threshold Studios, went further in stressing the importance of our actions today for communities in the future.
She said: "It’s about the gaze. Who’s collecting the information and what are they doing with it? And how are they making the archive? Leicester's black and ethnic minority population not reflected in terms of people who are doing the research, the archives. I’d like to see myself included more, from the bottom level to the top level."
Communities should be involved in heritage
And it’s communities – engaging with and reflecting them – that must be at the heart of heritage organisations.
Jo Robinson, Associate Professor in Drama and Performance, University of Nottingham, declared:
"Museums are increasingly community-oriented, led by people and stories."
She called for: "a shift in power, a letting go of knowledge out to communities, to leverage their knowledge and skills. Let the citizen scholars into the room."
Our job isn’t just to drive visits, it’s to share stories.
Tom Webster-Deakin, Digital Marketing Consultant, National Trust, observed that like many organisations, the National Trust "lives or dies by its visitor numbers". Adding: "the danger with that is that it leads to a transactional relationship... It can mean people think we’re just a 'day out'."
He came up with three rules for using digital to engage communities with heritage through content:
- we don’t exist to drive visits
- we exist to care for special places
- our job is to share them with people
He talked about Hardwick Hall, where the marketing team worked on the ground-breaking project We are Bess.
It involved modern women re-examining the skewed history of the remarkable Bess of Hardwick. Webster-Deakin said it helped increase engagement within the teams at the National Trust, with audiences, and – yes – boosted visitor numbers.
We need to be brave
And it’s by looking at digital differently, and operating in different ways, that heritage organisations can thrive.
“Digital start-ups often exist in a culture of risk-taking. Most of them fail, but that's the point. However, we can learn from the ones that survive. Mature start-ups can't afford to risk it all any more, but they maintain cultures that allow them to evolve,” Lees said.
Looking back to how the telegraph changed the whole world of communications in the 19th century, she said: “We’ve adapted before and we can do it again.”
Find out more
Find out more on the HeritageDot website and using the hashtag #HDot.
The National Lottery Heritage Fund was a partner of HeritageDot and also funded bursaries for people to attend.
Digital Campaign Funding - Tranche 2
The National Lottery Heritage Fund's Digital Campaign is currently in development, launching in early 2020. The initiative will have a number of workstreams - or tranches - each with the aim of growing digital skills in the heritage sector.
One of these workstreams, Tranche 2, makes grants available to organisations or partnerships that can support small heritage organisations to increase their digital skills. (Other workstreams in our Digital Campaign will be announced at later dates).
The total available funding under this tranche is £250,000, across all grants. We anticipate making only a small number of grants (we will even consider single applications asking for the whole £250,000). However many grants we make, one key consideration will be that small heritage organisations right across the UK can benefit.
Earlier in 2019 we ran an extensive discovery process to design the Digital Campaign, and then carried out two public briefings on the tranches that came out of it. This tranche has been shaped by many contributions from across the sector.
How the process works
- Read the Application Guidance £10,000 to £250,000 carefully to find additional criteria to help with your application.
- Review the key documents below including the £10,000 to £250,000 application guidance and application help notes.
- Submit a full application via our online application portal by noon on 18 November 2019.
Who can apply
You can apply if you are:
- a not-for-profit organisation
- a partnership led by a not-for-profit organisation
What we are looking for
We are looking for organisations and partnerships with the right skills to help smaller heritage organisations to grow their own digital skills and confidence. We’re also looking for evidence that applicants have helped people and organisations to become more digitally confident. Successful applicants must use the funding provided to supply support that is available free of charge to heritage organisations.
We are looking for applications that clearly explain how you will provide this support. Our ambition is to grow the number of smaller heritage organisations in the UK that have the skills required to make use of digital technologies when those skills are helpful and appropriate.
We are not specifying in advance how applicants should offer their digital skills development support to heritage organisations. We are not requiring that skills development support must be delivered in a particular type or number of classes, via a helpline, face-to-face mentoring or any particular method or channel. This flexibility is to encourage applicants to bring their own experience and ideas to the table about how smaller, less digitally confident heritage organisations can best receive support in growing their own digital skills.
There are a few key important factors that applicants will need to be aware of:
Geography
Once the grants are fully rolled out, it is important that a heritage organisation in any part of the UK is able to access digital skills development support. This means that if an applicant’s reach covers, for example, only Scotland, then we would need to make a further grant award to one or more organisation(s) to cover other parts of the UK. We welcome applications that cover only part(s) of the UK, but bidders should be aware that these will necessarily become part of a network of wider coverage.
Location
We expect that applications will reflect the fact that meeting face-to-face is easier in some parts of the country than others, and that you will suggest different approaches to teaching and learning depending on location and the practicalities of travel.
Referrals
The National Lottery Heritage Fund will from time to time refer heritage organisations to the successful applicants. The organisations that will be referred will often have very low digital skills and confidence, and they will be looking for assistance to grow their digital skills from a low base. Nationwide we expect this number of referrals to total at least 60, over a period of 6-12 months. Successful applicants must be in a position to respond to these referrals, and to assist the organisations referred.
This support does not have to be delivered through 1:1 mentoring; we will accept applications that will take referred organisations and make them part of wider groups or skills development initiatives.
Marketing
As well as offering digital skills development to organisations referred by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, applicants should explain how they will successfully market their free-to-use support to heritage organisations.
Plans
We expect all applicants to describe what kind of support they will deliver, how often and for what duration, in their applications. We do not require or expect an exact schedule, but we do require a summary of types and amounts of activity.
Duration
We require that applicants supply skills development support over a period of 12 months. However, we are aware that it may not be possible to offer full support straight away, and we are happy to accept applications that include a ramp-up period prior to the start of the 12 months, where only a lower or limited level of support will be on offer. The maximum project length for these projects will be two years to include achieving permission to start, ramp up, delivery of the 12 months training, and evaluation.
Evaluation
We expect that applicants will take steps to measure the skills progress of organisations that they help, but we do not expect a detailed description of this in applications. We will have detailed conversations with successful applicants to ensure that measurement of progress is, to some extent, standardised for comparability across projects.
Audience data skills
We expect applicants to suggest which skills mix they plan to offer to beneficiary organisations, and we do not require a list of specific skills to be taught. We do, however, have one exception: where possible, applicants should deliver at least some education or training on the use of audience data by heritage organisations. This should not, however, dominate the skills development offered.
Plan your financial contribution
If you are applying for between £100,000 and £250,000 you’ll need to contribute at least 5% of your project costs. We describe this contribution as ‘partnership funding’ and it doesn’t all have to be in the form of cash. Please see our application guidance for more details.
How to apply
In order to apply, visit our application portal and register an account. From the pull-down menu please select £10,000-£250,000. Then choose 'Start full application'. Please note there is no specific ‘Digital Campaign’ application form.
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Please insert the hashtag #Digital2 at the start of your project title, to help us correctly identify your application.
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In question 1, you do not have to give evidence of need or demand, as the Fund has identified this independently.
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You do not need to answer questions 1k and 2a - please put ‘NA’. For question 2b please select 'other'.
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The full list of valid programme outcomes can be found here. Please note that applications that do not state they will meet the mandatory outcome cannot be considered for funding. There is no obligation to name more than one outcome, and we encourage you not to claim more outcomes than you really think you can deliver.
The deadline for full applications is noon on 18 November 2019.
When we assess your full application, we will consider the following:
- your track-record and experience of helping individuals and organisations to grow their digital skills, especially from a low base
- how strongly your project will achieve the mandatory outcome
- the coherence, quality and deliverability of your plans
- your ability to help organisations with diverse needs in diverse locations
- the overall amount of support you plan to offer
- your willingness to work in collaboration with other organisations.
- overall value for money
Applications will be considered by an internal panel convened especially for this awarding process.
If your bid is successful, we reserve the right to offer you a different amount than you have asked for to ensure UK-wide coverage from a range of bidders. We would discuss this in principle with you in advance of the decision-making panel.
Key dates
- The deadline for full applications is noon on 18 November 2019.
- The Digital Campaign assessment panel will take place on 5 December 2019.
- Applicants will be notified by 16 December 2019.
Documents to help you apply
- £10,000 to £250,000 application guidance
Information and advice for how to write a strong proposal. You should follow this when submitting your application, except where the instructions above specifically tell you to do something different. - Application help notes
Useful information to help with completing an online application. - Project enquiry form example
A good way of getting feedback from us before you start work on a full application - Project plan templates
Templates for our recommended way to create your project plan - Standard terms of grant £10,000-£100,000
Our terms and conditions for grants of this size - Standard terms of grant £100,000-£250,000
Our terms and conditions for grants of this size - Good practice guidance
To help you plan and deliver your heritage project. - Full cost recovery
If you are an organisation in the voluntary sector, we could help cover some of your overhead costs