Case study: Cornwall Museums Partnership

Transcription

1 Case study: Cornwall Museums Partnership

2 2 What We received two separate questionnaire responses regarding the Cornwall Museums Partnership. They described the partnership as follows: A flexible partnership of museums which work together on marketing, skills sharing, partnership funding bids and information sharing. Questionnaire response An umbrella body which runs a range of projects with museums in Cornwall to deliver the Cornwall Museums Strategy. Questionnaire response According to our questionnaire responses, the partnership did agree joint objectives, there was a written agreement between the partners in the form of a memorandum of understanding/partnership agreement. The partners do have plans to work together again in the future. There was a range of very different independent organisations coming together to set out a kind of sense of shared purpose, and that happened in And then since then [ ] those museums have been working together and with other museums on a range of different funded programmes and it s culminated in the formation of a new charity which is a charitable incorporated organisation which was formed in January this year [2015] which is called the Cornwall Museums Partnership, and that is the new legal and financial mechanism through which partnership activity across Cornwall will be coordinated. The partnership includes a number of museums of varying sizes from across Cornwall. There are two distinct levels of involvement in the partnership; individuals from six major local museums sit on the board of the partnership and all other museums in Cornwall have a flexible involvement in the partnership depending on their willingness to become involved or the extent to which specific partnership projects are relevant to their work. The partnership was formed for the benefit of the museum sector across Cornwall. The Charity itself, Cornwall Museums Partnership is a Charitable Incorporate Organisation, formed in 2015 with six trustees provided by six museums and is independently chaired. Further trustees will be recruited to ensure the board is as strong as possible and will include representation from the wider museum sector in Cornwall. There will also be a CEO of the partnership, who was not yet in post at the time this research was carried out. Despite the formalisation of the partnership into a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO), interviewees still described it as a reasonably informal and flexible partnership:

3 3 It s always been reasonably informal as a partnership and as different projects have come and gone, it s fluxed with its membership. We always call it an ad hoc [partnership] because we have no lead partner and just as projects or events or things are relevant, people and partners come and go. Why A number of motivating factors lay behind this partnership. Reacting to decreased funding in the sector and trying to gain additional funding The partnership started informally in 2011, where a number of museums came together to develop Cornwall Museums Strategy in consultation with the wider sector, as a response to a realisation that public funding would be under increasing pressure in the coming years. The strategy, which had the backing of Cornwall Council would give the museums sector a shared sense of direction and five clear strategic aims which would help strengthen museums in Cornwall making them more resilient for the future. Interviewees explained that the museum community in Cornwall felt that they would be better equipped to respond to this decrease in funding if they did so together. In response to the question of what the motivation for the partnership was, one of the questionnaire respondents said that it was Strength in numbers (Questionnaire response): As a group we re much stronger than ourselves individually. Delivering the Cornwall Museum Strategy A central aspect of the local response to the climate of decreased funding was to create the Cornwall Museums Strategy. This emerged in our questionnaire responses as another key motivation for the creation of the partnership as it was largely this strategy that necessitated the creation of the Cornwall Museums Partnership. Cornwall Council and Cornish museums wanted to make sure that the museums in the region got themselves into a more sustainable position for the future. Their strategic priorities addressed issues such as sustainability and resilience, developing partnerships, raising the profile of heritage in Cornwall and engaging wider ranges and larger numbers of people. It was felt that in order to meet these strategic objectives, the creation of the Cornwall Museums Partnership was necessary. So the partnership came about as a result of the Cornwall museums coming together to write a shared strategy for museums across Cornwall.

4 4 Engaging broader audiences Engaging broader audiences is one of the key priorities of the museum strategy so that s exactly what the partnership is set up to do. The partnership gives us a platform by which we can develop and generate audiences and engagements. Interviewees explained that it was partly additional funding that enabled this engagement with broader audiences. The process of engaging broader audiences is partly being addressed through the marketing work of the partnership and partly through the community and learning programme that, at the time of conducting this research, partners were developing for implementation later in Making a statement to help secure additional funds The partnership is about advocacy. It s also about trying to be smarter and work together, and I would say it s partially about funding streams but it s also about availability of existing resources and how to use those more wisely. Historically, there has been a reasonably low level of investment in Cornwall museums and combined with this, various existing funding streams for some of the larger museums in the region were coming to an end. In light of this, many of the local museums, along with Cornwall Council, decided that: Rather than trying to pursue individual funding requests, it would actually be better to try and make a statement, a very strong statement about what it is museums can achieve to help inform the stakeholders really. In this sense, as interviewees confirmed, the partnership was established specifically to bring funding to the region that may not otherwise have been attainable. There s obviously a practical issue around fundraising and financing activity [ ] you get better value if you work in partnership.

5 5 Skills sharing By working together we can share skills to help each of our organisations develop whether small or large, volunteer led or staffed. Each of our museums has particular strengths and areas of excellence and by sharing expertise we build a stronger sector without taking on unsustainable costs in individual museums. The learning and sharing is a really key aspect of the partnership. How We re not all experts in all sorts of fields and so the skill-sharing and the opportunity to learn from each other [ ] the reason why the partnership was created in the first place was to get over some of those issues around rurality and the dispersed population so the idea is that we as a group, coherent group, would then provide opportunities for skill-sharing and museum development through mentoring for example, to the sort of wide, usually smaller volunteer-run museums. The way in which the partnership worked can be split into five main areas: funding; communications; structures; staff; and programmes and plans. Funding After the Cornwall Museum Strategy was put in place, interviewees explained that there was a positive feeling about how museums would be able to work together collectively. This coincided with the opportunity to apply for the first round of Major Partner Museum (MPM) funding from Arts Council England, so four of the larger museums in Cornwall came together in an informal partnership to put in a bid for that. This bid was unsuccessful but it was well received and Arts Council England provided some feedback on the bid. As a result of this, the Cornwall museums were invited to apply for strategic support funds in 2012 and from this they received about 120,000 of Arts Council England investment along with some additional investment from the partner museums themselves and Cornwall Council. Reflecting on this process of gaining funding, one interviewee remarked that: That really kickstarted the process of actually working together on specific projects. Subsequently, since the Cornwall Museums Partnership was established, other funding has been gained that has enabled the partnership to deliver certain specific projects aimed at securing additional funds for the region:

6 6 So we re running a programme called Catalyst at the moment which is fundraising training and that s been supported by about quarter of a million pounds worth of heritage lottery fund money. That s a two-year programme. We re about twelve months into it. That runs training, really high quality training, in fundraising and related topics for museums in Cornwall and any museum can come along to that. It s free or very heavily subsidised training. Emmie Kell, CEO, Cornwall Museum Partnership We re currently delivering a Catalyst project, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. HLF Catalyst focuses on the development fundraising knowledge, skills and capacity across Cornwall s museum sector. A number of museums are developing their own fundraising strategies with the support of mentors and an extensive programme of high quality training is being offered to museums and heritage organisations from across Cornwall and beyond. Uptake on training from museums of all sizes has been strong. Communications As the previous quotation makes clear, many of the opportunities the partnership provides are communicated to museums across the region via . Communication within the Cornwall museum sector is essential and so therefore the Cornwall Museums Partnership meets four times a year. Interviewees explained that this is also a really good opportunity to communicate the options available to those in the local sector. This is essential for the partnership: It s about trying to constantly communicate and connect organisations with each other so that they can generate their ideas for new projects and share skills and work collaboratively. This ethos around communication means that some people find the term partnership uncomfortable: So we prefer to call it collaborative working rather than partnership. That doesn t mean to say that we don t have [formal agreements], we have partnership agreements, legal agreements for every project that we run because there s money involved and it s really important. Often we re working to quite tight deadlines and it s really important that people s roles and responsibilities are very clear. Structures The mechanics and structure of the partnership [ is] currently in development so we re just recruiting an independent chair for the charity and then there s a board of trustees and that board of trustees is made up of the directors of the kind of six founding partner museums, if you like, and then there will be two more trustees appointed to represent smaller volunteer-led museums and they will be appointed by a vote at the county museum group which will take place over the next couple of months at some point.

7 7 Emmie Kell, CEO, Cornwall Museum Partnership The partnership is set up to give resource to museums where they want it rather than creating a model that everyone must fit into. It s not about forcing something on all museums. Each museum will want to engage at different level appropriate to their organisation. The way we work enables a great deal of flexibility and provides opportunities for support to those who would like to take it up. Subsequently, there is no membership model for the partnership. The model is that the constitution states that the charity works on behalf of all museums in Cornwall and that every museum can participate in its programme so one of the things that the partnership does is run the museum development service and that s a new thing [ ] organisations don t have to be members of anything but the projects that they can participate in are dependent on the restrictions of the funders. Emmie Kell, CEO, Cornwall Museum Partnership Interviewees explained that this means that each partnership is open to anyone who wants to get involved and then if they are appropriate for the project they will come on board. Staff Interviewees described a number of different staff associated with the partnership. These include officers and various freelance staff employed by the partnership. For example, there is a museum development officer, an officer who is going to be working with smaller museums to help them develop their collection management skills and an officer who will work with people on digitisation. When the interviews for this case study were carried out, many of these officers were just about to start. Elsewhere, the partnership board decided to appoint a shared Arts Award co-ordinator, which was funded by some of the project funding they had received. This person works with both larger and smaller museums in the region to help them embed Arts Award across their practice. There is also a full time staff member in Cornwall who has been appointed by the Cornwall Museums Partnership to predominantly work with many of the smaller, volunteer-led museums in the region. There are also a number of freelance staff associated with the partnership, for example a freelance employee of the partnership who liaises with a number of museums and then partners them with schools, people referral units and other education providers. This post is funded by project funds and also by individual contributions from the museums. There is also a freelance marketing officer who delivers joint marketing programmes across the county. The partnership was recently granted Major Partner Museum funding and when this kicks in there are a number of other posts that will be recruited for. This means there will be a team responsible for the collective work programme that will be funded through Major Partner Museums funding.

8 8 Programmes and Plans As a CIO, the partnership has a number of programmes and projects on the go. This includes joint publications for the region and audience development and research projects: Cornwall Museums Partnership has an Audience Development Plan which focuses on increasing and broadening our audiences, and as a partnership we are carrying out research of our market to really establish where our visitors are coming from, where we ve got gaps in our audiences and how we can address these. There s a piece of print that s about to come out which is flagging up a range of experiences that you can have at Cornwall s seventy museums and that again has been commissioned jointly by the partners. The structure of the charitable organisation that the partnership operates as is designed so that it can change and adapt along with local needs. The charitable organisation has specifically been designed to be flexible to the needs of the sector and level of activity being delivered at any particular time. We don t seek to create a body that has to be sustained for the sake of it. It has to deliver for the wider sector and the trustees are committed to make it work for as long as it is producing results for museums in Cornwall. What worked Interviewees identified a number of ways in which the partnership had worked effectively or delivered beneficial outcomes. These are outlined below. Securing additional funding and reducing costs Successful bids to large scale funders would not have happened individually. Questionnaire response The partnership helped secure additional resources and share some costs. Questionnaire response The partnership has actually enabled us to bring in resources that we had never had access to so actually we ve got much more money than we had when we started.

9 9 Two interviewees highlighted one particular example of how the partnership enabled museums to save costs. The National Maritime Museum in Falmouth is large enough to have a maintenance manager when many other museums in the region aren t. That person has then been commissioned to do energy audits at each of a number of other museums and come up with a shopping list (eg energy efficient light bulbs) which the museums purchase collectively to make savings on the unit cost. So that s kind of money saving all round, money saving in terms of their energy costs, money saving in terms of not having to appoint an external consultant or contractor to do the auditing work, and money saving in terms of buying light bulbs at lower cost. It just wouldn t have got that kind of investment down here if we hadn t been a partnership [ ] You just couldn t have got it individually at all [ ] And I think that s true of all the projects the partnership has run. If there hadn t been a partnership, there would have been no investment in Cornwall, or limited anyway. Gaining buy in from all relevant senior partners When asked in our questionnaire what the most important factor for determining the success of the partnership was, one respondent answered that it was due to: Every partner (at high level in each organisation) buying in to the partnership and giving their time and effort. Questionnaire response Creating additional capacity across the sector in the region Working in partnership is helping to provide capacity to organisations, even those with paid staff are relatively small so additional capacity, expertise and skills really help to develop our museums to a higher standard. Sharing skills For me personally, it s been really good working with colleagues from other museums where I have been able to learn from their considerable skills and knowledge, to implement change within our own museum.

10 10 Falmouth Art Gallery and Penlee House are really good at community engagement and [ ] they have an incredibly strong relationship with their local communities that a lot of the other museums don t have. And so they bring skills to the table in how they do that and what they do and how they engage different groups and all of these kinds of aspects [ ] It s very important, skill sharing, absolutely. Enabling projects to take place that would not have otherwise happened It s enabled us to also work collaboratively, to try new things that individually we wouldn t usually be able to afford to try ourselves for the first time. An example is working with artists to attract new audiences and participants to our museum. At Wheal Martyn, an example of a result of working in partnership is an industrial heritage conference we hosted for the first time in This had directly come about because one of the strategic aims of the Cornwall Museums Strategy is to raise the profile of heritage in Cornwall and this is a way we thought we could contribute to this aim. That s only a small example, just one that readily springs to mind. Arts Award is a really good example of where there was really high quality work which would just simply never have happened, had that partnership effort not been in place. It certainly enables the museums to function in a way that they wouldn t otherwise. In the past there have been things like joint marketing, which individually they couldn t particularly pay for, but together they can produce something quite nice that will appeal to lots of different audiences. Projects of a wider strategic benefit can be more easily identified and implemented We ll commission individual museums to provide something that s of collective or strategic benefit to museums in Cornwall so one of those examples would be we commissioned Royal Cornwall Museum to complete a collection mapping exercise, to try and work out exactly what was housed in all of the museums in Cornwall and get all that information in one place. The partnership s structure and approach mirrored the ethos and culture of the region As a region, Cornwall has a very strong local identity. Cornish language is important and the Cornish have recognised national minority status. Taking this into consideration when developing the partnership was felt to be very important.

11 11 Cornish heritage is very important to local people, to communities across Cornwall and as part of that there s a natural resistance to hierarchical structures or large organisations with a big brand that operate in a very top-down way. And that kind of fiercely independent culture of Cornwall is something that is written into the fabric of this partnership because it s not about having a model which imposes things on smaller organisations. There is something really important about the character and make-up of organisations in Cornwall around this nature of independence that has informed our model. Working together generates new ideas It s certainly enabled us to develop new initiatives, new ideas and open people s mind to different ways of working. You see what others are doing and think, we could work together on that, or that was a really good idea which would work well in our museum, so it s helped museums to identify additional ways to change how they work with their audiences. Working in partnership is what generates ideas, it s what gets people inspired. It s what makes them feel more supported. Often they re working in a very isolated way. Focused meetings with clear agendas We re very clear about what topics we ll be covering and what people should bring to the meetings, which sometimes doesn t work, but it s certainly better than some other places I ve been. It creates a more coherent offering for audiences There s shared marketing resources that we ve been developing as a partnership, I think have been really successful not only as a way of promoting the cultural offer and one stop shop to accessing the cultural offer but also in terms of value for money. You re putting in one advert or one banner ad [ ] Cornwall is a unique place because the population swells enormously over the summer and people are going to want to know fairly quickly and easily what they can do, what they want to see. To have that available, to give them that on a plate through a joined-up marketing approach, I think is very useful. It allows for more loans between museums in the region Interviewees explained that the partnership would provide a welcome opportunity for museums to signpost their collections to each other and to enable more lending between institutions when putting on exhibitions.

12 12 We ve probably got one of the largest collections out of the partnership and we re very keen for that to go out to not only the six organisations but also the smaller volunteer-run and non-volunteer-run organisations as well when they put on other programmes. A culture of trust There s a culture of trust that s been built up between organisations. They ve got people they can phone if they ve got a particular problem they need to solve. It s not going to cost them any money. People are very good at sharing and we ve sort of called that this culture of share-ism. That s what we re trying to promote. Challenges Interviewees described a number of challenges that they had encountered whilst working on this partnership. Difficulty engaging some of the smaller museums in the region I think there are challenges and I think there can be suspicion around some of the organisations. I think some organisations are naturally extrovert and some are naturally introvert so there are certain organisations, small organisations, who just want to be involved with everything and that s fantastic. And then there are others who just want to do what they re doing and they re not interested in the wider picture. So it s about targeting those that are appropriate really. The museum development officers down here have had an extremely tough job of engaging with the smaller museums [ ] It has been a challenge and I think there s still some way to go in developing hearts and minds and just demonstrating and communicating that we are there to help. Each museum is very different I think one of the challenges can be that we are all very different, both in terms of size, capacity, subject matter and geographic location this however can also be a real strength. I think this is about people, each museum does things in different ways and trying to bring people together to do them in a similar way can be tricky. Generally speaking, I ve found that it hasn t been too bad, but there s always resistance to change.

13 13 People s time is scarce There are lots of challenges. One of those is around people s time and capacity to participate. Internally, everyone s strapped for time. The practical logistics of investing time in the partnership while you re still running the organisation with the other hand [is hard, but] because we re all very committed to the partnership, then you make time for that. Communications We ve got a big region with travel times of three hours from one end to the other. We ve got seventy museums that are geographically very dispersed so you know communication is a real challenge for us. That s something we re very aware of. There s always problems with communication so I think getting the clear message out about what the partnership is for and what the partnership is doing has been very tricky and has not been done particularly well, because up until the CIO was formed, there has been no umbrella organisation really to put that message out. That s one of the challenges I think for us as a group of six, to be in a state where we can communicate effectively. Evaluation According to our questionnaire responses for this partnership, the partnership itself has not yet been evaluated, but it was felt to have been a success so far. However, individual projects delivered by the partnership have been evaluated and the learning from these have been used to shape the future programmes the partnership will deliver. At the time of conducting the interviews for this case study, the next three-year programme was just beginning and so interviewees explained that there would be more evaluation involved in that. The museums strategy itself will also be evaluated and reviewed: As we continue we will be looking at other funding opportunities to support the delivery of the aims set out within the museum strategy and will also be reviewing the strategy for beyond As we do that, we ll reflect on the significant achievements to date and use what we have learnt to identify new priorities and inform the future shape and role of the partnership.

14 14 There has also been some other evaluation of work produced as part of the partnership: There s been some focus group activity around users and non-users which we ve been able to fund through the strategic support fund, through the Arts Council. That threw us some interesting things to explore further and now we re at the start of a larger journey around MPM funding, and the demographic understanding of our audience. In conducting this research and evaluation work, interviewees explained that sharing data between organisations was helpful for refining the marketing and engagement strategies of the partnership.