Our work on culture: creating data infrastructure for the sector

How Can Open Innovations help the Cultural Sector?

Open Innovations is an independent, not-for-profit organisation that works with sponsors, organisations and individuals to innovate with data. Over the years, we've become a specialist in improving how businesses collect, process, visualise, interpret and publish their data, allowing them to see a detailed picture of their organisation and its impact on partners and beneficiaries. 

We have been doing this for a long while now, established in 2013, we've worked extensively with local authorities, central government, third and private sector across health, culture, transport, housing, net zero and of course, a whole host of work supporting northern England's economy.

Our approach is radically open: we share our work early and often on our website. Working transparently allows us to work at pace, adapt to feedback, be flexible and develop quickly and efficiently.

The Case for Culture

We've worked with a number of organisations in the cultural sector in recent years to support, celebrate and advocate for the cultural heritage of our region. This work started with a partnership with Leeds Digital Festival in 2021 and has now evolved into a network and ecosystem of cultural organisations, partners and sponsors who come to us for support and expertise on how to engage with their audiences and tell compelling stories using data. 

We've had a number of conversations with organisations who want to ensure their legacy and tell the story of their impact and success. Critical to this is having good networks for sharing and collaboration, and the data infrastructure in place for meaningful decision-making - this is where we help.

Why culture? 

Cultural participation across the UK is on the decline, a trend accelerated by the pandemic but reflects broader shifts in how people engage with cultural activities. According to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, arts engagement in the UK dropped from 76% in 2019 to 59% in 2022. 

This decline is particularly true among younger people, who increasingly opt for online engagement over in-person events. This shift presents an opportunity to rethink the cultural sector's approach to audience participation and engagement.

Data has a vital role in recovering engagement in the sector, providing insights into changing demographics, audience behaviour, and trends in engagement with local cultural events and activities. 

By building robust data infrastructure, cultural organisations can understand their audiences in more detail, allowing them to create programmes that better resonate with their communities. They can also evaluate the effectiveness of interventions, demonstrate the impact of cultural programmes and encourage investment in their region.

Open Innovations is supporting the sector to build this infrastructure. 

Let's take you through some of the projects we've been working on in arts and culture. There's plenty more in the pipeline, and we'd love to hear from you if you are working in this space and need our help.

Our culture projects

Leeds Digital

We worked with Leeds Digital initially to develop an automated festival impact review, building to a Data Microsite to present their data, offering a place for them to share their reach, impact and engagement. 

You can view the Microsite here. 

LEEDS 2023 Year of Culture

Our data partnership with LEEDS 2023 began right at the inception of the Year of Culture, supporting the organisation to be effective, transparent, and to help measure the impact and legacy left behind by the programme. 

There is a lot to digest on the hub page for LEEDS 2023. Take a look to learn more. 

University of Leeds

In order to evaluate the impact of a cultural programme, you need a baseline for comparison - something that wasn't available at the start of the Year of Culture. 

We worked with Dr Briony Thomas at the University of Leeds supporting the launch of the Mapping Creative Education programme, establishing a much-needed evidence base on creative engagement that focuses on young people in Leeds schools.

We built an open data resource to present this research and make this data open and available for academics, schools and cultural organisations. 

Now, the site is evolving into a hub for data on creative education. Watch this space as the site develops, as more data is added, and as we build a tool that brings together schools and creative practitioners to promote engagement in the sector.

View the hub page for the University of Leeds to learn more.

Leeds City Council

Leeds City Council have been part of our network for some time. This year, they reached out to us in relation to their culture teams. The Council collects data on a number of Council-led cultural events and funding programmes that they wanted to visualise, publish and share. 

This year, we worked with them to build a Leeds City Council Culture Dashboard (coming soon). We started by visualising data on their Leeds Cultural Investment Programme, a scheme that provides grant funding to cultural organisations in the region. This supports their goal of being open and transparent about government.

By presenting this data, you can start to see the impact these initiatives have on local businesses and communities in the region. We'll be sharing more on Leeds City Council in the New Year!

Bradford 2025 City of Culture

Bradford is the 2025 City of Culture. They were obviously familiar with our work for Leeds 2023 so we were delighted to be asked to support them to develop their Data Strategy.

The Data Strategy is now live, which you can view here. We're looking forward to working with Bradford 2025 over the next year as their data delivery partner using the expertise we've gained over the last few years to hopefully support them in visualising and evaluating a fantastic programme of events over the next year. 

Northumbria University

This year, we've been working with Northumbria University, the North East Combined Authority and others in a cross-sector initiative to improve the use and availability of data across the cultural sector. Focusing initially in the North East, this project will initially serve as a pilot that will scale to other regions going forward. 

We can't say too much on this yet, but this is a fantastic project with potential for a huge impact on the sector. Watch this space for updates on our progress.

Can we help your cultural project?

We would love to hear from you if you are a local authority, researcher, funder or creative organisation, or if you are doing interesting things with data in the cultural space. Reach out to us at hello@open-innovations.org.