Arts Council England West Midlands’ Digital Content Development (DCD) Programme is a three year programme of investment which aims to catalyse the creation and creative use of digital content platforms for arts organisations across the West Midlands region

The website went up recently and the map on the homepage shows some of the projects, along with how much money they received. Further information is due on the website at some point, but if you look at the page source then you can glean a little more. On the basis that you probably don’t want to ruin your eyes, here’s what I found:

• Birmingham Repertory Theatre – Towards the development of an online multi-user playwriting resource (£27,884)
• Pesky People – Development of a multiplatform approach to venue access information (£25,000)
• Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum – PostCart: creative digital access of art gallery and museum collections (£24,750)
• Library of Birmingham – Development of an Alternate Reality Game for young people (£23,750)
• Talking Birds Theatre Company – Development of The Difference Engine – a multiplatform real time access tool. Some mention of it here (£1,500 + £20,860)
• The Play House – Develop an online resource to match the company’s participatory ethos (£22,349)
• Eastside Projects and Birmingham City University – Piloting a 3D online art gallery (£22,000)
• The MAC – Playground: exploring the use of digital technologies in a new-built art centre (£20,500)
• Royal Shakespeare Company – Creation of a new digital arena for the creativity of the RSC. Pretty sure this was Such Tweet Sorrow (£20,000)
• Audiences Central – To develop a web platform and plug-in for cross regional arts marketing (£18,000)
• B Arts – Development of a new form of arts centre/collaboration (£17,380)
• Rhubarb Rhubarb – To create an online evaluation tool (£17,000)
• Shropshire County Council – Citizen Journalism (£15,612)
• Rideout – To explore the production of creative digital content engaging youth crime statistics (£15,000)
• Radio To Go – A collaboration with the British Library to pilot an online music archive. Called The Pilot Project (£13,750)
• Rosie Kay Dance Company – To create an online version of the touring production, 5 Soldiers (£12,500)
• Indigo Ltd – The development of a pilot online platform exploring new forms of crowd-source fundraising in the arts (launching soon and called Angel Shares) (£11,750)
• Wolverhampton Arts & Museums / Black Country Museums – Research and Development of a collaborative online resource for the Black Country Museums (£10,550)
• Black Country Touring – Exploration of enhancing a site specific, theatrical experience through live streaming (£10,348)
• Multistory – To create a new media platform for celebrating local stories as part of place-making (£10,235)
• Fierce Festival – Towards a Viral Online research game (£8,253)
• Birmingham Opera – Exploring new models of ownership and sales of published works (£6,737)
• Borderlines Film Festival Ltd – Experimenting with mScapes technologies (£5,600)
• Orchestra of the Swan – Research and development towards a strategic plan (£5,000)
• Capsule – To support digitally enhanced new marketing and distribution opportunities (£4,880)
• Welsh National Opera – research and development of phase one of iMaestro. To allow Welsh National Opera to research digital copyright law and the possibility of exploiting full-length opera samples under the Creative Commons license (info about that here) (£4,600)
• Ikon Gallery – Towards the development of a social media project (£3,500)
• The Other Way Works – Professional development around Augmented Reality and Transmedia (£2,575)
• Ex Cathedra – Market development, engaging an online music aggregator (£1,323)
• Dance Consortium – Exploring social media in relation to contemporary dance marketing (£1,000)
• MADE – To explore the use of digital platforms in placing making (£1,000)

As well as these projects, the programme supported a range of other activities including workshops, innovation labs and other events.

I’ve heard of one or two of these projects, but the vast majority are new to me so it’ll be interesting to hear a little more. I should probably also add that I’m involved in the Rosie Kay Dance Company project – that’ll launch next week so I’ll blab a bit more about it then.

Now, the good thing about writing this twelve hours after today’s announcement is that everyone else has summarised, pontificated and moved on. I can just link to what they’ve written. Blogging is ace. Anyway, onward…

Here’s the Arts Council’s announcement. Fair play to them for getting this out in reasonably good time following the spending review.

Audiences Central have summarised things and the Birmingham Post has calculated the cuts the region’s orgs are going to face from April 2011.

To skip through the announcement:

• Most regularly funded organisations will have their funding cut by 6.9% in 2011/2012
• By 2014/15 cuts will have risen to 14.9% in real terms (ie. ignoring inflation)
• Arts and Business and Creativity, Culture and Education will have their public funding halved next year and taken away completely the year after that. That’s very bad news for them
• The Arts Council will have to halve its admin costs
• There’ll be a new system for funding from 2012 onwards (arrangements to be announced 4 November 2010). Everyone will have to reapply – some existing orgs won’t be successful, some new ones will
• The budget for budget for ‘strategic opportunities for artistic work’ such as touring, large events and the Cultural Leadership Programme is being knocked down by 64%

Next year will be a ‘transition year’, hence the lower-than-expected cuts, the stay of execution for A&B and CCE and the Guardian describing arts groups as ‘relieved’. So expect things to get worse. Oh, and don’t forget the local authority funding that’s disappearing.

In A&B’s ‘defence’ Colin Tweedy has released an utterly unimpressive statement quoting an easily-swatted away question in Parliament and referring to the generalised views of unnamed ‘private sector partners’. Go get em, tiger.

Still, it’s not all bad news in the arts. Working at the top at the Royal Opera House can net you £630,000 a year.

Here’s the bunny vid:

The standout point from the presentation for me is this bit:

… despite the significant efforts of arts organisations and the Arts Council to broaden audiences – and there has been, and is, some really excellent work going on – our statistics show that there has been no significant shift in the profile of people who engage with the arts over the past three years.

This means that we can’t simply continue doing more of the same; it’s not working. We need a new approach

You can read the presentation to see how this is to be achieved (and from the tone of language used, it has to be achieved), but in a nutshell there’ll be:

• a programme of arts engagement activity
• a large-scale broadcast, media and marketing campaign
• targeting of an identified group of 12.8 million people who currently have some interest in the arts but have expressed an inclination/desire to do or see more
• a new national arts web portal

Locally, the programme is being coordinated by Audiences Central. Each region has been asked to pick a hot-spot to focus their activity on and in the West Mids it’ll be the Black Country. It’s hoped that the rest of the region will benefit from a ‘halo effect’ from this activity and from the national media campaign.

On this last point, the idea is to develop a brand and kitemark that venues, promoters, organisations, etc will want to apply to their work in the same way that many food producers have voluntarily taken up the 5-a-day brand.

Success will be measured via the national Taking Part survey and the Active Peoples survey (for local authorities that use an indicator called NI11 – hopefully that’ll mean something to someone).

I’m not sure what the budget for the national campaign is but, after much talk of ‘limited resources’, it transpired that the amount of cash available for the West Mids (and therefore the Black Country) is £200,000 over two years. Consequently there was much talk about partnership working and the reliance on organisations finding a benefit in piggybacking on the national campaign.

In the meantime, the Arts Council have set up a website at Hello Art where you can find out a little more and sign up for future updates. It’d be also be worth following Audiences Central for updates about the West Mids focus.

Finally (and because someone asked me to keep count):

• Mentions of The Big Picture – 7
• Mentions of the 5-a-day campaign – 7