AMA Conference Report 2015: The Strategic Sessions Breakout Collection

In partnership with

Conference supporter

Media partner

Social sponsor

The AMA conference

2015 brought together

650 inquiring minds to

share ideas, insights and

inspiration about our

future relationships with

audiences.

Conference Report written by: Kate Feld and Nija Dalal

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Introducing The Strategic Sessions Breakout CollectionThe AMA conference 2015 brought together 650 inquiring minds working across the arts, culture and heritage sector to share ideas, insights and inspiration about our future relationships with audiences.

The keynote presentations were complemented by a range of breakout sessions that allowed delegates to look at the areas that interested them in more detail and at a level that suited them.

This collection brings you transcripts from our Strategic Sessions.

Strategic Sessions were designed for those working at senior marketing officer, marketing manager level or similar.

Contents

Why we should all share our audience databases p.4

Our Museum: communities and museums as active partners p.14

Influencing upwards: asking the right questions p.26

Games: can they change audience behaviour p.35

The Breakouts took place at Stay Curious AMA Conference 2015 at Birmingham Repertory Theatre on Wednesday 22 and Thursday 23 July 2015.

Further breakout collections are available from Marketing Essentials, Advanced Arena, and Fundraising and Development programmes.

Tweet @amadigital with your thoughts and responses to The Strategic Sessions Breakout Collection #AMAconf

Cath HumeHead of ProgrammeAMA

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Why we should all share our audience databasesJackie Hay, Morris Hargreaves McIntyre

Dominic Parker, Sage Gateshead

Dominic: We are here to tell you a story about an exciting project, the Unusual Suspects, which we have run over the last six months. It is very fresh and the results are very fresh, but we have been planning it over the last year and a half.

I am sure that all of us have to some extent considered sharing data in one form or another and have come up against problems. There are three key problems that we have all had to consider:

1. Political will, protectionism over data and trying to defend our own market.

2. Legal issues: a genuine fear, sometimes a misunderstanding, of the data protection act and what you are/aren’t allowed to do.

3. The technical issues in sharing data. The task of integrating different companies’ data from ever more complex proprietary box office systems.

Later we want to talk to you about how we have tried to overcome those things and explain the barriers.

As arts organisations, we have all become pretty good at marketing but I think we all tend to focus on the core audience. Particularly when budgets are tight, we are focusing on the usual suspects. Those are the frequent attenders, the people who we hope will keep buying tickets over and over again. We are obsessed with recency and frequency. We are constantly marketing to those guys who are already pretty highly engaged. It is much harder to reach those who are infrequent, or lapsed, or who have never been to our venue or art form.

Jackie: We were curious to know if we could work together, share our audience data, and encourage the unusual suspects to become attenders. Our research and development project was all about using data to grow our audiences, to target and engage the unusual suspects.

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Dominic: In this presentation we are going to try and cover: who did this project, why we did it, what we aimed to achieve, how we overcame the barriers, and some of the early results.

The unusual suspects project is a research and development project. It has been designed to share and segment audience data and to test the most effective ways of engaging infrequent attenders and encouraging audience cross over. You will be aware of the digital fund for the arts, which is Nesta, the Arts Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. We are very grateful to them for the investment they have made.

Everything that we are doing and have tried will be published on the Nesta website.

Jackie: Each digital arts R&D project has to have an arts partner, a technology partner and a research partner as part of the structure of the projects. Our arts partners were Newcastle Gateshead Cultural Venues (NGCV), Morris Hargreaves McIntyre was the research partner and Tariff Street was the technology partner.

Dominic: The key point is this project is not just looking at the data from one venue. There are nine organisations sharing data - nine of the largest cultural venues on Tyneside. They are a mix of performing arts organisations, museums and galleries. Some cover music, dance, film, writing and literature, heritage, archives or science. Some sell tickets and some don’t. Each of these organisations has its own website, but there is also a joint site for NGCV.

Since 2009, NGCV has collaborated on a range of things: audience development, digital strategy, developing skills, shared expertise and research. The one thing that we have never done and was the major catalyst for this project is that we have never shared our audience data with each other.

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Jackie: We were curious about a number of things. We had several research questions:

1. We wanted to test whether the strategic use of shared data could actually help us to widen and deepen engagement with our audiences.

2. We wanted to test whether or not segmenting audiences, targeting particular segments and then differentiating our marketing and communications or audience development strategies can really make a difference.

3. We wanted to find out what really works. What resonates with audiences and what doesn’t?

Our objectives are to:

1. Demonstrate use of Culture Segments and Levels of Engagement

2. Demonstrate benefits of collaboration3. Build capacity of participating

organisations4. Create exemplar case studies and tools

for the wider sector

One of the really important objectives of this project was not just to come up with a nice addition to the toolbox. This was to be a pathfinder project for a new kind of marketing. We wanted to help and support arts organisations to reimagine and redefine how they might do their marketing on a daily basis.

Dominic: The big idea. There is a large untapped market. The hypothesis is that over the years NGCV had probably captured most of the market for culture in the region but only a small percentage were regular attenders. We knew that individually each organisation had a fraction of the market for culture but together we probably had all of it. We believe the future is in building a shared market to develop an arts ecology, rather than trying to retain or protect our market share.

NGCV has 4.3 million attendances each year. When you start to look at the number of people engaging in culture and crossover, sharing data becomes a bit of a no-brainer. Of course resources are very tight. Working

together becomes much more efficient and hopefully more effective. We believed that we could achieve more together, therefore the idea of developing the consortium into a commonwealth of data would achieve more.

Let’s have a look at some of the barriers we mentioned and how we tried to address them.

First there was political will and protectionism. NGCV has already built a strong circle of trust and deeper levels of collaboration. Sharing audience data became the next logical step for us. The political will was derived from that, but it wasn’t really enough. One of the solutions we had was to have a collaboration agreement, documenting and embedding that trust between the organisations. You don’t necessarily have to have 10 years’ worth of trust, I think that the template is starting to be there and you can catch up much more quickly.

Jackie: At Morris Hargreaves McIntyre we are long-standing advocates of data sharing. Instead of pursuing our own market share the reality is that we are in a shared market. As arts organisations we are not competing with each other but with Netflix, with PlayStation, bars and restaurants and big arena concerts. NGCV understood this and were ready to work together to develop that shared market and reinvent how they engage the public.

Dominic: Then there were the legal issues. To try and overcome confusion about the data protection act, we went around the world to see what the best models for privacy policies were. We discovered that Sydney Opera House had a fantastic privacy policy. We took that and adapted it. That document is available.

Jackie: What we then did is pool all of our data together and built what we called a ‘walled data garden’ where everyone’s data is stored separately but under the data protection protocols of each organisation.

In terms of privacy policies, in terms of the commonwealth, we have quite permissive allowances in terms of what

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the organisations can do but people can opt out at any time. They give us full consent but with a strong privacy lock. You have to opt-in to the commonwealth. That is the law. Your data will never be shared outside and you can subscribe very quickly with one easy step.

We ran a series of focus groups and in-depth interviews with people who had attended the organisations. We wanted to test the idea of a data commonwealth with them. Would they be happy to sign up and have their data be shared? We found that most people were really comfortable with that. They didn’t have big concerns about data protection, but it was for a very specific reason. It is because they have really high levels of trust in cultural organisations in general but also particularly with the organisation that they feel they most belong to. It was also clear that they wanted to be able to unsubscribe very easily. As long as that was possible they were very comfortable.

Dominic: The exciting technical solution. I guess we could have built a really sophisticated bolt-on system to everyone’s CRM and box office. That would have cost a fortune. Actually we created a relatively simple solution and decided to only share contact data and origin organisation. We came up with this:

There are nine organisations at the top: the NGCV. Those organisations put all of their data into what we called the ‘dirty warehouse’. Then that information was cleaned. Then you can see that the arrow goes back to the organisations. The clean data was put back in, which was a very handy side benefit.

Then each organisation, where we have clean data, invites its audience to join our commonwealth of data and asks them to become part of this research project, which we

did. Effectively we have a very large research panel.

Jackie: We called our audience commonwealth The Insider. We developed a very vanilla brand. We didn’t want the brand for the Insider to compete with the rest of the arts organisations. When people were signing up they thought they were signing up to a list where they would get events picked for them. Actually what they were doing was giving us quite a lot of information. It was our baseline survey.

When we invited people, we did it with a specific promise. We said ‘opt in and share your preferences with us and we will respond to your needs and hand pick events that really work for you’.

With the data that we collected we wanted to use and test bespoke campaigns. Sometimes we talk about it as putting the R or the relationship back in CRM. We were giving the insight that the arts organisations really needed to build authentic relationships with their audiences.

We collected insight about what people had been to and what they were interested in going to. We asked what they hadn’t been to yet but might be interested in going to. We are also building up an understanding of their propensity to join or support an organisation, to donate and volunteer.

From our experience of developing segmentation systems, Morris Hargreaves McIntyre developed a system called Culture Segments. It is based on psychographics; it is based on people’s cultural values and motivations. The segments are distinguished by deeply-held beliefs about the role that culture plays in people’s lives. If we can understand this, we can understand what it would take to persuade them to engage and what experience they seek when they get here.

We have identified eight segments, named to reflect what people get or could get from engaging with the arts. We have also developed a series of detailed pen portraits that look at the characteristics for each segment: average attendance, preferred art forms, average spend, media and social media tastes. Particularly important for the

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project was the propensity to join, donate, and volunteer, and also, how best to market and communicate to them.

For those of you who are curious, you can go to the link and find out which segment you are. I happen to be Expression. It is highly likely that many of you are Essence. People working in arts organisations believe that arts and culture are absolutely essential to their lives. What are you, Dominic?

Dominic: I am Essence with a heavy dose of Release. A large propensity for wine, somewhere in there. I think that is Entertainment. Most of Newcastle is Entertainment.

Jackie: This gives you an example of differentiating key messages:

These are messages that we developed for the West End theatres market, that AKA uses. It shows how you might adjust your messages to communicate with different segments. Effectively the segments allow you to personalise the communications to your audiences, rather than just personalise them from you.

This is another model we developed:

We have identified this journey of engagement to better understand why people engage with particular venues. The challenge is we want people to move along the journey of

engagement. Right at the end, people go from potential attenders to confident explorers to the Holy Grail where people donate and give their time and money. We surveyed people at the beginning of the project and we will again at the end to see if the project has moved people along that journey of engagement.

Dominic: We are going to share some of the preliminary results. This shows the dashboard that we are using from the commonwealth data:

It happens to relate to The Sage and features the number of contacts, the age spread and the origin organisation. If you imagine we were all sitting in a room talking about sharing data for a year and then the extraordinary day came when we could see this dashboard, you will understand how exciting this is. We could see who had come to our venue but hadn’t been to other venues. We could see what they like to do and what culture segment they are. We could see how we might be able to market more effectively to them. It suddenly became real and there was a great buzz and excitement around the cheerful marketing community of the North East. There was suddenly no doubt that there was access to real insight and some pretty hot leads.

Jackie: We are going to take you through some of the numbers.

Dominic: The first insight, and quite a big surprise when we pooled our audience data, was that we discovered that there was only 20% cross-over. Only 20% of the people were on more than one database. 80% of people were not on more than one database. In terms of testing the results, we started to think that most people have actually engaged in culture at some point. Most people have been captured on at least one of the databases,

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but each organisation only had a fragment. Between us we had most of the market for culture. The people, at that point, who were slightly dubious about the collaboration could immediately see that there could be a real benefit for them and huge potential crossover.

We launched The Insider and we sent out 179,000 emails to recruit people to it.

Jackie: At the beginning of the project, we thought that we were going to have about 500,000 records. We had about 490,000. By the time we had taken away those who were deceased, gone-away and moved, we were left with nearly 180,000.

From that initial invite we got 14,500 people joining up - an 8% conversion rate. We were stoked by that. We set the bar quite high. The survey that people had to fill in was relatively lengthy. We were really happy with that.

This is the culture segment breakdown for people who are in The Insider:

None of this information can be derived from box office information or Acorn. It is information that you have to collect from the audience member.

This is the levels of engagement for people who joined The Insider at the beginning:

We can already see what percentage of people have given time and donated. 6% are givers of time. 1% givers of money. In terms of Confident Explorers, that is 54%. We will ask those questions again later in the project and work out whether people have moved along.

We talked earlier about building a shared market. The research in this project shows us that we can no longer afford to think about ‘my audience’ and ‘your audience’ because people are reporting that they are interested in multiple art forms.

This is a list of the art forms, which NGCV is made up of:

You can see that the market is relatively saturated for cinema. However, as you go down there are 32% who are interested in archives and local history, right at the bottom 245 have never been to contemporary dance but are interested in doing so.

Looking at the breakdowns for the individual venues, there are nine organisations but Tyne and Wear Archives has ten venues within it so there are 19. What we can see here is proof of concept.

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With small crafted experiments we have evidence that people who have never been to a venue have been converted into being attenders with just the right targeted communication and marketing. Third from the bottom is Tyne and Wear Archives. Only 18% of people had visited but a whopping 64% said they would be interested in going. If you add their current and potential market it adds up to 82%. About half way down was Hatton Gallery. They were delighted and surprised to find out that 51% of people hadn’t been to their organisation but would be interested in going.

Dominic: We had all this data and a plan. We started doing carefully designed marketing campaigns to see what results we could produce. Everything was a controlled experiment so we always did an A/B test. We tested a variety of hypotheses to see how we could engage audiences, introduce new art forms and introduce new venues. We did that through different events that we added onto the products, but particularly through optimised copy for those segments.

Baltic, the contemporary art gallery next to the Sage, developed an engagement plan around the exhibition Tony Swain’s Undeterred Progress. They offered specialty drinks for Insider members. The campaigns were designed using all the segmentation and preference data and the copy was particularly optimised and differentiated in an A/B test.

This was designed for the Stimulation people.

They really like social interaction. It is all about socialising and sharing a drink.

This was the same event but optimised for Expression.

The Expression segment has a more general interest in the artistic insight so this focused on the curator and the artistic process.

The response rate was phenomenal. It sold out very quickly, in 20 minutes, after the email went out.

Baltic attracted these new people and was able to put them onto its database as core customers. The striking thing that came back was that these guys who were lapsed or non-attendees engaged in a much more enthusiastic way than the people they call their engaged audience. The feedback was that people really love doing this, the curators were amazed by the enthusiasm of these people who they thought were not enthusiastic previously, and they are going to do many more events like this.

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Jackie: The real insight is that they were targeting people who are not on their database. They assumed that those people were non-attenders. When they got everybody in the room they found that quite a few people were highly engaged in the arts. However, they weren’t engaged enough to have signed up to find out what is on and what might encourage them to come more regularly. It was a phenomenal event. There was a real buzz, not just for the audience members but for the staff at Baltic as well.

Dance City also did a really beautifully crafted campaign. They did product development. They decided to be really brave and target people who had never been to dance before. They were well aware that if you have never been before it can be a really daunting experience. They crafted an experience that would really make people feel welcome and understand what was going to happen to them.

To make this new audience feel really special, there was a personal invite from the Artistic Director Anthony Baker. He invited people who hadn’t been to dance before and he personally hosted a pre-performance talk where he gave an introduction to dance.

Campaign Version A was optimised for Expression, with text focusing on the social aspects. It made it clear that Dance City would be with people every step of the way. They explained what would happen at the interval because that can be really confusing for people. It also reminded them that there would be an opportunity for more socialising. At the end of the show they would have the chance to meet the dancers and the Artistic Director. It highlighted all of that, particularly engaging with artists and behind the scenes things that really resonate with Expression.

Dominic: Feedback was extremely positive. A small group of people came who had never been to Dance City before and they said they would definitely do it again.

By segmenting the audience and then by targeting our communications in a very focused way, one of the extraordinary things we discovered was the increase in email open rates was 72%. That was the thing that probably surprised each individual organisation most and it really started to work.

Jackie: We managed to do a very direct comparison. Because the timescale for the project was quite short, people weren’t programming specific things. It was things that were already in their programme. We were able to track that the open rates were much higher for people who were in The Insider, who were differentiated and targeted, compared to their core audience that received standard emails about the same event.

Tyneside Cinema decided to do something quite different: a test-drive campaign. They wanted to target people who had never been to Tyneside Cinema before, inviting them to be their guests or VIPs. Effectively they were giving them free tickets, but you never say that because you are inviting them and making them feel really special. They wanted to test whether giving free tickets was more compelling than giving something of added value.

They did an A/B/C/D test.They offered some people free tickets and other people would get free ice cream and wine when they bought tickets. Very surprisingly to them, all of the people who were new to the cinema weren’t interested in added value. They wanted the gift tickets. They got 48 new members who had never been before and at the end they emailed them and asked if they would like to come again and what they enjoyed most. People were really enthusiastic.

Dominic: Fantastic results again. 90% said they were likely to visit again and it wasn’t just a one off. Once they were engaged, people were more likely to have a return visit.

Another example was from the Laing Art Gallery. They wanted to have a conversation through Facebook to try and engage people who had never come to the gallery before. They had a competition on Facebook and a conversation about the exhibition. They got some great engagement. 40% of the people on Facebook who got in touch had never been to the Laing Art Gallery. That chatter was really helping to raise the profile on social media.

Jackie: Of all the results, this is probably the most significant that we have got.

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Dominic: What you can see here, in orange, is the people who have visited in the last six months. It normally takes three years to reach this level of visitation and we’ve done similar in six months. The blue line is the base line from when we started the project, showing the activity of people over three years. The two venues who ran particularly engaging campaigns that captured people’s imaginations - Tyneside and Laing - have had more visitation in the last six months than in the past three years from those people in The Insider.

In most cases, the orange line is just behind the blue line in terms of engagement. That shows a huge acceleration in frequency and recency of activity. Our conclusion starts to be that this kind of sharing data, segmentation and marketing, is really having quite a significant impact on infrequent and lapsed people.

Jackie: We have effectively managed to generate as much attendance in six months as in the previous three years, which was a really big revelation for us.

There has also been an increase in propensity to attend - people who haven’t attended yet but who are more likely to based on their experience of being part of The Insider.

Dominic: We can see that marketing in this way is starting to have benefits and I would say that most of the nine organisations are starting to build this approach into their daily lives.

To summarise the impact of the project so far for the organisations:

• More engaged audiences

• Increased capability• A working, shared database• Cleaned and augmented data• Segmentation of their audience • Better understanding of their audiences

For the arts:

• Templates for Privacy Policy, Collaboration Agreement and Contracts

• Audience development case studies• A model for successful collaboration and

sharing of data

We don’t claim to have every single solution, this is a pilot, but we do hope that this has something to offer to many other companies. We will share everything; all the learning, how to do and not to do things, all legal documentation and case studies will be with Nesta.

I know that there are conversations in other UK towns. There are projects going on in New Zealand using the same approach and technology. We are having conversations and trying to help other places here.

Jackie: It is important to note that when organisations are sharing their data, some have a small amount and some have a huge amount. Sometimes we get questioned about what much bigger organisations would get out of the project. Sage is in that positon. Nearly 50% of the data actually comes from Sage’s databases. Dom, would you like to comment on that?

Dominic: There are a number of things. We did think very carefully about what risk would there be for our organisation to get involved in this. I came to the conclusion that even though we probably had the largest database, at the level that we are working at, the risk is minimal to our own commercial approach. I thought the theory beyond that was that we were trying to support a growing arts ecology and market, where all of our market grows by having a healthier group of the public coming to the arts. I think that for the pilot that was a very healthy and good thing to do. Not everyone agreed. A couple of venues in NGCV didn’t get involved, perfectly fairly because they wanted to maintain their own market and not share it. My thought to them is that if we can make this work, I would hope that they would knock on our door and get involved.

Jackie: I would add that even though Sage had 50% of the records, there was 50% that they didn’t have. There was a huge opportunity to grow.

Dominic: We have learnt a huge amount as well, not just about shared data but the marketing approach.

In conclusion, how can we engage culturally active people who are not attending our venues or our art forms?

We found that there is a real hunger from audiences for information. There is a real appetite for The Insider. We didn’t know whether people would sign up or not and 15,000 did. From the six months versus three years chart, it does seem to be galvanising recency and frequency and future intention.

People are very keen to get involved. The open rates for emails are much higher, particularly when emails and headers are optimised for that culture segment. We have learned to love those people who are infrequent and unusual. If we don’t engage with those 80% who are not coming to our venue, we are missing a big trick and I guess we undervalue those people at our future peril.

Jackie: We need to embrace collaboration instead of fighting over the usual suspects. By working together and sharing our data we have been able to engage the unusual suspects and demonstrate that it really can work. This new shared model allows us to grow more visits and our income from far more members, albeit less frequently.

We need to actively encourage promiscuity. I never thought that I could say that I am working on a government-funded project to encourage promiscuity, but that is exactly what we are doing. By working together we are trying to encourage people to try lots of different art forms and go to lots of different venues. We are encouraging disloyalty and promiscuity in the audience and it is paying dividends because the audience you don’t have is much bigger than the audience you do have - even for the biggest venues.

It is like horizontal marketing. At the moment, audiences are getting vertical marketing, getting messages from us individually. As part of this project we are working together to help

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navigate this massive landscape where there is huge choice and variety. If we can help audiences navigate that complex and varied landscape and encourage them to roam across it then the offer is one of really varied cultural engagement.

We need to embrace segmentation. If we do this together we have the opportunity to build a larger and more engaged audience. If we don’t, effectively we are locking ourselves into a subsistence pattern where we are only ever engaging the 20% of usual suspects. There is huge value in the market in the people who don’t come and we really need to be making the most of it.

In terms of this project, culture segments has really made a difference. The deep psychographic insight has allowed the arts organisations to understand the needs of the segments. Non-attenders are receiving communications that are absolutely tailored to speak to their sensibilities, to meet their needs, and to encourage them to convert to attenders. In this new way of approaching marketing on a daily basis, we can see that by writing targeted and differentiated copy we can craft the kinds of messages that resonate with audiences.

Where we saw the biggest successes with audience engagement were where people were not just marketing and communicating in a differentiated way but developing events or wrap-arounds of events to really welcome people and have a fantastic experience. When people were crafting the experience, they were having the greatest successes. Effectively, relevant programming is absolutely king. Placing your work in a convincing, authentic context makes for much greater engagement.

To summarise, it is fair to say that we have never been more reliant on marketing than we are now and we have never needed to be more curious. We have never needed to be more resilient and driven by result. It is imperative that we engage and connect with our audiences in a meaningful and authentic way. If that is the case, why wouldn’t we all work together to share our audience data?

Someone said to me recently, ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’. It resonated with me about this project because rather than plotting our own course, we are trying to make the tide rise so that we all benefit.

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Q&A

Q. Henry from Nottingham Playhouse: What didn’t work?

A. Jackie: That is a really great question. There are probably a number of things. One of the biggest challenges, that we didn’t necessarily expect, was that actually the technology we thought we were building - something quite simple - actually became quite complex. It took us twice as long as we expected. We ended up really having to squash down the time running campaigns. Perhaps our planning didn’t work that well on the technology side.

There were quite a few issues about the data. We hadn’t thought through the whole walled data garden that we needed to build. There were lots of issues from a technological perspective.

A. Dominic: Because it was a pilot we were on a very tight timescale - a year - but really we delivered this in six to eight months. We didn’t always tailor things as much as we would like to. The technology was challenging. The other thing is that from my own organisation it was essentially a marketing project and, following Jackie’s last point about the programme being developed, we could have done a better job at involving our programming teams behind it. It is not easy to affect the programming teams with marketing insight. If we had them on board we would probably have had a greater result.

Q. Kate Parkin from Arts Council England: Has it impacted on how you market to your usual suspects? Has it had an impact on them?

A. Dominic: It has an impact. It is probably too early to say. It has made us think more critically about those different segments in our audience and what they might be looking for and the sorts of copy that we are writing. The thing I would love to do, if the Arts Council would fund it, would be to profile the whole of my database. We have 250,000. If they could all be profiled by culture segments and marketed like that constantly, that would have a huge impact.

A. Jackie: Different organisations are doing different things. They are at different stages and have different resources. There are a

number of them that are embedding this into their daily practice and that is having an impact.

A. Dominic: Baltic, Northern Stage, Tyneside Cinema: they are all very strategically culture segmenting all of their daily marketing.

A. Jackie: I am not sure if I should say this, but one of the organisations has actually changed the way that they do their marketing. Up to the point that we did this project, it was the events team that would craft the copy. When they had a little bit more ownership in the marketing team, they realised that it was really valuable for them to be able to do that. Now they craft it together or the marketing team can make suggestions. It has changed quite fundamentally the way things work in their organisation.

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Stephanie Burge: Hello, my name is Steph Burge. I am the Our Museum Coordinator for Amgueddfa Cymru National Museum in Wales. I’m based at one of our museums, St Fagan’s. My role there is to oversee the Our Museum initiative, to evaluate what we have been doing and to embed the learning across the whole of the organisation.

Laura Gutierrez: My name is Laura Gutierrez. I am a Project Manager, Facilitator and Coach that’s currently working with Glasgow Museums on the Our Museum process and my role there is to guide the organisation through this process of change.

Stephanie Burge: The purpose of today’s session is to share with you some of our experiences and learning as part of the Our Museum initiative. We are going to outline how creating a truly engaged and participatory museum requires cultural change within our organisations.

We are going to give you a bit of background about the Our Museum initiative and talk to you about how we are going to create ongoing and sustainable relationships with our communities. That requires a holistic organisational approach and commitment.It is not just one person’s job; it is everyone’s job within an organisation. It’s not just the learning department or the community outreach team; it has to be everybody on board and working towards the same aim.

We are going to share with you some snapshots of activity at both National Museum Wales and at Glasgow. We will show you some of the different ways that we’re embedding and sustaining mechanisms, both internally and externally, that provide spaces for dialogue, creativity and curiosity. We will look at how we are building those capacities to work collaboratively in new ways in our communities.

Laura Gutierrez: The ingredients that we are going to share with you aren’t necessarily a template on exactly how to successfully embed participation and engagement. They’re simply a set of pointers to explain what some of the common barriers to change have been in our experience and how they can be tackled in practical and effective ways.

Before we move on to introduce you to the Our Museum process, some of you might not be familiar with our organisations. This is just a really quick five minutes to introduce you to who we are.

Glasgow Museums is where I am based in a freelance capacity. It is part of a local government organisation called ‘Glasgow Life’, which provides cultural and leisure services across the city. It employs approximately 300 staff and Glasgow Museums is one of Glasgow Life’s seven service areas. It encompasses nine museum venues across Glasgow including The Burrell Collection, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum and Riverside Museum which was voted European Museum of the Year in 2013. We also have a large outreach team in Glasgow Museums, which is called The Open Museum. It was founded 25 years ago and it brings our collections outside the walls of our museums and out into the communities. That is done through lending reminiscence kits and object handling kits, and working directly with community groups to co-produce travelling displays.

Our collection is one of the richest civic museum collections in Europe with over 1.4 million objects. All of our Museums and most of the activities associated with our public programme are free with Glaswegians making up the majority of our visitors.

Within the extended Glasgow Life organisational family there are further

Our Museum: communities and museums as active

partners - the who, the how and the whyStephanie Burge, Amgueddfa Cymru: National Museum Wales

Laura Gutierrez, Glasgow Museums/Glasgow Life

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cultural and leisure services. These include the Glasgow Life community teams, with whom Glasgow Museums works really closely to develop its engagement.

The main remit of the Glasgow Life community teams is to encourage and support communities across Glasgow to access culture and sporting activity. They spread across the city. The team I am also part of in a freelance capacity operates out of local community centres and libraries, many of which are in close proximity to museum venues.

Stephanie Burge: Amgueddfa Cymru, National Museum of Wales, operates seven museums across Wales and one collection centre. We’re a Welsh government sponsored body and we are a free museum. We have a vast and diverse collection that spans all sorts of different disciplines including the arts. We have the largest impressionist painting collection outside of Paris. There are lots of things that people don’t necessarily know about. There is natural history, which spans from archaeology up to modern day Welsh life. There are industrial exhibitions that span, wool, slate, maritime and the coal industry in Wales, and natural sciences. One of our newest exhibitions is a dinosaur that is about 200 million years old. It was found in Wales and it is the oldest one to be found in the UK. It’s also a new species, which is very exciting.

Over the last few years, National Museum Wales has been undergoing a restructure. I think it is a situation that many museums are in at the moment and this process has forced us to re-vision and change the way we are working.

We are changing staff structures, making better use of our staff and our resources in order to work towards meeting the needs of our communities. We have got over 550 employees and 30 departments so it has been no small task. It has been quite a difficult and challenging process in many ways but we are now coming towards the end. I suppose we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and the real kind of benefits to that.

Our new vision as a museum was inspiring people and changing lives. What we are aiming to do is inspire people in Wales and beyond to discover, enjoy, learn and create through our museums and our collections. We are trying to transform the way that we engage with the visitors and our public. We want people to feel that the museum is somewhere for people that reflects them, that they feel they can leave their mark in, and that they can engage, play and be curious in. We want them to use those kind of facilities and our collections in quite different ways.

As part of this process the museum that I am based in, which is Saint Fagan’s, is also undergoing a Welsh government and Heritage Lottery Fund redevelopment project. We have got lots of big things going on and one of the things that we have been working on as well is the Our Museum initiative. I don’t know how many people may be aware of it but I will give you a background and an overview as to what the Our Museums initiative is. Laura and I were discussing this morning that unfortunately it’s not necessarily very evident from its title. People ask ‘Whose Museum?’

The Our Museum initiative was funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and has been running since 2012. It is due to come to an end early next year. The main focus is in bringing communities and museums together to form active partnerships. The programme is supporting seven museums and galleries across the UK, including Glasgow and Cardiff, to change their organisations. It is supporting us to embed participation at the core of what we are doing so that it is sustainable and less at risk of being marginalised when specific funding streams run out.

The idea was built from extensive consultation, which started in 2008 in a research phase that was led by Doctor Bernadette Lynch. At the end of that she produced the report ‘Whose cake is it anyway?’ It concluded that investment into participatory and community engagement in museums and galleries in the UK, over the last ten years or so, had not actually

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succeeded in shifting work from the margins. It had actually possibly pushed it further into that. Things were being funded in such a way that they weren’t core. They were very much at risk when staff came to the end of projects. As a result communities were remaining passive beneficiaries and weren’t actually involved in driving those changes and really being involved in the core of the projects.

Although all the organisations involved in Our Museum are now looking at the same aims and objectives, we have all taken different approaches.

National Museum Wales has looked at a very specific area. We looked at our volunteering and we put our hands up and said that we weren’t doing it very well. We hoped that by looking at a smaller area of our organisation and working quite differently with our volunteers in our communities we could see what change would look like. We hoped that we could learn from that and embed that into our processes across the board, to be able to work in very different ways. We are looking at a community of volunteers based on the needs of the volunteer and no longer just on the need of the museum. In order to do that we have set up a community engagement team, which is made up of community partners, staff and our trustees.

Laura Gutierrez: Meanwhile Glasgow Museums took quite a different take on the Our Museums initiative. We have focused on creating a networked model of change. We are exploring how to create and embed sustainable bonding and bridging opportunities that encourage our community partners and our staff to connect in new ways. By weaving networks that enable understanding and closer relationships in the process we hope to develop a museum process that is truly part of the city of Glasgow and utterly responsive to the citizens of Glasgow.

We would like to share with you five ingredients of change that both the Museum of Wales and Glasgow Museums recognise as underpinning the process that we are all going through.

The first is setting a compelling vision. The Our Museum process has set out a clear and compelling vision for change, which participating organisations have helped to shape. Our organisations’ leadership teams are now actively and consistently championing it and this is the ingredient from which the rest of them flow. It is a compelling action for active participation.

The belief really is that participation is the work of everyone in the museum and not in some ways adversarial or in contrast to the museum’s real work. It has been set out and fully supported by our senior figures from day one of the museum’s Our Museum initiative.

This vision has been essential in driving forwards the organisational changes needed to embed active and sustained participation. It has been vital to work through the very real and present barriers, which that work presents.

Stephanie Burge: I am going to talk to you about achieving buy in from the trustees and senior management team at the National Museum of Wales.

We’ve been quite fortunate actually that we have had leadership that have actively worked collaboratively with staff and community partners to champion and drive the change process.

In some ways there has been some serendipity to it but in other ways there has been a lot of work to really support that process. One of those areas is how we work with our trustees. It wasn’t quite as easy to get them involved to start with.

Trustees were quite apprehensive about how they would balance their role as a trustee, which requires them to be more strategic, to get more involved in the project.

Equally there was a lot of apprehension around trustees possibly taking that role. There were fears I suppose of them policing the process and therefore maybe hampering some of the creativity, the conversations, and the discussions.

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What we have always been looking to do is to create spaces and platforms where people can engage and there would be a level of parity, whether someone is a member of staff or a community partner. When we were looking at working with the trustees, there were concerns about how we would be able to manage that. Interestingly our community partners gave us the confidence to be able to do that. Working from the third sector they use their trustees differently to how museums do. They use their trustees for all of their knowledge and expertise outside of their role as a trustee as well and they thought it was very strange that we kept our trustees at arm’s length. They wanted us to bring them in and get them involved to strengthen our approach.

We really wanted to learn from the way that they work with their trustees. They helped us to develop and deliver a trustee training programme, which allowed the trustees to get an idea of the Our Museum initiative and the aims and objectives we were hoping to achieve. As a result, four of our trustees now sit on our community engagement team and get involved in those democratic discussions and conversations that are driving the changes at National Museum Wales. One of the trustees describes it as coming to the room wearing two hats. She comes as a trustee but more so she comes as an individual in the same way that everyone else in that room does. She gets involved in the conversations and brings her own kind of expertise to move things forward.

I suppose what we are trying to do all the time is to foster these strong relationships that work outside of the normal museum hierarchy so that everybody’s voice is heard equally regardless of those roles. I think it is important to note here that for change to be sustainable it has to happen at all levels. The driving force for this way of working can’t just sit with senior persons, whether that be trustees or the senior management team. It needs to be embedded across the whole organisation, which I think you are going to hear us say quite a lot.

The work at National Museums Wales and the situation with trustees and senior management team almost legitimises the type of work that we are trying to achieve.

It therefore makes it easier to create an atmosphere and a situation where things can be creative and things can change.

Laura Gutierrez: That leads us neatly onto our second ingredient for change, which we have called ‘creating a climate of participative safety’. What does that really mean?

With a clear vision in place, the message is clear to everyone both within the organisation and outside it. That active and meaningful participation is not only encouraged but a climate of participative safety is in place and fully supported by the organisation. Within this climate both community partners and staff feel that their thinking is welcomed, that their involvement, their contributions and their insights are valued. They recognise that the organisation is cultivating, supporting and holding participation at all levels. The decision making enabling that active participation is transparent and clear.

Stephanie Burge: At National Museum Wales the space has been created by building our community engagement team. That is made up of staff, trustees and community partners that shape, deliver and drive that programme together. Having community partners was one of the key elements of the Our Museum process but all organisations were left to decide what that meant to them. For National Museum Wales, we wanted to work with community partners that had strategic remit, specialist knowledge and community networks that would be able to support us in what we were trying to achieve in our volunteering programme.

We chose people for their understanding of the voluntary sector in Wales, of best practice in volunteering and supporting people like the Welsh Council for Voluntary Action or for work with specific community groups. We were looking across the board at how we could get in different knowledge and expertise to support what we were doing.

We were quite lucky to work with many of these community partners to write our initial bids to the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. That meant that from the outset we were

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focused on community needs and sharing our knowledge and resources. That strengthened our approach right from the beginning and it has also given community partners that same ownership over the process. I think that has been quite powerful for them to be involved at all levels.

One of the first steps in making this sort of thing work is to make sure that our vision and values are aligned and that we are working in a mutually beneficial way towards the same goals. We have been very careful to make sure that at all levels we are sharing authority with our community partners and that they are involved in key decision making. For example when we are recruiting staff now for our volunteering department, community partners are involved in job descriptions and the whole recruitment process including interviewing. They have that same level of input and authority around making those decisions. They have helped us to change things like our volunteer job descriptions and that whole kind of change in our processes and policies has really strengthened and changed our approach as a museum.

In addition to our community engagement team, we work in this way with a number of participatory forums. That includes the youth forum and a diversity forum. The idea is that we are representing our communities across the whole of Wales in the work that we are doing in the museum.

Laura Gutierrez: In addition to the ongoing consultation work that Glasgow Museums undertakes, we have also been exploring how to create regular structured forums for dialogue and exchange. They target a much more extensive network of individuals and groups across the city. We have called these events our creative café events. They are designed as an ideas generation mechanism that provides regular and ongoing opportunity for community partners and our staff to collaboratively generate ideas and dialogue to drive our public programming.

They are becoming spaces of participative safety for people to share insights, test out ideas and form new connections. These cafés encourage and capture the creativity of our staff and communities from the very beginning of the planning process.

They are scheduled to occur at regular points throughout the year, again to coincide and align with our planning cycles. In involving people, they are giving people a level of agency and ownership of the work that moves us further along a spectrum of engagement than our advisory panels have been able to do in the past.

So far we have held three of these creative café events, which have had about 75 to 100 attendees. Attendees have been drawn from our internal networks in Glasgow Museum and Glasgow Life as well as our extensive network of community contacts across the city.

The sessions have really been wonderful opportunities for Glasgow Museums to continue to weave strong networks across the city. They have enabled new and greater connections to be made that in turn are leading to very real collaborations and different ways of working.

Stephanie Burge: Ingredient three is about building internal capacity.

For participatory practice to be truly embedded and sustained it has to include all staff and they need to understand its relevance and application for their own work. Responsibility in community engagement has to be shared across the whole organisation. It can no longer be considered somebody else’s job; it has to be everyone’s job and in order to achieve this we need to work with staff to build internal capacity.

I find that in museums we are surrounded by beautiful collections and sometimes it can be quite easy to forget that our staff are as important an asset. We need to spend time with them in the same way that maybe we would in conserving or displaying our objects.

Staff need to be supported to work differently by being encouraged in creating spaces and resources that help to develop skills and understanding of working effectively with communities. We must value staff as individuals. They have skills, expertise and experiences that go beyond their job role. Often the knowledge and ability to make positive changes and to solve problems is

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already within our staff base. They just need to be given the opportunities to articulate their voices and to get involved in things.

Laura Gutierrez: I think that is where the focus of the Our Museum process in Glasgow Museums has really been. Our best ingredient has been creating internal capacity. We have done this in Glasgow Museums by creating a staff training and development programme that we have called ‘The Staff Ambassadors Programme.’

This programme is developing staff in supporting one another to work within the communities in which we serve. At the same time, it gives staff the opportunity to reflect on their working practice. What does this mean for our working practice? How can we all challenge ourselves to think and act beyond the ways in which we already work?

The Staff Ambassadors Programme is importantly elective and currently open to any staff from across Glasgow Museums and Glasgow Community Teams Service Areas. Any hierarchy of grade or department is checked at the door. Anybody from a gallery assistant to a senior manager can take part in this programme.

Over an eight month period a small but diverse cohort of staff worked together in a community of practice. Through participatory group work that encourages collaboration, they explored new ways of working and shared learning opportunities that aim to build important critical skills.

The Staff Ambassadors Programme is truly based around dialogue, exchange and reflection. One staff member that has been on this programme said ‘It is unlike any training programme,’ he has ever been on within the company before. It is deliberately different.

The impact of this programme on the organisation has been the development of a really strong peer network. It has built the resilience of our staff to find new ways to work together and implement new solutions as they share skills and knowledge with each other, particularly across different departments in different service areas.

This in turn is leading to staff with a renewed confidence to explore new ideas and apply their creativity to work in different ways with the people that we serve.

The inspiration and motivation this is providing staff with is also helping to bring about a shift in our organisational culture. Our ambassadors truly are agents of change, helping to embody and exemplify the vision of participatory practice that Glasgow Museums is embracing.

Ingredient number four is fostering a reflective learning environment.

There is a phrase that I use as a facilitator and a coach with many clients, which is ‘Slowing down in order to speed up.’ It is often such a challenging thing to do isn’t it? In light of deadlines and the constant forward momentum needed just to open the doors of a museum building, it is a huge challenge. Nevertheless finding ways to embed reflective practices and literally just carving out this space to slow down and notice what is going on around us, has been a key ingredient to both our organisations. It is accelerating progress towards becoming a more engaged participatory service.

Creating platforms that provide opportunities for us to get curious, ask questions and listen carefully to each other’s ideas, perspectives and wisdoms has reflected hugely on a more participatory culture in our organisations.

Stephanie Burge: One of the things that we found quite challenging during the programme was how to capture, measure and evaluate change as an impact.

Some forms of progress are quite easy to measure. For example we have volunteers here who are able to help us with building. We have a new iron age fort that they have been involved with from day one, from digging out the foundations to thatching the roof. It is really easy to see the impact for the museum and the benefit of having volunteers involved. What’s not so easy to see is the impact on volunteers. What has changed for them and how do we measure those things?

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The change for community partners involved in the process and the change for staff is quite cultural and can be challenging for us to gather together and look at. Over time what we have looked at and captured is the anecdotal evidence. The word anecdotal itself can be quite tricky because it suggests that the information being presented might not be fact. It even seems to belittle the impact and importance of what we are trying to draw out. What we mean by anecdotal is those smaller things that seem of lesser importance at the time. Sometimes it’s a conversation that you might have with a volunteer or little changes to a person’s confidence, abilities or wellbeing, or a new skill that somebody has learnt. These are sometimes the things that people don’t value for themselves but over time these smaller things do add up to a larger impact.

In essence I suppose what we are trying to impact is a person’s experience, the things that have changed for them and what it means to them. It is about individuals and their stories and what is really important to us is to gather and listen and really engage with the people that we are working with about what has changed for them.

One of the ways that we are looking at presenting these more widely is through digital storytelling. In a second, I am going to play you a video from one of our volunteers, Paul. The museum has supported Paul to share his story and wherever possible we try to support people to be able to do that. I think sharing the stories about what we are doing here in this change process from the mouth of the individual that’s involved is much more empowering for them and much more interesting for the audience. What I want you to be able to see is that Paul’s story was able to evidence the impact of the changes that we have made in a very different way.

View video

Video: The Battle of the Balkans. Joanna and I were married December 28th 2005 in Newcastle, her hometown, although we lived in Barry.

One day in June 2006 I looked at her and said, ‘Let’s buy a house in Bulgaria’, to which she replied, ‘Have you lost your marbles? What’s Bulgaria? Why?’ I said, ‘Because it’s there in the middle bit.’ So I decided we would do it. She said,’Okay, great.’

So we went and chose a farm type place and bought it. The house, the barns, sheds, land needed total rebuilding but the foundations in the house was almost liveable. Although it looked like an impossible job, the newly married couple were determined.

After a while we decided to start our own business, selling and buying houses to British people for a small fee. It was my idea, but I asked her if she would do the business side because I was now building two houses. It needed a lot of work doing. After four years, my wife said to me, ‘Would you sign the houses,’ in her name? To save me going with her forty miles away to the bank every time she needed my signature, which always lost me a day’s work. I said, ‘No problem love.’

The houses are now in her name only. I know now why. Later that month, all was done, including swimming pool. I was so happy.

A few days later in August my best friend, my brother, died aged fifty-three. I was distraught. Four days after that my wife, all of a sudden, told me she had met another man and I was no longer required.

My homes were in her name. What could I do? Within four days I lost my best friend in the world, my wife, step-son, animals and my fantastic home, which took me four years’ non-stop work.

To leave Bulgaria, she gave me a tiny pink case, so as I wouldn’t have to pay excess baggage.

I came back to Barry.

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Over the next three months, I was on a mission to kill myself with total alcohol. In November I was dead but still breathing. I had one inch of life left and I decided enough and searched for help.

I found a hostel for alcoholics and was given two years’ rehab. Over the next six months I was housebound, when my keyworker asked me if I would like to try some voluntary work at St Fagan’s.

I said ‘Yes’. I was terrified of going out but made so welcome by all the staff. They made me feel wanted.

The volunteers were nice as well. They are my friends now and I am alive again. I would say to other people who have given up, ‘Find that one inch and try that something else that brings you back to life.’

Thank you St Fagan’s.

Laura Gutierrez: At Glasgow Museums we have taken particular care to ensure that reflection is a critical element of our Staff Ambassadors Programme, which is about giving staff space to feel rich in both time and resources.

Each month the ambassadors come together in action learning sets, giving the cohort regular opportunities to reflect on where their learning is taking them and to positively challenge each other through that learning journey.

There are also two peer review sessions within that eight month programme of work, where staff ambassadors can be supportively critiqued through the various projects that they are developing during their time on the programme.

One of our staff ambassadors said to me just two days ago that his time on the programme provided ‘time to jump off of the hamster wheel, to connect with colleagues about the stuff that matters to him’ and give his batteries a much needed recharge.

Involving people from outside of our organisations in open and honest conversations about the way that change has been undertaken, has been a critical

ingredient in this change process. These fresh and independent perspectives have encouraged reflection for all of us. They have helped ensure difficult stories around embedding participation aren’t avoided but fully addressed and interrogated.

Change by its very nature as we know can be messy, chaotic and often very fearful. The problems and challenges are often very novel and unstructured. Managing that ambiguity inherent in change has been made much easier with the help from people within our organisations.

Stephanie Burge: From the outset National Museum Wales said ’We don’t hold all the answers’ and we found that to be quite a valuable thing to be able to say. We wanted to have that external voice and to value that and put that at the core of what we were doing.

Our community partners have not only brought that new expertise, they have also brought that critical eye. They have fostered an environment that is constantly questioning, changing, evaluating and adapting what we are doing to create better outcomes for the people we are working with.

Many of the museums involved in Our Museum have had a critical friend: a trusted person who is external but takes the time to understand what they are trying to achieve as an organisation. They sit on the outside slightly and draw out some of those questions that people are avoiding and that need to be addressed to move forward.

For me it is about that kind of balance about the critique and also the positive way that enables us to make that change happen quicker and in a better way. We have been building lots of mechanisms as part of Our Museum that allow us to work as a peer group and a network.

Glasgow and Cardiff Museum have worked very closely together. We have spoken about the café. They have shared information about their Staff Ambassadors Programme and it is about having that environment of learning and reflection that’s improving what we’re all able to do.

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One of the other elements of the Our Museum initiative is the peer review. Annually all of the organisations have got together with their community partners to create a space that is just about reflection and taking that time with each other.

Laura Gutierrez: Finally I do think that it is worth noting that both Steph and I are independent coordinators of the process for our respective organisations. I am a facilitator and coach and Steph brings similar qualities to her role in the Museum of Wales. That is really about being able to hold a safe space for our colleagues within these organisations as they are working through challenges that are often quite complex, multi-layered and occasionally very contentious.

Eventually what Steph and I are saying is that our ingredients are maybe adding up to a series of spaces or even platforms.

In his book ‘The Moral Imagination’ John Paul Lederach, one of the world’s most foremost minds on peace-building and reconciliation, talks about the importance of platforms and spaces where people with very different perspectives can come together. These are spaces where they can discuss what still is not working as well as it could or should, where they can be re-inspired and revitalised, where they can be challenged in a constructive way.

Essentially what Lederach is saying in his book is that it’s about space for connection. Really isn’t meaningful participation all about connection?

Our organisations have placed active participation at the heart of all we do by creating more and better opportunities for people to share their experiences as Paul very powerfully did in the video you just saw.

We have created opportunities for people to share their information and their perspectives with our organisations and with each other - really to have conversations that matter.

Stephanie Burge: What we’re seeing now through these connections and these conversations is that we’re transforming our

museums. Hopefully we are also inspiring people and changing lives.

We are coming to the part where it is over to you. Hopefully we will hear about some experiences and, looking at these ingredients, will start to create a space for us to be curious in this room. We are going to have those conversations and start to draw out some of those things that you want to take forward.

Laura Gutierrez: We said that it is about building networks of connectivity. We would like you to build your own little network over the next twenty-five minutes and have conversations that matter to you.

We have set up five discussion groups based on the ingredients that you heard us share. We would like you to move to the ingredient that held your attention most. What do you have most energy to discuss with your peers?

In your small groups we would like you to reflect on what you have just heard. Share your own questions and thoughts with your group. We would then like to come back together as a full group to hear your top two takeaways or questions that you would like to share. Steph and I will answer your questions thereafter.

Ingredient one is setting a compelling vision.

Stephanie Burge: Ingredient two is creating a climate of participative safety. Ingredient three is building internal capacity. Ingredient four is fostering a reflective learning environment and five is the importance of the external voice and managing ambiguity.

(Group Dialogue)

Laura Gutierrez: Can I invite Group 1 to share the top two things that you’re taking away?

Group 1: We thought first of all the idea of long term cultural change and making it part of your core work is really important. Lots of us do lots of successful short term projects and then it’s about linking that into everything you do and then that is related to the importance of a clear vision. It is quite

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refreshing to have that as a first point, and having a conversation and the attitude that’s part of your vision and the importance of that being understood by everyone internally. The leadership’s important too, making sure everyone understands the same vision.

Laura Gutierrez: Thank you very much. Group 2?

Group 2: We had creating and planning in participative safety and I think a safe way of managing the critical voices. We found that we were talking a lot about what the potential pitfalls around creating a climate of participative safety might be. It’s a fantastic idea and obviously it is something that we would all like to achieve but it is the difficulty of getting to that point in the first place if you work with lots of different agencies who all have different agendas, different working styles, different resource, different capacity. It is kind of looking at all of those issues and then if you want to keep something quite open but actually effective then you have to shut down elements of it in order to achieve something.

I suppose really we are looking at the fact that participative safety and an open minded approach, requires quite a lot of pinning down.

Laura Gutierrez: Yes, I think that something that looks unstructured has a tremendous amount of structure underneath it. What we were saying is it is by no means without parameters. There’s a lot of structure that would have taken far too long to share with you.

Group 3?

Group 3/4: We talked quite a lot about buy in for this from the top down and also the importance of people within the organisation having the confidence to support and embrace something like this. The whole idea of thinking outside somebody in their role and their skillset and the widening of that is something that certainly key organisations could be doing and it could really help.

It feels like there are an awful lot of ideas but we also feel that people often think that they need permission to come up with their ideas.

Their managers need to be asking them, rather than having so many people feeling quite frustrated that they can’t make their idea happen. I am sure if the trustees and the directors knew about those ideas they would be overjoyed and would love them.

Laura Gutierrez: Yes and that’s what Glasgow Museums is trying to do through its mechanisms, particularly The Ambassadors Programme and The Creative Cafés, is to give that permission to staff as well as our community partners. Our staff are our community in their own right and we have recognised that, giving them the permission to be creative and to actually empower them to develop those ideas. It is not just talk. It’s actually creating mechanisms that are enabling people to generate an idea and take it right through. That’s not easy and it comes back to your point at the back there, your point about a lot of structure behind making that happen.

Group 5?

Group 5: We were looking at the importance of the external voice and managing ambiguity. We talked about embedding the external voice so that it came across the whole of the organisation and all internal stakeholders. We talked about really providing the opportunities for those conversations and for the voices to be heard - also something around creating the opportunities to really understand what engagement in the community is and seeing that in your organisation’s mission and vision.

We also spoke about freedom of speech, managing the critical voices and the responsibility of the external voice too. Laura Gutierrez: Thank you.

We have got a couple of moments before we are due to end. Are there any questions that you might have from what you have heard from each other or from what you have heard from Steph or I?

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Q&A

Q: In all the organisations that I have worked in over the years, I have never spoken to any of the trustees. I was just wondering who in this room feels the same or if you have any direct contact with your trustees?

A: I am a trustee. The organisation I work with is actually quite small and I have loads of interaction with the people.

Q: That sounds like a great organisation. That is quite unique though isn’t it?

A: Well the only thing I would say is you know if everybody was bombarding me with stuff all the time, I just wouldn’t be able to. It does have to be managed.

A. Claire Eva: I think it is down to the board to identify what their different specialisms are and offer that resource out.

A. Laura Gutierrez: I think there needs to be a line of sight between a gallery assistant right up to a trustee and that’s not always there. In Glasgow Museums, because we are part of a wider organisation, that line of sight from myself or my colleagues isn’t always clear who the trustees are. I think in organisations where that functions better, that line of sight is clear.

A. Stephanie Burge: Please do be heartened that in many ways we were in the same situations. We’re getting to a point where we are making those connections and we have got four trustees who really are on board but we are a long way from getting to that ideal situation where everybody is on that level of parity. It is about those small steps towards it and sometimes it is trustees who have got that specialist kind of knowledge or interest who want to get involved. Those small changes then start to catch and start to move on and so it is a process over time.

Q: I can imagine that the trustees would find it so rewarding to receive material about the beneficiary volunteer programme and things like that. How much information do trustees generally receive for big organisations, whether or not it is very broad or the small anecdotal things?

A: Certainly in the meetings I go to, a lot of it is financial information and it is very tedious.

A. Laura Gutierrez: It is back to building internal capacity of trustees as much as it is as building the internal capacity of gallery assistants. I would love our Staff Ambassadors Programme to be open to a trustee should they have the time and energy and commitment to take part. They are not excluded from those conversations or that learning.

Q: Do you have any evidence of all this great work - the impact that it has had on the visitors? Has it been running long enough to get feedback to say I have noticed a change of some sort and they visit the museum?

A. Laura Gutierrez: The programme has been going for about eighteen months. We are looking at what the impact on the organisation has been. We are beginning to build up evidence through the collaborative projects that, in the end, benefit our customers. We’re looking at what the benefits are, how they have been generated, and we’re building up a range of case studies through the ambassadors taking part in the programme.

We are not at the point where Wales are yet, which is where we can share digital stories of that. We are some way behind that but we are in the process of doing that. By the end of our time on the Our Museum programme we will have those to put out on our website, to show ‘Here’s what we’ve done with some funds and here’s what we hope the impact has been on you guys.’

Q: We were starting to talk a little bit in our group about The Natural History Museum and finding out about who your community is. Working in a national foundation, sometimes it is a challenge to know who that person is that you’re going to be engaging with - they could be international. How do you start that process about finding who you really are trying to engage with?

A. Laura Gutierrez: You have to be honest about that. If you’re in South Kensington be honest about who your target is. We have not given you a set of tools because there aren’t any. In this Our Museum process,

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there are a range of different organisations of varying sizes and of varying context. The Paul Hamlyn Foundation gave us all the money to do this because they recognised that each of us presented different challenges. We had utterly different sets of contexts and we have worked out a theory of change that suits who we are. Who we are in Glasgow is very different than Wales and would be very different from The Natural History Museum itself. All we can do is give you the ingredients that we have recognised that are part of a change process. I do think that is a very interesting point and one that we all grappled with from the outset and wondered who are our communities? In Glasgow we said, ‘Actually one of the communities that we are prioritising through this process is the wider staff community’, because without them we can’t do this work.

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Mark Wright: I am director of People Create Limited, which is a leadership design and team-performance company that I formed about eight years ago. You might be absolutely right for thinking why on earth should I be standing in front of you. I don’t run a large organisation, I don’t have teams of people, I don’t employ anyone directly and I certainly don’t have a boss. In terms of my experience of influencing upwards on a daily basis, I am not doing very much of it.

I used to work in the arts. I have a background in the arts. I used to be a sculptor. I was also head of leadership development for Ernst & Young where I spent a few years battling with pretty serious people, helping them to understand and to lead in a slightly different way to the way that they had been trained.

I am now solely responsible for generating all the revenue that my business makes. I am responsible for supporting my family and some of the other people I work with, as well as designing and delivering leadership development work and running programmes for organisations. I’m responsible for making relationships with people who have no sense of what it is I am trying to achieve for them. They don’t really care often; they have been told that they need to do something because they have teams that are in trouble. The outcome of it is indistinct at best; there isn’t a product or thing that I create. It is about people being able to do their work more effectively or negotiate or whatever it might be. The outcomes are intangible. The people I am talking to can change the relationship at any point with no consequence to them whatsoever. Actually, everything I do in building relationships is all about influencing upwards when I have very little power. I want to talk about how, in those brief snapshots, you influence as effectively as you can.

How do you understand what your levers of power are? How can you take some of the things that you may think are negatives and

weaknesses and turn them into things that are powerful for you?

Why influence? This conversation is about influencing upwards but the reality of influencing is that generally it is much more important than it used to be. In all of our organisations, we are moving into a situation where leading teams and leading organisations is very different. It is more isolated because people are doing more homeworking. People are working across regions. It is becoming more connected, there are more social connections.Hierarchies are flatter. People work in teams much more often. There is this constant need for pace and agility. The traditional model of how you influence, command and control - ‘I’m the boss, I am going to tell you what to do’ - is starting to break down. Just being good at influencing people is a life skill.

If I am working with people around leadership, it always has a core of ‘How do I influence others?’ Bear that in mind. This is not just about the relationship with your boss, but also your colleagues, your team and your stakeholders. If you feel like you are getting cascades of information from your boss and being pissed on the whole time then maybe we can spend an hour looking at how we can turn that around? We’ll look out how you might change the dynamic just by being different in the way that you do stuff.

Why should we bother with this whole influencing thing? On one level, it helps you get stuff done quicker and maybe better. It may help you get protection. If you are in a position where you can influence those who have more power than you then it is about unlocking resources and time and getting things signed off.

It is not easy for a number of reasons. The levers of power seem to be weighted in favour of your boss in so many ways.

Influencing upwards: asking the right questionsMark Wright, Director, People Create Ltd

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We’ll talk about how we can change the dynamic from an ‘us’ and ‘them’ dynamic to something that is much more subversive in many ways. I am tempted to think of you as influence terrorists, but I am more interested in the idea of you as influence freedom fighters.

I am going to talk about the context for influence. What do you need to do before anyone will listen to you? I want to share with you something about the dark underbelly of influence. I am not going to talk a huge amount about how to be Machiavellian. I am going to assume positive intent but I am going to mention some of the stuff you may want to think about if you do want to get your own way. Then I am going to talk about situational influence, a lovely model that helps with how we might move around in our relationships with others. Then the core of what I have been asked to talk about is the power of questions. How do I employ my ability to question really well as a key lever of influence?

I spend a lot of time working with people in pretty large organisations: Marks and Spencer, Dyson, Vodafone. One recurring theme is an assumption, whatever level I work at, that things will be easier if they are promoted. One of the things that leaders say is, ‘When I get to the next level, it will all be a bit easier. I just need a little bit more power and it will all be fine.’ Just be aware that it doesn’t get any clearer or easier the further up the tree you go so don’t assume it will.

In fact the reverse is true; the further up the tree you go, the less you know. If you have a sphere of influence, the perimeter of unknown is relatively small. As you move further up your influence grows and the area of unknown grows too. As people get higher up, the things people are dealing with become more vague and it becomes harder to navigate. The reality - this is your opportunity – is how do I start to grasp really core questions? How do I create a sense of influence that allows me to facilitate people to be able to clarify what is going on? How do I become a coach for my boss? That is the job that I want you to have.

One of the challenges with influencing is that if you are not taken seriously by your boss

or you don’t have an appropriate level of credibly, it is going to be very difficult to have any influence over them.

Think about how you can establish that core credibility. Assume you are this box:

All of your skills and experience are in the box. That is the given, that is what you are expected to do. How do you establish your reputation, or brand if you like? What do you want to be famous for? It may be one or all of these things outside the box. Relevant delivery is about making sure that what you are doing is absolutely relevant to your organisation. Make it exceptional, remarkable or something people are amazed by. It might be unexpected. You might get the reputation for doing something that wasn’t asked for but was really cool. The other one is visible delivery; be brilliant and be prepared to say, ‘I did this’. Don’t allow others to take the limelight.

Do a stock take of the kind of work that you do. Work out which of these - or it might be all of these - apply and say ‘I’m going to make it really visible’. ‘I am going to make sure there is an element of the unexpected’ or ‘I am going to make it really exceptional’ or ‘I am going to be the first person in the company to do this’. This is your starting point. This will get you to first base in terms of your ability to influence other people.

In terms of the dark underbelly, let’s talk about some of the things that go on in this influencing business that you might want to think about. There is a great book called ‘Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion’ by Robert Cialdini. He talks about six aspects of influence.

Unexpected delivery

Creating the context for influence…

Exceptional delivery

Relevant delivery Visible delivery

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Reciprocity

We are hardwired to trade with each other. If someone does us a favour, we feel a sense of duty to that person. When you give vouchers to somebody you are initiating or hoping to initiate a reciprocal arrangement. It is all about the idea that I give you something small and something large will come back to me. Being generous with people is not an entirely altruistic act.

For example, I did this by accident actually. For the last couple of years starting up my own business, I was working from home and literally working from the kitchen table. We didn’t have very much money. I wasn’t sure how to go about saying thank you to people at Christmas time. I was concerned at how much it was going to cost me to buy loads of bottles of wine and there would always be other companies doing similar but bigger and better things to me. I wasn’t able to do anything on that scale. I got stuck and thought, What can I do that is different?

In a fit of desperation, I have got two sons who were about three and five, we decided to do a tray bake. We baked fudge - nice fudge - and we chopped it all up and got boxes with ribbons and my sons wrote little menus. I made about 30 of these boxes and sent them all to my various clients who I had worked for over the last year or those I was hoping to work with over the next year. It would have cost me about £20. In that year my revenue went up by nearly £100,000.

It wasn’t just because I make fudge. The fact was it felt like a different experience for the person receiving it. It felt personal. It felt intimate. It was a little bit homespun but actually it was pretty cool. I stumbled upon it. I wanted to do something nice for the people I had worked with and I didn’t want to do anything overly corporate.

If I could have afforded it, I might have gone for the easy option and bought lots of wine. In reality, the effort I put into doing these things had a much deeper emotional impact than I ever thought it would. It was personal and had this little bit of narrative around it. I did that for a couple of years and it became this little tradition.

I didn’t just do it with my clients but also with my associates - the freelance network

I have. Who do I want them to call when they have a nice piece of work? I want them to call me first. I have to be good at what I do as well, but at the moments of decision, what do I want someone to do? I want them to remember me and be favourably disposed and have a little sense of obligation. It works. It is very easy to do and it is a nice thing to think about.

Commitment

The second aspect of influence is commitment - getting someone to commit to things, even in small ways. The reason why you fill out so many forms in a car showroom is not because they need all of that paperwork. It’s because the mental act of writing out your name helps you become committed to buying a car. When the car salesperson is negotiating with you, their target is not the price that you pay; their initial target is just to get you committed to buying with them. Once they have got that everything else is negotiable. Their objective is to get you to commit and part of that is getting you to fill in a form so that you have some sort of engagement with something.

Part of what you do in marketing is asking people to commit in some way. In fundraising you ask people to commit in a small way - ‘just come to an event’ - and then you get people to sign up to a newsletter and then a questionnaire. Over time you build a sense of commitment.

Consensus and social proof

Belonging is really important - the idea of social proof. If everyone else is doing it then it is okay. There is a huge amount of psychological research on the power of belonging. We are hardwired to belong. There is a residual part of our brain that drives us towards belonging. Social proof is reassuring. Cialdini himself is not averse to doing it. He wrote ‘National Bestseller’ across his own book. All of those kinds of things are ways of reassuring people. If you are wanting to influence, think about how you can make sure it feels okay for other people to do this as well.

Liking

Liking, being liked, being likeable, being someone that people want to do business

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with: the issue here is that people decide with emotion and they justify with logic. Even if you think you are super logical if you put yourself in an MRI scanner and make a series of decisions, micro-seconds before you justify your decisions with logic you will make an emotional choice. Being liked is really important - understand that people make decisions, and about you, not just based on logic but on emotion.

Authority

People are influenced hugely by authority. People in uniforms tend to command more influence. There is a great study where researchers stood at traffic lights and watched people who jaywalked, walking on the red man. People follow more quickly on the red man if the first person who goes is wearing a suit. People who look like they know what they are doing actually command more authority than people who don’t. It is not necessarily right, it is just how it is.

Here are a few other slightly leftfield things you might want to think about. People who are taller command more authority. They tend to be listened to more. People who are extroverted and talk a lot are perceived to be more intelligent. It doesn’t matter what you say. When you ask people who is clever in the room, people who talk more are perceived to be cleverer. I tend to be more reflective in meetings so I am at a disadvantage but fortunately I wear a pink shirt. Pink is an influential colour. If you want to influence, pink is the colour. It is something about the way your brain processes stuff. It calms people down and reduces objection rates.

Scarcity

You guys are experts at this with comments like ‘last few tickets remaining’. Scarcity is a driver for influence. If you are thinking about how you might influence your boss then deadlines are great: ‘we have to do this by this time’ or ‘there are other people interested in it’.

In terms of books, the Cialdini book is a classic. Another one is called ‘Flipnosis’ by Kevin Dutton. That is about influencing in the moment, things that can change really quickly. He has just written another one, ‘A

Good Psychopath’s Guide to Success’. It looks at what it is about the psychopath’s mentality, if you are a good psychopath - surgeons tend to be psychopathic, magistrates, and hedge fund traders - that makes them very good at influencing.

I am talking to you about this because your credibly is one of the bases for trust. If you can develop trust with your boss, more than just competency, then you are going to have much more opportunity to influence well.

How do I develop trust?

Charles Green came up with a nice equation:

This is pretty core stuff. Credibility is about the logic: this is what I do and this is the reason for it. Reliability is about how you do what you do. Intimacy is about why. Why do I care? Why should you care?

The interesting thing about the equation is that, not only is it important that you pile as much stuff as you can into the top but it is important that it is not divided too much by self-orientation. If everything is about you, your money, your targets, your credibility - making this number really high at the bottom - then all of that good stuff doesn’t elicit trust. You need to create an environment where the self-orientation bit is as low as possible. This proposal or pitch is not about me. It is about us, the organisation. That is how you build trust. You pile in as much stuff as you can in the top and you make sure that there is low self-orientation.

A quick conversation about organisational power. This is based on some established research. The context has changed but the research is still pretty robust, even now. Let’s imagine this is your boss:

TRUST =

CREDIBILITY RELIABILITY + INTIMACY +

SELF ORIENTATION

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What levers of power does your boss have?

Legitimate power: he has got a job title, he has been appointed by somebody. He may have reward power: the ability to give you a pay rise, a bonus, or to take it away from you. He or she may be an expert. They have referent power, the idea of connectedness and also the idea of charm.

One of the things that I might be able to do is that I have power because, you know what, people really like me. I enjoy drawing people together. This is where my power lies. I may not have any legitimate power at all but I am the one that power goes to when they have something exciting to talk about. Coercive power: the idea that I can just make you do stuff. I am bigger than you.

French and Raven came up with this research in 1959. In 1965 they added in the idea of informational power because having information was a powerful thing. The downside of informational power in their context is that as soon as you have given it to other people it is gone.

The reason that we find this idea of influencing upwards challenging is that your boss might have all the levers of power at their disposal in their relationship with you. You don’t have legitimate power over them. You don’t have the ability to reward them directly. You may have some degree of informational power but not always. You may be more charming, referent power. The one that you definitely have is expert. If you are not the expert in your organisation at what you do then there is something wrong. That is the one lever of power that you have.

Going back to my original analogy, you can’t go up against your boss and compete with them when they have got all these levers to pull on. You have to be able to change the frame of reference for the conversation. This is not a head to head battle. In military terms, it is asymmetric warfare. You have to try and make some of the things that are their levers of power irrelevant. This is something that freedom fighters and terrorists know. They do things in a different way. That is what I am asking you to think about. How do I take what I have and turn it into an advantage rather than a disadvantage?

Situational influence. This is your new boss:

This is a different boss - slightly nicer than the previous boss - waiting to be influenced.

How do I go about influencing this person? How do I get to a place where they want to listen to what I want to say?

I have four options. Two of them are push and two of them are pull. I can seek to persuade them. I will use a certain amount of logic but I can persuade them that I am really good at what I am doing, this is a great idea, etcetera. There might be an element of asserting. There are times when your boss doesn’t really know what needs to be done. They just need to be told in the nicest possible way. Those are both push modes of influencing. On the other side, I have two ideas for pulling people towards me. One would be bridging and one would be attracting.

This is a dynamic model. This is something that I use a lot. I spend a lot of time watching teams in action. I work with 12 IT professionals in Geneva who work for a very large luxury brands company. The IT guys are responsible for merging all of the different IT systems that they have acquired over time. They are an absolute nightmare. They are supposed to be an integration team but actually they have been awful. They are better now because of this. They used to spend all of their time in one place - mostly in asserting, just telling each other what they needed. This model is very useful because it helps them understand that the tactics they are using to try and get influence within the group aren’t working. They are only using one mode of attack to try and break the cycle that they have found themselves in. Whereas what you need to

PERSUADING

ASSERTING

BRIDGING

ATTRACTING

Situational influence…

•  Presenting suggestions and recommendations

•  Asking questions that support a position

•  Using data, facts and logic

•  Dismantling the arguments of others

•  Stating personal needs and expectations

•  Judging the behaviour of others, based on personal values

•  Offering rewards and resources

•  Specifying undesirable consequences

•  Asking for clarification and opinions

•  Encouraging others and being empathetic

•  Reflecting and summarising

•  Exploring hidden resistance

•  Reviewing common ground

•  Being vulnerable

•  Creating common ground

•  Sharing a vision and aspiration

•  Describing exciting or ideal outcomes

•  Invoking metaphors and analogies

•  Using story to inspire

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do is think about how can I move around this? What does the person that I am trying to influence need from me? What might be my preference? If I am aware of that I might need to move around.

Persuading

One tactic I have is persuading. This is all about presenting ideas using facts and logic: things that back up an argument. We decide with emotion but justify with logic. This is useful, but if all you go with is this and you neglect everything else then it is going to be really tough. You haven’t got them emotionally.

Asserting

Stating personal needs and expectations, offering reward and resources or specifying undesirable consequences like ‘if we don’t launch this now, this is not going to happen’ is really expedient. This is where you go if there is a fire in here. If I want you to get out, I don’t need to explain with logic. It is expedient. However, if you do that all the time then it is emotionally shallow and people are going to get tired of it - particularly if you are trying to influence upwards.

Bridging

Over the other side we have the idea of bridging. It is the idea of conversation really and finding the common ground: what is this shared thing that we are trying to achieve? It is the idea of being vulnerable. I like this one in terms of selling. If you look at anything to do with selling, it says you have to be confident and do all the hard-sell things that are all about persuading. It is really interesting if you go into a conversation with someone and say, ‘I have got some really cool ideas but to be honest I can’t do this alone. I am not an expert in your business. I think between us we can create an amazing solution. Help me understand what it is that you need and we can create something amazing.’ It is an amazingly powerful way of influencing. That idea of putting yourself out there and saying that you don’t have all the answers can feel a little scary but it can be very powerful if used well. If you don’t overuse it and go into every meeting and say ‘I don’t know!’ it is very powerful.

Attracting

Attracting by sharing a vision. This the Henry the 5th or Martin Luther King moment when you stand at the front and you go ‘This is the best thing we are ever going to do. I am going to take you on a journey. Let me show you the promised land of marketing, it looks like this. It is going to be an amazing thing.’ The attracting thing can be incredibly powerful if you have the right person doing it in the right way. However, if you did that in every board meeting then people would just say ‘whatever’. There is no magic bullet in here. It is about understanding where your default might be. Each of you will have a certain style about how you want to influence. It’s important to understand that the people around you will have a preferred way of wanting to receive things from you as well. Sometimes they will connect.

You can often tell what sort of influence is needed by a group of strangers from the objections they will give you. You will put your ideas forward and get some kind of rejection. People who say things like ‘the numbers don’t stack up’ need more persuading. They are asking for logic and data. ‘Where has this happened before?’ is another objection you can get. They want a case study. Someone who says ‘I don’t see the value in it’ wants a story from you. Someone who says ‘I don’t think we have asked enough people about this’ needs to be engaged. You need to do some bridging. If they ask ‘what is it that we need to do?’ they need you to assert a bit.

Being open to the rejection messages that you get from people gives you clues as to how you need to respond. If someone is coming back to you with a persuading rejection, there is no point giving them a story ‘it is going to be brilliant!’ They don’t care anymore. What they need to hear is what it is going to cost, who is going to be involved and what is the case study.

I know that I spend too much of my time in bridging. I know that most of the people I spend time with when I am in selling mode probably require persuading. I am continually learning how to switch. Because

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I am an introvert, I enjoy conversations over coffee. I know if I give them a hot drink they are more likely to buy than if I give them a cold drink. Get people to eat food with you and they are more likely to go with you. Give them a warm drink and they are more likely too. That’s the dark underbelly again.

My preference is bridging: ‘let’s work this out together, let’s be collaborative’. What I have learned is that sometimes I need to stand up and say ‘It’s going to be brilliant. I haven’t designed it yet but I know it is going to be.’ They need to be reassured by a story I will tell them about how amazing this is going to be. They then have to go and sell this to other people but they can’t do it with the same story, they need some logic. I now also have to give them data and facts and figures. It is not my strong point, but I am learning that the people I’m working with will need that so I do this when I am putting together my proposals. This is the story, this is the logic and the rational, this is how we need to get together to create something amazing, and this is what I need from you in order to make it happen.

If you need to persuade a large group of people then I would generally start with attracting. It is going to be an amazing thing. I would back it up with some logic. I would then come across and bridge with you. ‘Give me some feedback. What are your reservations around this?’ Then I would come down into asserting - what I need from you is this. ‘This is a summary of how I understand what we need to be doing. How are we going to move it forward?’ It is a pretty dynamic model.

I told you I want you to be freedom fighters. I also want you to be the Direktor Grundsatzfragen.

I work for BASF, a large German chemicals company, and run part of their global leadership development programme. I am pleased to say that they have a Direktor Grundsatzfragen, as do many other German companies. What it means is the Director of Fundamental Questions. Their job is to ask really important questions in the organisation. Why are we doing this? What else do we need to be doing? Is this the right thing for us? It is a really nice job title. I have

never met this person in BASF but I kind of imagine he - I know he is a man - looks a bit like this:

I want you to become the Direktor Grundsatzfragen in your organisation. I want it to be your job to become really skilful in asking fundamental questions. That is where the gap in the armour is where you might be able to have more influence than you currently do.

In terms of questions, there is some research by Marcial Losad who is a Brazilian social psychologist who did observation work with teams. The outcome was that he was able to predict the performance of teams based partly on the quality and frequency of the questions that were asked within the teams. Good questions and the frequency they are asked are a predictor of performance, alongside two other variables. He found that in average performance teams there would be a ratio of about 0.7 to 1 questions to statements or opinions. Less questions than statements. In poor performing teams it goes down to about 0.1 to 1. There are ten times more statements than questions. There is very little curiosity. They are just defensive. High performing teams get up to about 1.1 to 1. There’s a balance between the questions that are asked and what matters to me. As a way of thinking about how you improve performance, the quality of the questions and the type of questions that you ask is important.

To move us on, I want to whip through an idea of the taxonomy of questions. I am sure you are all familiar with yes and no questions, open and closed. We can frame questions that elicit a yes or no response. This is fine. There is a time and a place. Then we move into open questions. There is a hierarchy. The baseline is who, where and

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when. These questions will elicit information. They don’t drive anywhere massively deep but they help us understand who is going to be involved, where it is happening and it elicits data.

What? What are we doing? What else needs to happen? These are more important questions. They get us better quality responses than who, where and when.

How? How are we going to do this? How else could we do this? These questions encourage curiosity and to explore a little bit more. They get us towards social contracting. How are we going to work together? How is this going to happen?

At the top of the apex is why. Why are we doing it? Why did we go for this solution? It is really important to ask why questions but you have got to do it really carefully. If you do it too often and without setting the context for the why question it becomes a defensive thing and you can trigger fight, flight or freeze responses. People then have to justify actions and decisions, which they often don’t like doing. You have to be really careful with a why question so maybe there is some appropriate framing: ‘I am really interested in understanding why we did this’ rather than going straight in with ‘why did we do this?’ You can do it by putting a summary in: ‘what I hear you say is that these three things are important. Why is that the most important?’ You can frame a why question by putting some context around your motivation. It takes away some of the potential threat of the why.

You can ask questions. Once you move away from the first word, we can think about what is the wider question about? We have convergent questions, which will drive us towards looking at responses. We can also have divergent questions, which allow us to respond, to reflect and to think about potential. Are we trying to get people to converge on a solution or are we trying to get people to think more widely about what is going on around them?

You might also want to think about the order of questions. We have low order questions that encourage factual responses. We have higher order questions that test ‘do I

understand what is going on in the wider context?’

I have constructed a four-box model that shows convergent questions and divergent questions and, at the side, high order and low order.

Low order convergent questions are things like ‘what is the timescale? What is the budget? When do you need this?’ I can give you a response and there is no imagination or exploration, it is just facts. Higher order convergent questions are things like ‘why do you think that option A is better than B?’ We are not exploring; I have defined it by the two options that we have decided on but I am asking you a reasonably high order question to justify why you have made the choice that you have. ‘How should we allocate budget between social media and print?’ would be another example.

Divergent questions are things like ‘how else could we achieve option A?’ We are sticking with stuff that we have got. We are assuming we are moving out beyond option A. ‘What have we missed in our social media and print strategy?’ We are kind of exploring but we are sticking within the options that we have got.

High order divergent questions would be things like ‘what could be option C or D or Z? How could we achieve even more with less? What would we do if we knew that we couldn’t fail?’ Those are the high quality questions. They are really exploratory. You are not going to be asking those types of

convergent questions divergent questions lo

w o

rder

que

stio

ns

high

ord

er q

uest

ions

What is the timescale?

What is the budget?

How do I do this?

When do you need this?

Why do you think that Option A is better than Option B?

How should we allocate budget between social media and print?

How else could we achieve Option A?

What have we missed in our social media and print strategy?

What could be Option C or D or Z?

How could we achieve even more, with less?

What would we do if we knew we couldn’t fail?

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questions all of the time. You would be exhausted and wouldn’t get very much done. It is about moving around this.

A piece of research based on US school teachers revealed that they ask 300 to 400 questions a day. Depending on the studies, less than 5% of the questions they ask are higher order divergent questions. 60 to 95% of the questions are low order convergent questions. Next time you have the luxury of sitting in a meeting when you are totally engaged with what is going on, create a little tally list. Make column 1 open questions, column 2 closed questions and column 3 statements. Just work out what is going on in that meeting. You will be surprised and a little bit disappointed. We are very bad at asking really good questions. And it is a skill and it is important. Direktor Grundsatzfragen. That is your job. I want you to write your own Grundsatzfragen list.

I have a list, which I call my Killer List of Questions. I don’t ask them all in a robotic way, but they are just there, so that when I am in meetings I can ask people.

These are some of mine, which I occasionally throw into conversations with my clients when I want to provoke them or want them to explore an idea.

What are the core values that you strive to maintain here?

What are the issues that keep you awake at night?

What is the relationship between how things are for you now and how you would like them to be?

What single change would make the biggest difference?

What is stopping this from happening?

Who else is, or might be, interested in all of this?

What else do you feel I need to know?

How does what I have said sound/feel/look to you?

What could prevent or limit our chances to go ahead?

It is important to rehearse and to have some preparation because good quality questions are rare.

We flip between motivational states and the quality of the questions that you ask will allow people to move accordingly. People move between motivation for mastery or empathy, self and others, concern and rebel, serious and playful. We flip quite quickly between these different motivational states and your questions will allow you to follow the energy of the people you are working with.

If it would be treated with the seriousness that it deserves, what would be the fundamental question that you would ask of your boss? Craft it. Craft a beautiful question so that it feels like a thing of beauty that you can then use. That then becomes part of your reputation.

To summarise, in order to have improved influence you have to get your core credibly sorted. Think about how you are going into negotiation with the situational influence model. Get your quality questions. Make them things of beauty. Craft them. Make sure you do it over time. Reputation is an investment over time.

You can tell whether someone is clever by their answers. You can tell whether they are wise by the questions they ask.

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Ron: Games, reward schemes, loyalty point systems: everybody has one of these things in the for-profit world right now. Whether it is a Starbucks reward card or any local thing, they have worked their way into our behaviour. We keep these cards and use them for prizes. We are going to talk today about points and games.

There is a game called Re-Mission for people who have cancer, to teach them about how cancer works and about white blood cells and what to do with them etc. They’ve found that when people play this game, their ability to follow their chemotherapy goes up. They take their pills on time more regularly. They show up for their appointments more often. They’ve learned about what is going on in their body and they are visualising it. They call this a serious game, a health game. They found that people can be motivated if there are tasks based on game rewards and if there is recognition around that.

We all know that there is a reason why we carry that card around in our pocket and we act.

I’d love for you to understand the trends in gamification. I am going to talk about some theories and psychology of why this works and how people are broken into different types of players. Some arts organisations have started to put some of this into effect.

How many of you play candy crush? Our phone is a huge games outlet. We aren’t saving any money but game playing is an integral part of our everyday experience - just as much as telling stories.

Let’s talk about gamification: ‘A form of player sport, especially one decided by rules, decided by skill, strength or luck’ or ‘the application of game ideas to a non-game problem’. Really the important thing here is play - allowing people to play.

The benefits of gamification are increased engagement, people wanting to play, loyalty and social connections. Game playing is a very interesting way to meet new people. Certainly it can change behaviour.

I’m going to share a couple of examples. The Little Mermaid was given new life through a second screen version. You brought your iPad with you and there were games and singalongs, things that you could do that brought this experience to a whole new level. They charged a premium for it and they brought something to life, which we already have in our libraries.

Anyone use the Nike Fuel App or have a Fitbit? By gamifying the fitness experience, they help you get out of the chair.

Did anyone do the ice bucket challenge? That was a very simple game - a non-tech game that doesn’t require a programmer.

Anyone drive a Prius? My wife got one recently and I am addicted to getting the highest miles per gallon. I monitor the little consumption metre. I’m at about 51.1. It doesn’t matter! If I drive sloppily it is still going to be about 50 but I sit there on the accelerator because they turned it into a game. I don’t even know if they intended to turn it into a game but I consider it to be something that tops the monotony of driving.

Habitrpg.com is a task manager. You enter your to-do list and as you get things done you are awarded gold pieces that you can use to buy swords and things. There are quests. If you don’t get things done it starts taking gold away from you. If you like playing in this world, why not use it to help you be more productive?

Finally karate. The belts are a reward system. As you get better the colours change. It is a visual symbol of where you are in your process of martial arts.

Games: can they change audience behaviour?Ron Evans, Group of Minds

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It is all around us. Anyone have a Boots Advantage Card? What do you do with the points? Is this a game? Where is the play? The world is all about points systems right now. Most of the cards are based on a points system, where you get certain points for behaviours. Doesn’t that mean that it might be a discount only?

I loved Margaret Robinson’s blog Hide and Seek where she cried foul on this whole thing and said ‘this is not gamification, this is points-ification - totally different thing.’ You earn points, I control what they are worth and really it is just a discount. There is no play. No challenge.

This is a session on gamification. As you see this in the world, I want you to become keen observers of the things around you trying to influence your behaviour. Look for the points systems. They are really just a discount.

I got a yogurt a week ago. They have ‘yokens’. ‘Fab freebies and discounts on our website...’ Do I really need it? It’s not really my thing. Jumping on the bandwagon doesn’t really mean it is good.

Points systems - not really a game, just a discount. Points allow me to hide the transaction and it confuses the fact that it is really just money. Spending points, researchers found, does not have the same effect as spending money. It is a lot easier to spend points. We don’t know what they are worth. Points systems keep you, they don’t get you. They are loyalty systems that make you stay with that vendor because you have an unrealised gain. I’m not saying it is a bad method. It can work in the arts but it’s not gamification. There is no challenge and no play.

We’re now going to talk about the theory of game players. Mr Richard Bartle, PhD in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Essex, has some really great insights into how people behave in games. He says it breaks them into four parts:

1. Explorers like to discover the world, learn the rules that govern, see how things fit together and how to behave in the space.

2. Achievers try to achieve goals and do

their best. It could be virtual or face-to-face.

3. Socialisers are there to make connections with other people.

4. Killers want to exert influence on others. How does this translate to the arts?

I like to think of this as an audience segmentation idea. How could we create something that was a gamified experience for Explorers? A treasure hunt. Yes. Excellent.

What about Achievers? People who are on a scoreboard or who are trying to increase their knowledge about a type of artist.

Socialisers? A game where people connect in the arts. Twitter?

And Killers? This one’s a little hard in the arts. When I was a kid, I went to an archaeology day at a museum and they gave us plates and we got to break them to make shards of pottery. We went for lunch and when we came back we had to dig them up and put them back together to get a sense of what an archaeologist does. So, not too many games for Killers in the arts!

But there is this other gentleman, Loyalty 3.0, Rajat Paharia. He is a silicon Valley guy. He really wrote the book on modern day Big Data and gamification. He says there are five reasons why we play games:

1. Autonomy - ‘I control’: the urge to direct our lives. An example would be giving an award for the most interesting tweet at a conference. It is up to you to control and construct the tweet that is going to be the winning one.

2. Mastery - ‘I improve’: the urge to get better at things, levelling up in a game, attending all of the Lord of the Rings in the theatre. This is about things that people can check them off and say ‘I’ve done it’.

3. Purpose - ‘I make a difference’. This one is the go-to one for the arts. People give to causes that they feel connected to. It is an intrinsic motivator.

4. Progress - ‘I achieve’: the urge to progress towards a goal that the person finds meaningful. An example of this

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might be milestones in education or overcoming a fear of heights.

5. Socialisation - ‘I connect with others’: an urge to connect, to be recognised and to be understood.

Let’s put these in context and take a look at arts organisations experimenting with games.

New York Public Library held an overnight called Find the Future: The Game. People got to explore the space and find books that were hidden. There was a story that weaved through the whole thing and next morning there was an award ceremony. Players 18 years of age and over explored seven miles of stacks and used laptops and smartphones to follow clues to treasures such as the library’s copy of the Declaration of Independence. This was for the Explorers. Did they create any tech or an app? No. They just created a gamification experience in their own venue, but they wrapped one of these theories around it.

Dallas Museum of Arts - as you go around to various venues, they have codes that you scan on your phone. You get points which you can spend in the gift shop. Now they are advancing into experiences. You can meet the artist and connect with the venue in other ways. The tech system that they use to scan things is open-source. Any organisation can download it.

Tate Trumps. I love this. You basically take pictures of paintings and choose who might win if we fought them against each other. What are we teaching there? Critical analysis of a painting. I have to look at a picture and think that’s really sad or angry. I am having to emote with it on a deeper level. That’s fantastic.

We have talked about various ways you could plug this into your organisation. Let’s talk about a few additional game concepts.

Anyone have a donor board up on their wall? Isn’t this just a top scoring wall, a permanent record that shows that person gave a lot of money? There is a tactic we use. Let’s say you are putting out the donor list for the season. One of your donors has given £1,000, another has given £5,000.

They know each other. So you send out the list for approval to both of them. ‘Just want to make sure that everything is alright.’ Nine times out of ten, the one who gave £1,000 will say ‘why don’t you move me up…’ It has worked every time that I have tried it. It is gaming. It is fantastic.

We had Silicon Valley Give. In a 24 hour period, arts organisations would reach out and ask people to give. You can give on any day of the year, but focusing people on a specific day created a buzz. Focusing the effort was very effective. Every hour had a special prize with it. If you got up at 3am and gave it was matched by Hewlett Foundation, up to $100,000. That was one of the ones that got the most. Did it require any tech? No. And they raised nearly $8m in 24 hours.

Let’s put it all into effect. I’ve asked Jess from Gulbenkian to join me.

Jess: Ron is our mentor in the Digital Marketing Academy. I work for Gulbenkian, we are an arts centre on the University of Kent campus in Canterbury. We run a festival called Boing. We are billing it as Kent’s international family friendly festival.

Ron: How could Jess gamify the festival?

A: We could get families involved and take photos.

Ron: Interesting. Providing opportunities for people to capture their experience. Make a memory for the day. Maybe there is a digital frame that goes around it? Or a big wall?

A: An interactive treasure hunt.

Ron: I like it. It is low tech.

A: It would be nice to have a physical activity like having toys in a ball pool or foam packaging. You have to get them into the correct nest and there is a leader board.

Ron: It is timed, right? I love it. It is an interesting challenge, which is an important part of a game. You don’t want a game that is too hard - people walk away from them - but too easy and it is not fun either. Something that is time-based is excellent. If it takes you longer, it is still a good challenge.

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A: We thought of taking Boing in a literal sense, could you have space hoppers and get them boinging? How many jumps could you do? For older children, maybe pogo sticks?

Ron: It is such a great word. Number of bounces, and some way of tracking that. I see a great video opportunity there.

A: Ours is a variation on the treasure hunt. We thought that there could be a code word in the different acts. You have clues you collect and then you use the code word to access a special performance.

Ron: I love that. Intertwining different codes and challenges. That gives you some sort of special access later on.

What about the Socialisers?

A: I was thinking that people love to show off how cute their kids are so maybe Boing Face? If you are at an event you do a family selfie and the most ridiculous ones get posted online by the festival team

Ron: I love that. Boing Face. I almost did one myself.

These were great ideas. None of them required a lot of technology or expense and all of them seemed fun.

Let’s move on.

I’ve created a checklist for you of how you could do this with your own organisations.

There are a few questions you should ask yourself.

What is the ultimate goal?

Why are we creating a game? It is going to take some effort and focus so what do we want to gain and what is the baseline? How does the person normally behave? If you are trying to change the Boing folks to behave differently or to get more 18-25 year-olds to show up then you need to know how many are showing up now and how they are behaving. There are a lot of ways of figuring that out. Research should be part of it. You have a lot of data you can mine.

Is it a game?

I have warned you away from point systems. Does it enhance the experience? Does it add something more than you can already get? Is there an element of play? Are you actually thinking of your people as game players? If the answer is ‘No’ then it may not be a game. Is there an interesting challenge or is it just points? Time-based challenges are very forgiving for people.

Is there a mechanism for on boarding - teaching people how to play?

Usually in a game there is a level that shows you how it works. It teaches you the rules. We don’t want what we call ‘rage quitting’. Is there a mechanism that teaches people how to play the game?

Can players get feedback on their progress?

This could be against other players or against themselves. They need to know where they are at any given time. We were talking about data collection in the arts and at the moment all of that is behind the scenes. Who is a frequent attender? What if we gamified that? What if we allowed the frequent attenders at the opera to see each other and where they scored on a scoreboard? I am the ultimate opera goer in the UK. It is not as wild as it might seem. It might inspire people.

Is there a reward of meaningful value?

If you don’t have this, you get to the end and there is nothing really there for you. There has to be some payoff. It doesn’t have to be financial. It could be recognition so you get a certificate or a badge. It could be appreciation - I love at the end of a game when they say ‘You saved the universe’. I feel very powerful and then I go and buy another game. It could be early access - this is a phantom benefit because it doesn’t cost you anything to let people in early. I love creating value out of things that don’t cost the organisation anything. People do discounts as the first reward but I think it devalues the art. I would much rather you gave me more: it is this price, and if I do it, I also get drinks or access or a soundtrack. Exclusive access is a very powerful reward around social media contests.

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Power can be a great reward. I have seen this on social media where I get some control or some say on how decisions are made. There is a game called Eve Online. Every year players elect a council of players who go to Iceland where they make the game. It is a reward for being really good at the game. They sit down with the developers. In arts, we could do that too. I am opening up the can of worms about artistic choice and whether we want to have people give us feedback but there could be a structure whereby people who win a game control something. Then there are prosocial incentives: rewards for connecting people together so that they talk to each other.

The funny thing is that the research is not in about purchase behaviour around games. There’s evidence of loyalty - once you are there games help to keep you there - but the research isn’t in yet that playing games helps you buy. That is really interesting. We have to frame it in the arts that we could possibly use games to enhance the experience and get people who have experienced us to experience us again. But we don’t know if it brings people in yet.

Carol Jones, I wanted to pick your brains. At Chapter you launched a points system.

Carol: This was a very long time ago. We were the first organisation in the UK to introduce a points based loyalty scheme. We started off subverting our old ticketing system. Then we moved onto PatronBase.

Maybe we have time to convince Ron about points systems and that they work.

Ron: They do work, they are just not games.

Carol: I don’t know. I think that in all of us there is a deep drive to collect things. It is the same with points. The challenge now, when the ticketing systems have caught up, is to look at how we can reinvent a points based scheme that works and that has bits of gamification. I was very interested in the Dallas Museum of Arts. There they are using games to bring people in but also points to keep them.

I was also thinking about how we can reward people with points, not financially.

How can we reward them in terms of big intrinsic motivations? ‘Actually, I am making a difference. By collecting these points I am making a difference.’

Ron: Let’s combine the two together. I am glad you brought that up. I am not anti-points. Points based systems are great for loyalty. I am unequivocal on that. If you have the option, check your CRM and you may have a module you can install but you are kind of messing with fire. You have to be serious about it. You are creating a new economy. You are creating a points based system and you have to control what those points can buy. There has to be enough of an ability to create points for the accounts so that you can keep them. There has to be something that you can spend the points on that is of value. That is people’s whole jobs – there are Games Economists trying to figure out how much things cost in games and balancing it all out. I am all for having points and I love the idea of points awarded not just for purchase but for other forms of behaviour.

Let’s gamify. Let’s say that Bard on the Beach in Vancouver has a points based system. You get points for attending, for Tweeting etcetera but there is also the ability for you to test your ability about the plays in the season. You start out and you know a little bit. Then there is a video, and a text, and you might level up. Wouldn’t it be great if we gave our audiences points for becoming engaged in the knowledge that we want to share with them or for reacting emotionally to something that they saw? Points could be a fantastic use of that.

Q&A

Q. Chris from Lighthouse in Poole: I am a fundraiser. The problem we have is that a lot of our audience are older generations. Is there any evidence that this crosses generations?

A: I don’t know. My grandmother just tears me apart at Poker. I don’t think that age has anything to do with interest in playing games. I turn it back to you. It is pretty easy to ask the questions to the audience that you have. I don’t have any research that says

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that people’s game playing interest drops off with age. I think that the mechanism by which the game is played could be influenced by technology or not but you’d be surprised. Age doesn’t seem to stop people wanting to play games on Facebook.

Challenge those thoughts. I want you to be critical and go ‘I don’t actually have anything that proves that’s the case. What can I learn about this?’ As a fundraiser it could be really interesting. If you can just get someone to give £1, they are so far over the line and it can lead to more. The difference between zero and a pence is everything.

One of the most effective fundraising things I’ve been involved in is godaddy.com. It is a place where you register a domain name. On the checkout it says ‘would you like to round up to £10?’ and I do it every time. They have made so much money versus the fundraisers who just go ‘we need the donate button to be bigger on the website’. No it just doesn’t work like that. Rather than just buying a domain name, which is a really boring thing to do, they thought about how it could have an emotional connection that makes you feel so good about yourself that you donate to this charity as part of it. It is fantastic that they made something so boring, so emotional.

Q. Ruth from Sheffield Theatre: Thinking about this in relation to our productions which are only on for a month, and then another one. Would people get sick of it or do you have to keep the momentum up?

A: That is a single ticket concept. I could see that if it was different rules of the game for each show, that might be difficult. Imagine if there was a game that weaved its way through membership. You only get to play the game when you are a member. It becomes another phantom bonus. We are always trying to make subscriptions more valuable and the first thing people do is drop the price. It is interesting. The reason subscriptions were introduced was to pay for the shows that nobody wanted to see. Somewhere around 1900 it switched to buying in bulk gives you a big discount, and that is how it is today. I have never heard of any organisation weaving a game into membership. I think that would be fantastic.