BAC leader: Venues are under pressure to prove social impact

Theatre leaders are having to spend a “huge amount of time” trying to prove the social impact their venues are having in order to justify continued funding, Battersea Arts Centre executive director and deputy chief executive Amy Vaughan has suggested.

Vaughan said there had been a “social pivot” in the sector, requiring “evidence” to justify the work theatres were producing.

The BAC leader was speaking at the National Theatre on January 22, in a panel chaired by NT co-chief executive and executive director Kate Varah, at which the National’s latest research was unveiled.

Entitled Scene Change: Optimising Business Model Innovation in the Performing Arts, the report compiled insights from more than 140 performing arts organisations and made suggestions such as creating a brand-new government fund dedicated to innovation, as well as greater use of technology to make venues more efficient.

Asked by Varah what surprised her most when conducting interviews that contributed to the report, Vaughan identified a phenomenon she dubbed a “social pivot” in the sector.

She reported theatre leaders saying to her: “Ten years ago I was allowed to just make art, and now I have to be doing stuff with the NHS and evidence how much I’m doing to help young people’s mental health.”

Vaughan added: “These are all things we know that art already does, but the evidencing of it is taking a huge amount of people’s time.

“People – leaders particularly – are having to develop these skills and make their organisations deliver all these things to justify keeping the same amount funding as they’ve always had.”

The “social pivot” was one of many burdens on theatres that the panel argued was proving a barrier to the sector effectively adapting its business models to seismic changes such as funding squeezes and advancing tech.

Vaughan added that, while leaders said they were happy to shout about theatre’s social impact for research and to policymakers, they were often expected to do so without adequate training in communications, social impact or data.

“Where’s the leadership development to learn how to do these things that we suddenly have to learn how to do?” she asked the audience of art leaders, funders and tech consultants.

Vaughan continued: “Our abilities to collect, analyse and understand data [as a sector] are so woefully underdeveloped. If we don’t get that right, even if we have the best experts, we won’t be able to tell our stories. So I think there’s something really important about us all going, okay, we’ve got to learn a new set of skills here.”