Some thoughts on the Hodge Review

Here are my immediate thoughts/hot-takes on the Hodge review of Arts Council England.

First, some quick ones:

• Yes, keep ACE arms-length – whatever your political stance artists should be free to create without political interference.
• Replacing Let’s Create sounds sensible – a less top-down approach should allow artists and organisations greater flexibility and freedom.
• Proposed changes to NPO funding (particularly longer 5 year cycle, rolling applications, and 80% funding assurance) should make longer-term planning easier and help with stability.
• National Programme for Individuals sounds very interesting – Ireland has recently made their pilot Basic Income for Artists scheme permanent.

Of particular interest to me…

Given my background and the work I’ve been doing of late, I’m really interested in the proposed reform of reporting requirements and the publishing of a data and reporting strategy.

The current system is not working.

The present reporting requirements are not fit for purpose. They are too onerous and there is widespread scepticism about whether ACE uses all the data it demands

I’ve seen many people at many cultural organisations view the metrics they supply to ACE as belonging to ACE – rather than being potentially useful metrics for them.

Let’s Create amplified this by making this data feel like it was driving ACE’s KPIs, rather than a demonstration of organisational and artistic success.

…job changed from producing art and working with new musicians to dealing with all the paperwork and bureaucracy of being an NPO

Under Let’s Create bureaucracy is the driver – not the art.

Introducing a system whereby NPOs set their own KPIs on which they expect to be judged would be transformative

The KPIs should belong to the NPO – not to ACE.

To be fair to ACE they have been signalling this concept – the move to quarterly reporting (rather than annual) and making reporting flow through the org’s board (rather than direct to ACE) has shifted the framing. But more needs to be done to avoid stats being collated that feel that they are of no use to the org, and possibly not even being used by ACE.

Overhauling systems

ACE should invest in a comprehensive overhaul of its systems

Yes!

there was almost universal criticism of the systems that ACE uses, with Grantium receiving the bulk of the complaints

We hate it all!

While I agree that ACE needs to overhaul it’s systems, I disagree with the proposal to use “off the shelf” software.

ACE’s requirements are very challenging – they have a broad range of organisations they support with a very wide range of needs. The rollout of Illuminate (which was a custom build) is a stark reminder of the challenging design choices – many orgs felt that it was primarily designed for ticketed performance-based NPOs, and had a focus that was not relevant to them.

This is a tricky needle to thread – and a common challenge. Off-the-shelf may work for say 80% of your needs – but what do you do about the other 20%?

At the other end of the scale a custom-build (à la Illuminate) promises to exactly match your needs – but comes with it’s own challenges about correctly scoping what those needs are, and the risk of building up increasing technical debt.

Often the ideal approach is somewhere in between – using best-of-breed off-the-shelf elements, with some custom-build integrations behind the scenes. Don’t build what you don’t need to, but ensure that you’ve got a wholistic setup that can meet your requirements.

Final thoughts

This is a very in-depth report with many useful recommendations (including many I’ve not even mentioned). It will be interesting to see which ones of these get implemented, and how ACE will respond in the interim.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.