Overview

Let’s Get Real: Value (LGR Value) focused on the ways that using digital can add value for cultural audiences, communities and organisations, supporting positive internal change and deepening engagement. Across an eight-month period, between February and October 2024, 19 arts and culture organisations undertook a journey of interrogating, understanding and developing their approach to the value of their digital work.

Since emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic and through the cost-of-living crisis there has been unprecedented pressure on the budgets and resources of audiences as well as arts and culture organisations. With this pressure comes greater expectations around the potential value of digital, alongside a much stronger focus on monetary value in general. But through this phase of LGR, we wanted to encourage the participating organisations to look more deeply at value and to be brave enough to not just focus on the monetary value.

Across those organisations, small scale experiments were conducted within their current and planned digital activity, all looking at understanding and developing the different types of value of that work to audiences, organisation or both.

Some of the participating organisations focused on their internal practice, such as how they report on success across different departments or sites. Others experimented with audience-facing initiatives, such as improving the content and navigation of their events listings and understanding the value that adds. Whatever the focus was, the key is that it was small, manageable and realistically achievable.

The 2024 project brought together an exciting community of people and organisations from across the arts and culture sector, from museums to national theatrical venues. Together, they tackled the challenge of understanding the value of digital through openness, honesty and collaboration. The project also offers us insights into the state of our sectors relationship to digital in 2025.

Download Let's Get Real: Value Report

Report authors: Alec Ward, Anra Kennedy and Jane Finnis for The Audience Agency

Let’s Get Real (LGR) was Culture24’s flagship collaborative action research programme, brought over to The Audience Agency (TAA) when the two charities merged in November 2023. Since 2012 it has supported eleven cohorts of cultural organisations to become more relevant, resilient and responsive to digital cultural change. This hybrid programme took place in partnership with the new Institute for Digital Culture at the University of Leicester.