Case Study Cornwall Museums Partnership - King's … · round of Major Partner Museum (MPM) funding from Arts Council England, so four of the larger museums in ... Case study: Cornwall

Case study: Cornwall Museums Partnership

The art of partnering


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What We received two separate questionnaire responses regarding the Cornwall Museums Partnership. They described

the partnership as follows:

‘A flexible partnership of museums which work together on marketing, skills sharing, partnership

funding bids and information sharing.’

Questionnaire response

‘An umbrella body which runs a range of projects with museums in Cornwall to deliver the Cornwall

Museums Strategy.’


According to our questionnaire responses, the partnership did agree joint objectives, there was a written agreement

between the partners in the form of a memorandum of understanding/partnership agreement. The partners do have

plans to work together again in the future.

‘There was a range of very different independent organisations coming together to set out a kind of

sense of shared purpose, and that happened in 2011. And then since then […] those museums have been

working together and with other museums on a range of different funded programmes and it’s

culminated in the formation of a new charity which is a charitable incorporated organisation which was

formed in January this year [2015] which is called the Cornwall Museums Partnership, and that is the

new legal and financial mechanism through which partnership activity across Cornwall will be

coordinated.’

Emmie Kell, CEO, Cornwall Museums Partnership

The partnership includes a number of museums of varying sizes from across Cornwall. There are two distinct levels

of involvement in the partnership; individuals from six major local museums sit on the board of the partnership and

all other museums in Cornwall have a flexible involvement in the partnership depending on their willingness to

become involved or the extent to which specific partnership projects are relevant to their work.

‘The partnership was formed for the benefit of the museum sector across Cornwall. The Charity itself,

Cornwall Museums Partnership is a Charitable Incorporate Organisation, formed in 2015 with six

trustees provided by six museums and is independently chaired. Further trustees will be recruited to

ensure the board is as strong as possible and will include representation from the wider museum sector

in Cornwall’.

Colin Vallance, Managing Director, Wheal Martyn Trust

There will also be a CEO of the partnership, who was not yet in post at the time this research was carried out.

Despite the formalisation of the partnership into a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO), interviewees still

described it as a reasonably informal and flexible partnership:



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‘It’s always been reasonably informal as a partnership and as different projects have come and gone, it’s

fluxed with its membership. We always call it an ad hoc [partnership] because we have no lead partner

and just as projects or events or things are relevant, people and partners come and go.’

Ellie Collier, Programme Manager, Cornwall Museums Partnership

Why A number of motivating factors lay behind this partnership.

Reacting to decreased funding in the sector and trying to gain additional funding

‘The partnership started informally in 2011, where a number of museums came together to develop

Cornwall Museums Strategy 2012-17 in consultation with the wider sector, as a response to a

realisation that public funding would be under increasing pressure in the coming years. The strategy,

which had the backing of Cornwall Council would give the museums sector a shared sense of direction

and five clear strategic aims which would help strengthen museums in Cornwall making them more

resilient for the future.’


Interviewees explained that the museum community in Cornwall felt that they would be better equipped to respond

to this decrease in funding if they did so together.

In response to the question of what the motivation for the partnership was, one of the questionnaire respondents said

that it was ‘Strength in numbers’ (Questionnaire response):

‘As a group we’re much stronger than ourselves individually.’


Delivering the Cornwall Museum Strategy

A central aspect of the local response to the climate of decreased funding was to create the Cornwall Museums

Strategy. This emerged in our questionnaire responses as another key motivation for the creation of the partnership

as it was largely this strategy that necessitated the creation of the Cornwall Museums Partnership.

Cornwall Council and Cornish museums wanted to make sure that the museums in the region got themselves into a

more sustainable position for the future. Their strategic priorities addressed issues such as sustainability and

resilience, developing partnerships, raising the profile of heritage in Cornwall and engaging wider ranges and larger

numbers of people.

It was felt that in order to meet these strategic objectives, the creation of the Cornwall Museums Partnership was

necessary.

‘So the partnership came about as a result of the Cornwall museums coming together to write a shared

strategy for museums across Cornwall.’




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Engaging broader audiences

‘Engaging broader audiences is one of the key priorities of the museum strategy so that’s exactly what

the partnership is set up to do.’


‘The partnership gives us a platform by which we can develop and generate audiences and

engagements.’

Ian Wall, Director, Royal Cornwall Museum

Interviewees explained that it was partly additional funding that enabled this engagement with broader audiences.

The process of engaging broader audiences is partly being addressed through the marketing work of the partnership

and partly through the community and learning programme that, at the time of conducting this research, partners

were developing for implementation later in 2015.

Making a statement to help secure additional funds

‘The partnership is about advocacy. It’s also about trying to be smarter and work together, and I would

say it’s partially about funding streams but it’s also about availability of existing resources and how to

use those more wisely.’


Historically, there has been a reasonably low level of investment in Cornwall museums and combined with this,

various existing funding streams for some of the larger museums in the region were coming to an end. In light of this,

many of the local museums, along with Cornwall Council, decided that:

‘Rather than trying to pursue individual funding requests, it would actually be better to try and make a

statement, a very strong statement about what it is museums can achieve to help inform the

stakeholders really.’


In this sense, as interviewees confirmed, the partnership was established specifically to bring funding to the region

that may not otherwise have been attainable.

‘There’s obviously a practical issue around fundraising and financing activity […] you get better value

if you work in partnership.’




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Skills sharing

‘By working together we can share skills to help each of our organisations develop whether small or

large, volunteer led or staffed. Each of our museums has particular strengths and areas of excellence and

by sharing expertise we build a stronger sector without taking on unsustainable costs in individual

museums.’


‘The learning and sharing is a really key aspect of the partnership.’


‘We’re not all experts in all sorts of fields and so the skill-sharing and the opportunity to learn from

each other […] the reason why the partnership was created in the first place was to get over some of

those issues around rurality and the dispersed population so the idea is that we as a group, coherent

group, would then provide opportunities for skill-sharing and museum development through mentoring

for example, to the sort of wide, usually smaller volunteer-run museums.’


How The way in which the partnership worked can be split into five main areas: funding; communications; structures;

staff; and programmes and plans.

Funding

After the Cornwall Museum Strategy was put in place, interviewees explained that there was a positive feeling about

how museums would be able to work together collectively. This coincided with the opportunity to apply for the first

round of Major Partner Museum (MPM) funding from Arts Council England, so four of the larger museums in

Cornwall came together in an informal partnership to put in a bid for that. This bid was unsuccessful but it was well

received and Arts Council England provided some feedback on the bid. As a result of this, the Cornwall museums

were invited to apply for strategic support funds in 2012 and from this they received about £120,000 of Arts Council

England investment along with some additional investment from the partner museums themselves and Cornwall

Council. Reflecting on this process of gaining funding, one interviewee remarked that:

‘That really kickstarted the process of actually working together on specific projects.’


Subsequently, since the Cornwall Museums Partnership was established, other funding has been gained that has

enabled the partnership to deliver certain specific projects aimed at securing additional funds for the region:



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‘So we’re running a programme called Catalyst at the moment which is fundraising training and that’s

been supported by about quarter of a million pounds’ worth of heritage lottery fund money. That’s a

two-year programme. We’re about twelve months into it. That runs training, really high quality

training, in fundraising and related topics for museums in Cornwall and any museum can come along to

that. It’s free or very heavily subsidised training.’

Emmie Kell, CEO, Cornwall Museum Partnership

‘We’re currently delivering a Catalyst project, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. HLF Catalyst

focuses on the development fundraising knowledge, skills and capacity across Cornwall’s museum

sector. A number of museums are developing their own fundraising strategies with the support of

mentors and an extensive programme of high quality training is being offered to museums and heritage

organisations from across Cornwall and beyond. Uptake on training from museums of all sizes has been

strong.’


Communications

As the previous quotation makes clear, many of the opportunities the partnership provides are communicated to

museums across the region via email.

Communication within the Cornwall museum sector is essential and so therefore the Cornwall Museums Partnership

meets four times a year. Interviewees explained that this is also a really good opportunity to communicate the options

available to those in the local sector. This is essential for the partnership:

‘It’s about trying to constantly communicate and connect organisations with each other so that they can

generate their ideas for new projects and share skills and work collaboratively.’


This ethos around communication means that some people find the term partnership uncomfortable:

‘So we prefer to call it collaborative working rather than partnership. That doesn’t mean to say that we

don’t have [formal agreements], we have partnership agreements, legal agreements for every project

that we run because there’s money involved and it’s really important. Often we’re working to quite

tight deadlines and it’s really important that people’s roles and responsibilities are very clear.’


Structures

‘The mechanics and structure of the partnership […is] currently in development so we’re just recruiting

an independent chair for the charity and then there’s a board of trustees and that board of trustees is

made up of the directors of the kind of six founding partner museums, if you like, and then there will be

two more trustees appointed to represent smaller volunteer-led museums and they will be appointed by

a vote at the county museum group which will take place over the next couple of months at some

point.’



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The partnership is set up to give resource to museums where they want it rather than creating a model that everyone

must fit into.

‘It’s not about forcing something on all museums. Each museum will want to engage at different level

appropriate to their organisation. The way we work enables a great deal of flexibility and provides

opportunities for support to those who would like to take it up.’


Subsequently, there is no membership model for the partnership.

‘The model is that the constitution states that the charity works on behalf of all museums in Cornwall

and that every museum can participate in its programme so one of the things that the partnership does

is run the museum development service and that’s a new thing […] organisations don’t have to be

members of anything but the projects that they can participate in are dependent on the restrictions of

the funders.’


Interviewees explained that this means that each partnership is open to anyone who wants to get involved and then if

they are appropriate for the project they will come on board.

Staff

Interviewees described a number of different staff associated with the partnership. These include officers and various

freelance staff employed by the partnership.

For example, there is a museum development officer, an officer who is going to be working with smaller museums to

help them develop their collection management skills and an officer who will work with people on digitisation. When

the interviews for this case study were carried out, many of these officers were just about to start.

Elsewhere, the partnership board decided to appoint a shared Arts Award co-ordinator, which was funded by some

of the project funding they had received. This person works with both larger and smaller museums in the region to

help them embed Arts Award across their practice. There is also a full time staff member in Cornwall who has been

appointed by the Cornwall Museums Partnership to predominantly work with many of the smaller, volunteer-led

museums in the region.

There are also a number of freelance staff associated with the partnership, for example a freelance employee of the

partnership who liaises with a number of museums and then partners them with schools, people referral units and

other education providers. This post is funded by project funds and also by individual contributions from the

museums. There is also a freelance marketing officer who delivers joint marketing programmes across the county.

The partnership was recently granted Major Partner Museum funding and when this kicks in there are a number of

other posts that will be recruited for. This means there will be a team responsible for the collective work programme

that will be funded through Major Partner Museums funding.



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Programmes and Plans

As a CIO, the partnership has a number of programmes and projects on the go. This includes joint publications for

the region and audience development and research projects:

‘Cornwall Museums Partnership has an Audience Development Plan which focuses on increasing and

broadening our audiences, and as a partnership we are carrying out research of our market to really

establish where our visitors are coming from, where we’ve got gaps in our audiences and how we can

address these.’


‘There’s a piece of print that’s about to come out which is flagging up a range of experiences that you

can have at Cornwall’s seventy museums and that again has been commissioned jointly by the

partners.’


The structure of the charitable organisation that the partnership operates as is designed so that it can change and

adapt along with local needs.

‘The charitable organisation has specifically been designed to be flexible to the needs of the sector and

level of activity being delivered at any particular time. We don’t seek to create a body that has to be

sustained for the sake of it. It has to deliver for the wider sector and the trustees are committed to make

it work for as long as it is producing results for museums in Cornwall.’


What worked Interviewees identified a number of ways in which the partnership had worked effectively or delivered beneficial

outcomes. These are outlined below.

Securing additional funding and reducing costs

‘Successful bids to large scale funders would not have happened individually.’


‘The partnership helped secure additional resources and share some costs.’


‘The partnership has actually enabled us to bring in resources that we had never had access to so

actually we’ve got much more money than we had when we started.’




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Two interviewees highlighted one particular example of how the partnership enabled museums to save costs. The

National Maritime Museum in Falmouth is large enough to have a maintenance manager when many other museums

in the region aren’t. That person has then been commissioned to do energy audits at each of a number of other

museums and come up with a shopping list (eg energy efficient light bulbs) which the museums purchase collectively

to make savings on the unit cost.

‘So that’s kind of money saving all round, money saving in terms of their energy costs, money saving in

terms of not having to appoint an external consultant or contractor to do the auditing work, and money

saving in terms of buying light bulbs at lower cost.’


‘It just wouldn’t have got that kind of investment down here if we hadn’t been a partnership […] You

just couldn’t have got it individually at all […] And I think that’s true of all the projects the partnership

has run. If there hadn’t been a partnership, there would have been no investment in Cornwall, or

limited anyway.’


Gaining buy in from all relevant senior partners

When asked in our questionnaire what the most important factor for determining the success of the partnership was,

one respondent answered that it was due to:

‘Every partner (at high level in each organisation) buying in to the partnership and giving their time

and effort.’


Creating additional capacity across the sector in the region

‘Working in partnership is helping to provide capacity to organisations, even those with paid staff are

relatively small so additional capacity, expertise and skills really help to develop our museums to a

higher standard.’


Sharing skills

‘For me personally, it’s been really good working with colleagues from other museums where I have

been able to learn from their considerable skills and knowledge, to implement change within our own

museum.’




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‘Falmouth Art Gallery and Penlee House are really good at community engagement and […] they have

an incredibly strong relationship with their local communities that a lot of the other museums don’t

have. And so they bring skills to the table in how they do that and what they do and how they engage

different groups and all of these kinds of aspects […] It’s very important, skill sharing, absolutely.’


Enabling projects to take place that would not have otherwise happened

‘It’s enabled us to also work collaboratively, to try new things that individually we wouldn’t usually be

able to afford to try ourselves for the first time. An example is working with artists to attract new

audiences and participants to our museum.’


‘At Wheal Martyn, an example of a result of working in partnership is an industrial heritage conference

we hosted for the first time in 2015. This had directly come about because one of the strategic aims of

the Cornwall Museums’ Strategy is to raise the profile of heritage in Cornwall and this is a way we

thought we could contribute to this aim. That’s only a small example, just one that readily springs to

mind.’


‘Arts Award is a really good example of where there was really high quality work which would just

simply never have happened, had that partnership effort not been in place.’


‘It certainly enables the museums to function in a way that they wouldn’t otherwise. In the past there

have been things like joint marketing, which individually they couldn’t particularly pay for, but

together they can produce something quite nice that will appeal to lots of different audiences.’


Projects of a wider strategic benefit can be more easily identified and implemented

‘We’ll commission individual museums to provide something that’s of collective or strategic benefit to

museums in Cornwall so one of those examples would be we commissioned Royal Cornwall Museum to

complete a collection mapping exercise, to try and work out exactly what was housed in all of the

museums in Cornwall and get all that information in one place.’


The partnership’s structure and approach mirrored the ethos and culture of the region

As a region, Cornwall has a very strong local identity. Cornish language is important and the Cornish have

recognised national minority status. Taking this into consideration when developing the partnership was felt to be

very important.



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‘Cornish heritage is very important to local people, to communities across Cornwall and as part of that

there’s a natural resistance to hierarchical structures or large organisations with a big brand that

operate in a very top-down way. And that kind of fiercely independent culture of Cornwall is

something that is written into the fabric of this partnership because it’s not about having a model which

imposes things on smaller organisations. There is something really important about the character and

make-up of organisations in Cornwall around this nature of independence that has informed our

model.’


Working together generates new ideas

‘It’s certainly enabled us to develop new initiatives, new ideas and open people’s mind to different

ways of working. You see what others are doing and think, we could work together on that, or that was

a really good idea which would work well in our museum, so it’s helped museums to identify additional

ways to change how they work with their audiences.’


‘Working in partnership is what generates ideas, it’s what gets people inspired. It’s what makes them

feel more supported. Often they’re working in a very isolated way.’


Focused meetings with clear agendas

‘We’re very clear about what topics we’ll be covering and what people should bring to the meetings,

which sometimes doesn’t work, but it’s certainly better than some other places I’ve been.’


It creates a more coherent offering for audiences

‘There’s shared marketing resources that we’ve been developing as a partnership, I think have been

really successful not only as a way of promoting the cultural offer and one stop shop to accessing the

cultural offer but also in terms of value for money. You’re putting in one advert or one banner ad […]

Cornwall is a unique place because the population swells enormously over the summer and people are

going to want to know fairly quickly and easily what they can do, what they want to see. To have that

available, to give them that on a plate through a joined-up marketing approach, I think is very useful.’


It allows for more loans between museums in the region

Interviewees explained that the partnership would provide a welcome opportunity for museums to signpost their

collections to each other and to enable more lending between institutions when putting on exhibitions.



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‘We’ve probably got one of the largest collections out of the partnership and we’re very keen for that to

go out to not only the six organisations but also the smaller volunteer-run and non-volunteer-run

organisations as well when they put on other programmes.’


A culture of trust

‘There’s a culture of trust that’s been built up between organisations. They’ve got people they can

phone if they’ve got a particular problem they need to solve. It’s not going to cost them any money.

People are very good at sharing and we’ve sort of called that this culture of share-ism. That’s what

we’re trying to promote.’


Challenges Interviewees described a number of challenges that they had encountered whilst working on this partnership.

Difficulty engaging some of the smaller museums in the region

‘I think there are challenges and I think there can be suspicion around some of the organisations. I think

some organisations are naturally extrovert and some are naturally introvert so there are certain

organisations, small organisations, who just want to be involved with everything and that’s fantastic.

And then there are others who just want to do what they’re doing and they’re not interested in the

wider picture. So it’s about targeting those that are appropriate really.’


‘The museum development officers down here have had an extremely tough job of engaging with the

smaller museums […] It has been a challenge and I think there’s still some way to go in developing

hearts and minds and just demonstrating and communicating that we are there to help.’


Each museum is very different

‘I think one of the challenges can be that we are all very different, both in terms of size, capacity,

subject matter and geographic location – this however can also be a real strength.’


‘I think this is about people, each museum does things in different ways and trying to bring people

together to do them in a similar way can be tricky. Generally speaking, I’ve found that it hasn’t been

too bad, but there’s always resistance to change.’




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People’s time is scarce

‘There are lots of challenges. One of those is around people’s time and capacity to participate.’


‘Internally, everyone’s strapped for time. The practical logistics of investing time in the partnership

while you’re still running the organisation with the other hand [is hard, but] because we’re all very

committed to the partnership, then you make time for that.’


Communications

‘We’ve got a big region with travel times of three hours from one end to the other. We’ve got seventy

museums that are geographically very dispersed so you know communication is a real challenge for us.

That’s something we’re very aware of.’


‘There’s always problems with communication so I think getting the clear message out about what the

partnership is for and what the partnership is doing has been very tricky and has not been done

particularly well, because up until the CIO was formed, there has been no umbrella organisation really

to put that message out.’


‘That’s one of the challenges I think for us as a group of six, to be in a state where we can communicate

effectively.’


Evaluation According to our questionnaire responses for this partnership, the partnership itself has not yet been evaluated, but it

was felt to have been a success so far.

However, individual projects delivered by the partnership have been evaluated and the learning from these have

been used to shape the future programmes the partnership will deliver. At the time of conducting the interviews for

this case study, the next three-year programme was just beginning and so interviewees explained that there would be

more evaluation involved in that.

The museums strategy itself will also be evaluated and reviewed:

‘As we continue we will be looking at other funding opportunities to support the delivery of the aims

set out within the museum strategy and will also be reviewing the strategy for beyond 2017. As we do

that, we’ll reflect on the significant achievements to date and use what we have learnt to identify new

priorities and inform the future shape and role of the partnership.’



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There has also been some other evaluation of work produced as part of the partnership:

‘There’s been some focus group activity around users and non-users which we’ve been able to fund

through the strategic support fund, through the Arts Council. That threw us some interesting things to

explore further and now we’re at the start of a larger journey around MPM funding, and the

demographic understanding of our audience.’


In conducting this research and evaluation work, interviewees explained that sharing data between organisations was

helpful for refining the marketing and engagement strategies of the partnership.

Documents

Case Study Cornwall Museums Partnership - King's … · round of Major Partner Museum (MPM) funding from Arts Council England, so four of the larger museums in ... Case study: Cornwall