The Imagination Museum Phase 1 – what we learnt

16th December 2024

In 2024, we received funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England to relaunch The Imagination Museum network for dance and heritage professionals, focusing on organisational development, advocacy and awareness-raising, and consultation with our growing network of members to help us plan for Phase 2 of the network and beyond.

Following a busy year, we wanted to share some of the findings from our Phase 1 relaunch:

What happened?

180 industry professionals attended or took part in preparations for our in-person dance and heritage Advocacy Events geographically spread across the country, in Ipswich (with Colchester and Ipswich Museums and DanceEast), St Austell (Wheal Martyn Clay Works), Blackpool (Showtown) and London (The Horniman Museum and Gardens and Trinity Laban), and an additional 199 engaged with our streamed events, live or on-demand.

People were also able to engage with our project by accessing case studies and resources on our new website, engaging with social and newsletter content, joining our mailing list or approaching us directly, which increased our online reach and digital engagement. Our new project manager Alice also worked on consolidating the database of industry contacts we’ve been building over the 5 years since we first piloted the network, which now exceeds 500 people.

Who?

From a sample of live event attendees we found that: 

39% were from dance background

27% were from heritage background

18% were from a background in dance and heritage

Interestingly, 16% were from neither a dance or heritage background, which indicates that:

• there is broader interest in the collaborative approach the network supports and the idea of working creatively with different kinds of partners in an interdisciplinary way,
• and also that the theme of the events can lead to them having broader appeal with a greater range of individuals and organisations (e.g. the sustainability theme in Cornwall).

We were pleased that 45% of respondents were from heritage or heritage/dance backgrounds, as it was a key target for us to increase representation from the heritage sector. We want to continue to build on that heritage and heritage/dance representation within the network, as we know from experience that this is key to sharing learning from The Imagination Museum beyond those who are already in the know about its potential benefits.

61% of respondents were new to The Imagination Museum, indicating the growth of our network but also that measures we put in place to raise our profile were effective.

We successfully reached a range of scales of individuals and organisations across the sector, from independent freelancers, through small (less than 10 staff) to large organisations (over 30 staff).

Working with Wafer Hadley to establish an Evaluation Methodology for the project using the Failspace model, we identified that the network’s impact and the breadth/diversity of our reach was not only reliant on the individuals who actually attended our events, but also on the range of networks with which those attendees were working, and their motivation to pass on what had inspired them to others.

So we started:

• to find out a bit more about the kinds of groups with which our participants were working (attendees’ most common targets were: children and young people (24%), lower socio-economic groups (10%) and families (11%))
• to build an understanding of how our offer might extend beyond the people in the room on each day to have greater impact. Feedback from attendees evidenced strongly that valuable networking took place and new connections were built. We know people not only engaged with us, but with each other, creating the conditions for onward collaboration beyond our project and fostering improved local partnerships.

100% of surveyed attenders made new connections as a result of attending, with 70% stating they had made more than 3 connections.

How else did people benefit from the project?

Participants told us that they found the advocacy events to be high quality, valuable and they gained knowledge, inspiration and tips for delivering successful dance and heritage projects, with insight from a diverse mix of 29 guest speakers and contributors (representing a significant increase in the number of creative and heritage practitioners with whom we were expecting to engage during the project). As well as being able to share our contributors’ expertise through the Advocacy Events, we will be sharing some of their talks via recordings for people to watch on-demand in the coming months.

It’s significant in terms of our role as a network that evaluation showed that as we increased our profile as an organisation, we also helped to increase the profile of our partners and participants, by connecting them with other organisations locally and also advocating for the calibre of their work and experiences nationally.

The process of developing the Advocacy Events through our four iterations in four hubs meant that we had the opportunity to try out different things, thinking about how we could offer inspiring opportunities to engage with the network that would support participants in a holistic way e.g. a friendly, open environment; offering ‘break-out’ spaces; learning about how to present content in different ways to suit different learning styles; trying to achieve a greater balance of dance/heritage/community representation across the panels.

98% of survey respondents rated the events as 4 or 5 out of 5 with 80% scoring them 5/5.

Respondents felt they learned or gained:

“Insight into successful projects, networking, how projects and co-production does (and might) work”

“New knowledge and inspiration to carry forward”

“A broader knowledge of how dance can unlock hidden histories”

“Time to reflect, brilliant energising and important conversations, networking, inspiration and encouragement! The value of partnership and co creation”

“More about the opportunities of this work to shape/transform the future of museums and tell stories in a different way”

And that it impacted their development and practice by:

“feeling […] part of a growing movement”

“Feel[ing] re-energised to reconnect and apply for heritage/museum settings”

Respondents told us about some of the changes they might make to their practice as a result and the actions they were planning:

“To plan community engagement into projects from day 1”

“Take some risks and commission some performances!”

“embedding co production approaches in commissioning right from the start; hopefully a better understanding of the experience and perspective of dance artists in museum partnerships”

We also received positive feedback about the impact and value of our website and resources: “The resource section is fab and great for writing funding bids, so thank you.”

Our Phase 1 project also enabled us to develop our understanding of the ways in which being part of The Imagination Museum brought added value to our partner organisations.

In follow-up discussions, our Advocacy Event (and future co-commission) partners reflected on some of the key benefits:

• Reducing risk: The Imagination Museum lifts a substantial part of the workload and brings funding; it also supports people to be able to make the case for this dance/heritage work within their organisations, because there is substantial precedent to show that it works.

• Galvanising teams and boosting morale: “members of our team were able to be present on the day which was of great value… bringing everyone on board and thinking about possibilities”; “had a motivating effect”

• Access to expertise: “Bringing Katie’s expertise working with so many organisations; an understanding of what’s happening across the country/in other contexts”

• Ambition and inspiration, with partners “inspired by what they saw from other projects about dance being situated right at the heart of the collection” and challenged to take things a bit further – “not re-inventing the wheel every time; building on other experiences; access to seeing how things are possible”

• Learning and networking: participants and partners made local and national connections and dormant partnerships were revisited; “a lovely extension opportunity we wouldn’t have had otherwise”

• Confidence and growth: of heritage professionals less confident with dance

• Building profile: “helpful having an external force to drive it forward; great to be part of this scale of thing, to raise our profile”

• Strategic: “it aligns with our shared objectives so it’s a good fit and easy to build into our programme”

• Style of working – friendly and open: set the tone for productive exchanges of ideas and collaboration.

How our Phase 1 project has helped us to develop

As a result of our Phase 1 project and the sector consultation we’ve undertaken, we believe we now have more urgency and a sense of momentum for our Phase 2 activity, with nationally invested advocates and partners.

As well as developing our Imagination Museum ‘hubs’ in Ipswich, Blackpool, St Austell and London, and fostering support from larger heritage organisations for the next phase of our planned activity, our Phase 1 project also evidenced considerable appetite from our members for more of this work in the future. Behind the scenes we continue to respond to requests for support from individuals and organisations across the country, indicating wider recognition of our expertise and the need for a consistent approach to ensuring resources and information are available to people who want to develop their dance/heritage practice. We are also exploring and learning from new relationships with national advisory organisations such as the Association for Independent Museums (with whom we are now a member) and the Association for Performing Arts Collections and local support organisations in our partner areas.

Thinking ahead to Phase 2, we want to support our first four Imagination Museum co-commissions for Ipswich Museum, The Horniman Museum and Gardens, Showtown and Wheal Martyn Clay Works. Seeking funding for that activity has been challenging and we are not in a position to announce that co-commissioning activity yet. However, during Phase 1 we’ve been able to talk a lot about what the co-commissions could look like and what would need to be in place to support them to work most effectively.

A future dancing museum

At the last of our Advocacy Events this year, our facilitator Emma McFarland (who authored the Trinity Laban/Horniman Museum and Gardens Dance and Museums Symposium Report 10 years ago – find it on our Resources page) encouraged us to step 10 years forward, to envisage the museum of the future, and particularly a future dancing museum.

Participants’ feedback about what this future dancing museum might be was diverse, describing something that looked different for everyone. Some of the key observations made were:

• this future museum had a sense of being more formless than a more traditional museum, occupying all kinds of spaces and not necessarily only formal institutions 
• different kinds of expertise were valued equally within this ‘future museum’, meaning there was a shift in the conventional sense of where ‘power’ was held – de-centring a sense of who gets to make, talk about, own history and making it more possible for more people to feel part of it.
• within the future museum, expertise from the community sector was valued equally alongside that held within heritage and dance. We talked about a ‘future museum’ nurturing a culture where different kinds of expertise were constantly interacting (perhaps with an organisation like The Imagination Museum being a match maker or translator in that context) so moments of ‘being in the right place at the right time’ (mentioned regularly throughout events), and ‘just finding the right person’ to make a fruitful collaboration happen could occur more frequently.
• non product-orientated processes were preferred within the future museum, within which ideas could be tested and there was sufficient time to allow a project to evolve more organically. Taking time wouldn’t be seen as a failure but rather a success, because the idea of ‘success’ itself was thought of differently and was measured more by the participants and what they thought than by external stakeholders like funders.

Moving forward, we want to continue trying to find ways of supporting a fluid exchange of ideas and creating places of possibility, through

• Creating a welcoming space for dance, community and heritage practitioners to meet, learn and share practice, recognising the equal significance of the expertise of these parties

Although it has sometimes been challenging this year to recruit people to come along to our in-person events, everyone at those events has described how valuable it has been to attend these kinds of professional development opportunities in-person.

• Co-commissioning work with care

Through our Phase 1 activity there has been a strong commitment from all members and partners to developing the artists briefs and a selection process for future co-commissioning in equitable ways that could create opportunities beyond the individual commissions.

As a result, we’ve been considering ways to support co-commissioning of artists that would enable all those taking part in that process to feel they had learned something and could potentially initiate at least one new relationship with a heritage partner as a result of getting involved, rather than only those who were shortlisted for the final commissions for example.

• Learning more about the impact of this dance/heritage activity for communities (including potential for working with research partners to build the case for this).

Knowing why the work we commission for museums and heritage sites is impactful for those who engage with it, both communities and our partners, will enable us to continue building a legacy for this work in the future.

Thank you to everyone who has been part of The Imagination Museum in 2024, particularly to our Core Team, Executive Committee and Main Partners for their unwavering support.

The Imagination Museum is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, and is currently being managed by Made By Katie Green. In 2024 it is being delivered in partnership with Colchester and Ipswich Museums, DanceEast, Wheal Martyn Clay Works, Showtown, The Horniman Museum and Gardens and Trinity Laban, with additional support from an Executive Committee, and Advisory Organisations including the Association for Suffolk Museums and Arts & Heritage.

Photos of our Advocacy Events by Alice Odin.