Clients & Projects: Capacity Building

Our work in this area comprises combinations of session design, production, facilitation and presentation. We always work closely with our clients to ensure our bespoke content is consistent with our given audience's knowledge base and understanding. Here are some clients we have recently helped in this area.

BBC Academy
Devising and delivering training courses

Our association with the BBC Academy (previously BBC Training and Development) has continued to be fruitful. Through much of 2011 we developed and delivered Creating Great Digital Experiences, a course focused on how to develop a deeper understanding of audiences beyond the standard demographic data, how to put that knowledge to use when developing an idea and then choosing the best content platform for its realisation. The training combines insightful and wide-ranging presentation with practical exercises that are designed to be useful when back at work with the production team. The course has taken us all around the country to sundry BBC locations: Glasgow, Bristol, Manchester, Evesham and of course London.

We've also developed and delivered development workshops for specific BBC production areas on behalf of the Academy, including a session looking at the "social roadmap" for the entire BBC. At the time of writing we're scoping out new Academy work for the College of Journalism and the Homepage Team.

BBC Training and Development
Knowledge-building Workshops

In the summer of 2010 we delivered a series of workshops for BBC comedy production staff, looking at the role of social media in contemporary comedy. The sessions were very much in the spirit of previous workshops we delivered as Double Shot in London and Glasgow in the spring and summer of 2009, stressing the importance of finding the right tool for the job, and helping attendees understand not only the broader social media environment but also what internal BBC technical, financial, strategic and human resources they can exploit. The workshops combined insightful and wide-ranging presentation with practical workshops.

By way of an external perspective, we conducted Q&As with three leading comic writers who use social media extensively in their work: Graham Lineham (Father Ted, The IT Crowd), Robert Popper (Look Around You) and Peter Serafinowicz (The Peter Serafinowicz Show).

A nine-month programme of social media training and knowledge-building

We began working on the BBC T&D department’s Future Now project in the winter of 2008/2009, delivering a series of seminars and workshops on the theme of social media — and particularly what social media means, practically, for broadcasters. The events ranged from small hands-on training sessions through to large, formal presentations, featuring a wide range of guests from inside the BBC and out. The series initially ran in London at various BBC locations until the spring of 2009; we then delivered a re-cut version of the sessions for BBC Scotland staff in Glasgow in the autumn of 2009. Our role in the sessions took in all aspects of the production: session design, guest liaison, overall event production, hosting, brainstorm facilitation and in many cases, presentation.

Sound and Music
Knowledge-building workshops

In the second half of 2010 we worked with Sound and Music to deliver a series of workshops examining the impact of recent developments in communications technology on both arts organisations and the creative practitioners who Sound and Music represent. This work dovetailed very clearly for us with the in-depth inquiry into digital collaboration models we’ve recently launched on our blog, although we are also looking at a variety of other areas such as curation, partnerships, IPR and event capture. As with all our workshop work, we are concentrating on live demonstration and genuinely discursive and interactive exchanges.

image by suburbanslice - some rights reserved (Creative Commons 2.0)

Southbank Centre
Management team knowledge-building workshops

We worked in early 2010 with the marketing department of London's Southbank Centre arts complex to deliver a series of workshops for senior and middle management looking at the impact of recent developments in communications technology on the arts. We considered such areas as streaming media (and the implications for event capture and storage), IPR, new kinds of partnerships, the bankrolling of "free", the "intellectual long tail", new kinds of curation, crowd-driven recommendation and, of course, user-generated content, or circular media as we prefer. As ever, we've been concentrating on live demonstration and genuinely discursive and interactive exchanges.

image by Dan Taylor - some rights reserved (Creative Commons 2.0) Royal Opera House
Editorial consultancy; strategy for digital learning; implementation of projects

In summer 2011 we worked with the Royal Opera House to sharpen the editorial focus and strategic direction of their in-house blog, but this was only the latest manifestation of a happy relationship that stretches back several years.

We delivered a workshop in the summer of 2008 looking at the role of digital technology in arts education, and what the organisation might learn from emerging best practice. We produced the interactive programme notes for the online video of Don Giovanni, creating the notes themselves and working with the platform provider to ensure a smooth user experience. We developed a Moodle-based eLearning website and programme for the Royal Ballet School. We also facilitated a strategic brainstorm to help design a new creativity competition, launched in 2009, called Fanfare, and in early 2010 we facilitated the conception of a digital creativity and collaboration offering to complement the House's outdoor big screen work.

image by EVERYDAYLIFEMODERN - some rights reserved (Creative Commons 2.0)

Barbican Centre, London
Management team knowledge-building workshop

In the spring of 2008 we ran a half-day workshop for 40 or so of the most senior staff at the Barbican Arts Centre in London, leading them through some key concepts on digital and communications technology: social media, ubiquity of connectivity, cloud tech and web tools, user-generated content, P2P and streaming vs downloaded content. We then looked specifically at how this was all affecting the arts and entertainment sector, asking who was doing good work, who was missing the mark, and what was missing, that is, what opportunities were there for the Barbican? More recently, the Barbican have asked us back to work on their digital strategy.

Justin and Simon delivered an excellent workshop with good feedback from all who attended; they went on to provide an excellent paper which is going to be incredibly useful as the 'baseline bible' of understanding and something - along with its links and references - which I know colleagues will find really useful.
— Chris Denton, Head of Marketing, Barbican Centre