Case study:Achates develops Strategy: Leeds City Council

We have supported Leeds City Council and Leeds city based cultural organisations, ranging from Opera North and Phoenix Dance, to BookTrust and the British Library of the North, on the first stages of the development of a Cultural Strategy and associated Impact Measurement Framework for the city which would also inform future council grant making and the decision as to whether to create a Cultural Compact. This work started by mapping a range of current City Council strategies, none of which mention culture, to show how culture can contribute to achieving their goals using our unique impact framework, the 8 Types of Impact of Culture and Heritage© which is also the basis of the UK wide Culture Makes… campaign which has more than 300 cultural partners demonstrating the value and impact of their work.

In order to enable this work we led an extensive consultation process, including consultation sessions with key stakeholders across the Council as key funders of culture in the city, key cultural partners using methodologies outlined in this proposal to establish the priority audiences (stakeholder groups) who impact, and change would be optimised with and for, the types of impact which would be the focus of activity, the impact framework, and the outcomes which the strategy would deliver. With these key elements in place as a shared focus for the group, we have also delivered a review of current grant making and developed surveys to establish baselines for the city against which progress can be measured and benchmarked against national data sets. Our model and approach is also acting as a case study for DCMS to show how culture can unlock the 5 Labour government missions.