Digital Culture Network - Evaluation

Arts Council England launched the Digital Culture Network (DCN) in June 2019 to help arts and culture organisations develop digital skills and make the most of technology. The Network is made up of nine Tech Champions, based in each of our nine regional offices, each with a different digital specialism. The DCN delivers training events, provides one-to-one support and produce resources and tools to help organisations increase their digital maturity.

The DCN is a two year initiative in which the Arts Council has invested in the region of £1.1million. It has been in place since March 2019, formally launched on 24 June 2019 and is currently funded to be operational until March 2021.

We are looking for a service provider to evaluate the DCN to help us understand how well it is performing across four key areas:

- Is the DCN delivering against its core aims and objectives to help increase the digital skills and capacity of arts and cultural organisations? - How effective are the structure, systems and processes of the DCN? - How is the DCN viewed by the arts and cultural sector? - What has been the value and impact of the partnerships developed by the network?

We also want to know what could be improved in the future to make the network more effective if it were to continue.

Although a final report in June 2021 is a key element of this evaluation, we will also want to use findings to inform and refine operations between October 2019 and March 2021, and to inform future planning for the network which will need to take place in the first half of 2020.