The cultural sector does not need another organisation trying to reinvent digital support. It already has the strongest digital advice services available to arts, culture and heritage organisations in England: the Digital Culture Network. Its Tech Champions, Knowledge Hub, webinars, events and one-to-one support have helped thousands of people build confidence, develop skills and make better digital decisions.
Our intention is not to compete with the Digital Culture Network, duplicate its resources or confuse the sector with another overlapping digital advice offer. Quite the opposite. We want to help more organisations turn that advice into practical, shared, sustainable action.
The sector already has excellent digital advice
The Digital Culture Network has built a trusted national offer around digital skills, data literacy, leadership development and practical digital support. It gives organisations access to expert guidance across areas such as websites, accessibility, CRM, ticketing, email marketing, social media, digital marketing, audience data, analytics, eCommerce and digital strategy. For most organisations, that is exactly the right starting point.
A conversation with a Tech Champion can help clarify the problem. A webinar can introduce a new way of thinking. A Knowledge Hub resource can explain what good practice looks like. A case study can show what is possible. Our job is to sit alongside that work, not in front of it.
Where the Digital Culture Network helps organisations understand what to do, our mission is to help organisations work together to action it.
The gap is not knowledge. It is capacity.
Across arts, culture and heritage, people are not short of ambition. They are short of time. A museum may know it needs to improve its website, but not have the internal resources to turn advice into a brief, budget and delivery plan. A gallery may understand the value of audience data, but struggle to move from spreadsheets and ticketing exports into a usable reporting rhythm. A heritage organisation may want to improve accessibility, but need help turning guidance into templates, workflows and checks that staff can actually use.
That is where collaborative implementation can add value. Not by replacing advice. Not by creating parallel guidance. Not by stepping on the toes of organisations already doing excellent work. But by helping groups of organisations move together from good intentions to practical progress.
This hub should be an action layer, not another advice library
Our thinking is simple: where strong advice already exists, we point to it, contextualise it and help people apply it.
That means our role is less about writing guides to digital marketing, CRM, accessibility or websites, and more about creating practical routes through what already exists.
For example:
- Implementation labs, where organisations work through a specific challenge together over several weeks.
- Shared templates, such as website brief structures, campaign planning sheets, CRM field maps, reporting dashboards or accessibility checklists.
- Peer groups, where organisations facing similar challenges compare progress, share blockers and learn from each other.
- Action sprints, where advice becomes a time-bound piece of work with clear outputs.
- Benchmarking and progress tracking, so organisations can see what has improved over time.
- Working groups, where a shared challenge becomes a shared project, rather than ten organisations each starting from scratch.
The Digital Culture Network remains the trusted source of expertise and guidance. Culture Hub becomes one of the places where that guidance is carried forward into collaborative delivery.
This is especially important for smaller and stretched organisations
Digital change is often described as if every organisation has a digital team waiting to pick up the work. Many do not.
In smaller organisations, the same person may be responsible for marketing, fundraising, events, learning, collections, volunteers, the website, social media and reporting. Even when the advice is clear, the implementation can feel overwhelming.
Our aim is to reduce that burden by making digital improvement more collective.
- Instead of every organisation creating its own campaign template, we can build one together.
- Instead of every museum working out how to structure an accessibility review, we create a shared process.
- Instead of every team separately learning how to connect content, CRM and email journeys, we test a model with a small group and share what works.
This is not about doing everything for people. It is about making progress easier, more affordable and more sustainable by sharing the load.
Collaboration should also help with confidence
Digital work can feel risky when people are unsure what good looks like.
That is one reason peer learning matters. When organisations can see how others are approaching similar challenges, the work becomes less abstract. People can ask honest questions. They can share mistakes. They can compare tools, budgets, workflows and outcomes in a practical way.
This is where our community spaces could add real value to the wider support ecosystem.
The Digital Culture Network helps organisations understand the principles, options and good practice. We aim to create structured opportunities for organisations to apply that thinking together, with practical outputs at the end.
That might mean a group of museums building a shared seasonal campaign. It might mean a cohort of heritage organisations improving their accessibility statements and content workflows. It might mean a set of cultural venues developing a shared dashboard for email, web and ticketing performance. It might mean collections teams exploring ethical, careful and practical uses of AI in collections information, while staying grounded in trust, public benefit and professional standards.
Our starting principle: signpost before we create
One of the risks in digital support is duplication. The sector does not benefit when five organisations produce five versions of the same introductory guide. It creates noise. It fragments attention. It makes it harder for busy teams to know where to start.
So Culture Hub should begin with a simple rule: signpost before we create.
- Where the Digital Culture Network has already produced a strong resource, we link to it.
- Where another sector body has deeper expertise, we point people there.
- Where guidance exists but is difficult to apply, we create the missing action layer.
- Where organisations need confidence, we create peer support.
- Where there is a recurring practical problem, we build shared tools.
- Where a group of organisations can solve something together, we help convene them.
This is how Culture Hub can be useful without becoming competitive.
A partnership mindset matters
The future of digital support in culture should not be about ownership of advice. It should be about shared impact.
The Digital Culture Network, Museums Association, Collections Trust, The Audience Agency, The Space, Arts Marketing Association, Arts Fundraising & Philanthropy, Heritage Fund and many others all contribute different forms of expertise. The sector is better served when those offers connect clearly, rather than sitting in separate places with separate language and separate journeys. Culture Hub can help by acting as a practical connector.
That might include curated pathways through existing resources, shared referral routes, local or regional implementation cohorts, post-webinar action groups, collaborative pilots, or shared evaluation of what actually changes after support is accessed.
The question is “How do we help more organisations use what already exists, apply it well and keep improving?”
Advice is the start. Adoption is the outcome.
Good advice matters. But advice only creates change when it is acted on, embedded and improved over time.
That is why Culture Hub should not measure success by the volume of content it publishes, the number of topics it covers or the size of its resource library.
Those things may be useful, but they are not the real outcome.
The real measure is whether organisations are able to make practical progress because they had somewhere to apply the advice, work through the detail, share the effort and learn with others.
For Culture Hub, success should mean more organisations moving from intention to implementation. It should mean teams becoming more confident, better equipped and less isolated. It should mean useful tools being adopted, not just downloaded. It should mean shared projects leading to visible improvements in websites, campaigns, accessibility, data, audience engagement, income generation or operational resilience.
We should be able to ask:
- Are organisations taking action they might otherwise have delayed?
- Are they adapting trusted advice into practical workflows, templates and habits?
- Are they building confidence and capability within their own teams?
- Are they collaborating where shared effort makes more sense than working alone?
- Are they using evidence to review what worked and improve the next version?
- Are they becoming more resilient, more connected and more able to keep improving?
A place where advice becomes adoption, adoption becomes evidence, and evidence becomes ongoing improvement.
A clear invitation
Culture Hub is being shaped as a collaborative space for the sector, not a finished offer being handed down to it.
We want to hear from museums, galleries, heritage sites, libraries, archives, arts organisations, venues, festivals, community groups, freelancers and support organisations about where the gap sits between digital advice and practical action.
- What are you trying to improve?
- Where are you getting stuck?
- Which tasks keep being postponed because there is not enough time, capacity, confidence or budget?
- Which resources have helped you understand what to do, but still left you needing support to actually do it?
- Which problems would be easier to solve if organisations worked on them together?
Those answers should shape Culture Hub.
Our role is not to replace the Digital Culture Network, or to create another competing advice service. Where the Digital Culture Network is already the right place to start, we will signpost people there. Where its Knowledge Hub, events, webinars or Tech Champions provide the right guidance, we want more organisations to find and use that support.
But we also believe there is space for a practical action layer around that advice.
That is where Culture Hub can help: by bringing organisations together to apply what they have learned, build shared tools, test ideas, create templates, run implementation sprints, compare progress and keep improving over time.
We would also welcome conversations with the Digital Culture Network team and its Tech Champions about how this could work in practice.
That might mean signposting Culture Hub as a next step after a webinar or one-to-one session. It might mean co-designing practical implementation cohorts around recurring sector needs. It might mean creating shared templates that help organisations act on existing guidance. It might mean using Culture Hub to surface common blockers, questions and evidence from the sector, so that advice and support can keep evolving.
We are not trying to own this space. We are trying to help build a useful bridge between trusted advice and practical adoption.So this is an invitation.
To the sector: tell us what would help you move from knowing what needs to change to actually making progress.
To the Digital Culture Network and its Tech Champions: let’s explore how Culture Hub can extend your reach, support adoption and help more organisations turn guidance into action.
