With a little help from your friends

Collaboration. It is such an easy word to say and one which is used frequently in organisations across the country. The question is: is it actually happening?

With increasingly sparse public funding for the arts and morale beginning to dwindle amongst those at the sharp end of the sector, it has never been more crucial to find new ways to support and promote the work being done by arts organisations, projects and individuals.

Whilst I was studying for my Art degree I worked in a variety of different arts organisations in the public and third sectors and gained invaluable experience of the day-to-day challenges these institutions face. I assumed, like many of my peers, that upon graduating it would be difficult to find a job in the industry but that the experience I had gained in the workplace would help me to succeed regardless. In reality what happened was a major financial crisis, perfectly timed to coincide with my graduation.

While arts professionals across the country began to brace for the inevitable ripple effect, I found myself not working for an arts organisation, as I had imagined, but interning for Visit Lincolnshire, a tourism marketing agency. With my feet in two camps it quickly became apparent that there are significant parallels to be drawn between tourism and the arts; not least the economic challenges facing both industries (Visit Lincolnshire was forced to close its doors due to funding issues). These parallels can be exploited to achieve mutual aims; it just requires a little collaboration.

To illustrate my point, here is a quote from Welcome to Yorkshire’s Twitter account: ‘200m visits to Yorkshire every year – equivalent to the total visitors to the Eiffel Tower to-date since 1889!’

These sorts of facts are what make it so clear that collaboration between tourism and the arts is crucial. If arts professionals in Yorkshire (and neighbouring counties, we are after all a small country by most international tourists’ standards) were to establish a relationship with their local tourism body they would immediately gain access to a two-hundred million strong pool of potential visitors every year.

It’s a two way street – tourism bodies benefit greatly from having exciting events and attractions to talk about in their publications, websites and social media platforms. A more mutually beneficial relationship couldn’t exist! Content is king in marketing today and that is particularly true for tourism. Generating rich, exciting content which demonstrates the personality of a place is key to stimulating conversations about your brand.

Like the arts, tourism bodies must also battle to be considered an essential public service; key to maintaining quality of life for the population and for rejuvenating the struggling economy. As part of this ‘duty of care,’ for many tourism professionals, facilitating collaboration is an essential part of the job. And not just collaboration between themselves and arts professionals, but between arts organisations in general, in order to better develop the cultural offer of their area.

When I worked for Visit Lincolnshire, my team offered assistance to a publicly-funded arts organisation that was in the early stages of developing an umbrella brand that aimed to bring together all the county’s festivals. There were clear ways we could help, for example by offering the local event data we collected for use on their own website. Furthermore, we were able to share our knowledge of the lesser-known, often unusual festivals happening in the area (Scarecrow festival anyone?), give technical guidance as to the best ways they could plug into our data and share marketing strategies to fully optimise their small budget.

The unfortunate truth is that as Lincolnshire’s tourism body slipped away so did many of the exciting collaborative projects my team was developing.

The moral of the story is this: get in touch with your local tourism body today, not next week, or next month. Go for a coffee with whoever has five minutes and treat them like a friend, because that is exactly what they want to be – the friend who introduces you to other new people, shares your ambitions and wants to make the place that they live and work the most exciting place on earth. Nurturing this relationship will undoubtedly bring unexpected rewards and might just help both the arts and tourism industries to weather this storm, as allies and friends.