Case Study Folkestone - King's College London · Case study: Folkestone kcl.ac ... it was more just...

Case study: Folkestone

The art of partnering


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What Folkestone Quarterhouse and Folkestone Fringe are working together to build and develop arts audiences in the

town. Building on the success of the Folkestone Triennial, Folkestone Quarterhouse and Folkestone Fringe are

working in partnership with a number of local curators to put on a series of mini-festivals during 2015.

‘Folkestone Quarterhouse is a newly-built, multi-purpose arts centre. […] Quarterhouse is part of the

Creative Foundation, a culture-led regeneration charity, which also runs the Folkestone Triennial.

Folkestone Fringe was set up as the fringe to the Folkestone Triennial. In planning for the future, the

fringe identified Quarterhouse as its key competitor for audiences and funding for contemporary

cultural events in Folkestone. Meanwhile growing this audience is core to Quarterhouse's mission.

Quarterhouse & Folkestone Fringe are opposite kinds of organisations in many ways. […] We decided

we needed each other. And that if we worked together we would build audiences a lot faster than on

our own. In 2015 we are running five mini-festivals of performance as a partnership between

Quarterhouse, Folkestone Fringe and a different local artist appointed to co-curate with us.’

Questionnaire Response

According to the response to our questionnaire about this partnership, it did agree joint objectives, which were put

down in a written letter of agreement. The partnership was not evaluated and the partners do have plans to work

together again.

Why There were four main reasons why the partnership was entered into: audience growth; removing the competition for

audiences; better connections in the community; and resource sharing.

Removing the competition for audiences and working together to build audiences

This partnership is primarily based upon the relationship between Diane Dever, Director, Folkestone Fringe, and

Allegra Galvin, Quarterhouse Director, Creative Foundation. They had previously worked together on a project

called Fun Palaces, for which they had submitted a joint application after each discovering that the other was also

planning to apply. After this, Arts Council England encouraged both Allegra and Diane to go on a residential course

in Cambridge about brand identity and marketing for small organisations.

‘On this course we identified each other as potential partners or potential competition, so that was the

starting point for a conversation […] it was more just talking about Folkestone and what we’d like to

see Folkestone be like […] So that was what came out of the course we were on in Cambridge, this idea

that we had similar feelings about the audiences that currently existed in Folkestone. The challenge of

getting people to come to things was something that we were both dealing with […] and then I think

just this sense that if we did it together, we would get there a lot faster.’

Allegra Galvin, Quarterhouse Director, Creative Foundation



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‘On the Arts Council course in Cambridge we had to do a SWOT analysis and we identified each other

as potential threats in terms of audience, going after the same audience. Part of the exercise was to turn

our SWOT analysis into pros, so to take our threats and think about how we could make them into an

opportunity. So really I think the conversation started there, that probably we were better working

together to build audiences in Folkestone than we were trying to do it separately.’

Diane Dever, Director, Folkestone Fringe

This desire to build audiences in Folkestone also tied into the cultural rhythms in the town, which has a triennial arts

festival, and the desire to maintain the hype and audiences achieved during the festival at other times.

‘I’d just come out of a ten week festival delivery which happens every three years in Folkestone

because we have a triennial and it’s a sort of unusual time. There’s a lot of heightened activity so to

engage an audience isn’t as difficult as it is in the other two years of that three year cycle […] So we’d

had a great year and I was conscious that the momentum needed to be maintained in some form so that

all of those things that had been happening in Folkestone didn’t […] have to wait another three years

for that type of activity to be going on in the town.’


Better connections in the community

For Folkestone Quarterhouse, a primary motivating factor for entering into this partnership was to build its

connections and relationships with both the community within Folkestone and also the wider artistic community.

For example, Folkestone Fringe had a company they were able to book which Folkestone Quarterhouse ‘would have

loved to book but didn’t have any contact for’ (Allegra Galvin, Quarterhouse Director, Creative Foundation)

without the partnership.

Similarly, Diane has been in Folkestone for about twelve years whereas Allegra has been in Folkestone for around

eighteen months. Therefore, Allegra explains that:

‘There was a definite advantage of working with Di, which was that she knows loads of people and

she’s really well connected in the area and she really enjoys getting people to come to things and

engaging people with what’s going on.’


‘I’ve been in Folkestone for twelve years. I’ve been running an organisation since 2008 so I’ve built up

a lot of relationships and I know the community, different communities, really well.’


Resource sharing

Whilst building connections in the community was a primary motivation for Folkestone Quarterhouse, Folkestone

Fringe sought to benefit from the resources and space available to them through the more traditional and venue-

based organisation Folkestone Quarterhouse.



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‘The Fringe were running lots of events around the Triennial but they didn’t necessarily have the right

spaces for all the things that they wanted to do, so we co-hosted.’


‘Folkestone Quarterhouse is an amazing venue with a lot of resources and a team of staff, and I am

venue-less and with a team that changes depending on the projects.’


‘Mine’s a very small organisation. They’ve got lots of space. If I need space, I phone up and they do

whatever they can to help on a really basic level right up to us now co-programming work and putting

joint funding applications in. So it enriches both organisations and I think everyone’s got to start

working like that.’


How According to the response to our questionnaire about this partnership, each partner contributed the following: ‘time

up front invested in discussing aims of the partnership; time to programme the festivals; time to develop relationships

with relevant charities / government bodies in the district & county for each festival; time to fundraise for each

festival’ (Questionnaire Response).

The way that this particular partnership works is that Diane from Folkestone Fringe and Allegra from Folkestone

Quarterhouse work together to deliver all the mini-festivals and then for each different mini-festival they also bring

in one different co-curator with an expertise in that particular area. They were very clear that they must each be

happy with the co-curator before proceeding:

‘The concept is that there’s three of us in each mini-festival but that the core relationship sits with Di

and I, Folkestone Fringe and Quarterhouse. One thing we agreed between us was that we had to

completely agree on a co-curator for each one […] both of us have to be equally comfortable working

with that person.’


It was largely the existence of a different external curator for each mini-festival, which the main partners felt

necessitated having a formalised letter of agreement for the partnership:

‘I think it’s a good thing to do whenever you work with someone else, to lay those things down, and

then also because we were bringing a third person in as a regional co-curator, […] it seemed like a

sensible thing to do. We do that when we work with artists so it wasn’t such a weird thing to propose.’


Working together in this way has required the partners to be able to easily share information. Using sharing

technologies such as Dropbox for this purpose has meant that documents are easily available to everyone involved

and not just the organisation responsible for the administration of the partnership:



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‘So although we administrate it, everything is on Dropbox, everything gets seen by everyone’


‘It’s had an impact on […] how we consolidate information, how we share information.’


What worked? The partnership in Folkestone was felt to have been successful due to the fact the two core partners had shared

objectives and a genuine desire to collaborate. They were both open to suggestions and both felt ownership of the

overall project, which were factors that added to the success of the partnership, according to the partners involved.

One partner said that their collaborative manner of working had opened up more conversation channels between arts

organisations in the city more generally and that this had benefitted her organisation.

According to our questionnaire response and interviewees, the successes of this partnership can broadly be

categorised in the following terms: gaining or developing additional skills or capacity; the ability to apply for more

funding; creating a more ambitious programme; engaging broader audiences; the strong relationship between the

directors of the two organisations combined with the very different assets of their organisations; and transparency

around roles and budgets.

Gaining or developing additional skills or capacity

The partnership allowed both of the main partners to develop their own skills and also to benefit from the skills,

expertise or capacity offered by the other partner.

‘I think for me an unexpected thing would be that as a small regional venue, you don’t have a big

programming team and whilst I hadn’t thought about it that way beforehand, just the joy of working

with other people who programme and produce was really lovely. Less lonely, that’s it! Artistically less

lonely. It would have taken me a long time to get to a point where I could afford to have somebody like

Di in my team […] I couldn’t add a whole person to my team right now but by working like this on a

project by project basis, it means that we get all the advantages of having somebody like that but

without having to add somebody into the team in terms of a whole salary.’


And the additional expertise of each partner allowed for more innovative work to come to Folkestone:

‘Each festival has almost three heads on it so you know three heads can bring more than one. So if

you’re programming, you need to see a lot of work to be able to programme it. So there’s almost three

times more opportunity for us to have seen interesting work that we can then bring here.’


The partners benefitted from learning skills of communication and collaborative working, associated with the

method of working within the partnership:



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‘My way of working, which really relies on me being aware of what needs to be done for each project,

has changed because all of a sudden I need to communicate that to a wider team so I’ve had to think

about how I communicate slightly differently in the sense that information now needs to move from me

to other people to get things done whereas before it would really just be me working through a series of

processes and then asking people at certain times to do specific things.’


The partners benefitted from making use of resources they could access through the other partner:

‘I’ve got access to a marketing team and to a printer and to equipment and to Textstar, which is

something that I wouldn’t be able to access without a separate budget, a separate programme. I’d have

to do it all by myself so it wouldn’t have happened.’


The ability to apply for more funding

Both partners felt that the partnership enabled them to apply for more funding and made them more attractive to

funders.

‘The partnership has opened up the possibilities of applying for funding, so to give you an example, […]

as Quarterhouse, we’d maxed out on our ability to apply to Awards for All […] earlier in the year, but

our co-curator could apply. So it opens up these funding possibilities. If it were just me, I couldn’t get

the funding to deliver these festivals, so it brought additional funding into the programme without that

ever being money that actually comes to Quarterhouse.’


‘In terms of getting funding, we’re stronger as a consortium. You know the programme is stronger

because it brings in Quarterhouse programming. The offer for a funder is much stronger.’


Creating a more ambitious programme

The partners also felt that working in partnership enabled them to deliver a more ambitious and experimental

programme of a higher artistic quality.

‘I think when you add more people, you add more ambition.’


‘Without the partnership, I wouldn’t be able to work in the way to bring stuff that’s, let’s say, a blacked

out box environment or Allegra wouldn’t be able to programme really weird sound stuff.’




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Engaging broader audiences

One of the fundamental aims of this partnership was to engage broader audiences. Whilst it is too early to tell the full

extent to which this has worked for the 2015 mini-festivals, a pilot project in 2014 suggested that the results would

be promising:

‘We did a test run of the partnership in autumn 2014 by co-programming a handful of events, which

saw a marked increase in attendance.’

Questionnaire Response

The strong relationship between the directors of the two organisations combined with the very different assets of

their organisations

Although this is a partnership between two organisations, the relationship between the directors of these two

organisations (Diane and Allegra) is at its core. The response to our questionnaire about this partnership listed the

strength of the relationship between these two women as something which was fundamentally important for the

success of the partnership. Added to this, both organisations had something very different to bring to the table,

which they were willing to share with the other organisation who needed it.

Transparency around roles and budgets

Although Folkestone Quarterhouse are administrating the project as they have a finance team, Allegra explained that

Quarterhouse ensured ‘total transparency around the budget which was another really important aspect of the

partnership’ (Allegra Galvin, Quarterhouse Director, Creative Foundation).

Another important success factor was understood to have been the clarity that existed around the division of roles:

‘We decided quite early on who was going to manage what […] it was a fairly straightforward split and

that was a good lesson from that festival going forward. That is a good thing to do, to make it clear to

people who is handling what aspect of the programme.’


Challenges Interviewees reported very few challenges relating to this partnership. One interviewee felt that the potential

challenge of whether or not roles were clearly communicated to people was avoided ‘because of the things we

committed to early on’ (Allegra, Folkestone Quarterhouse). Although she did add that the ‘“normal things” for any

partnership did present themselves: “it’s going to be chaotic or if not chaotic then at least challenging.”’ (Allegra

Galvin, Quarterhouse Director, Creative Foundation)

As far as Diane from Folkestone Fringe is concerned:

‘Because it started from an idea rather than funding, we haven’t had any kind of challenges in terms of

what we’re doing and why. It’s always been really secure.’


However, she did identify some challenges relating to the project management of the partnership:



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‘I think the challenges are always about communication and communication channels, and everyone

knowing what each other is supposed to be doing, which is basic project management skills really. […]

I can’t offhand think of anything that’s not really working, apart from constantly checking that we’re

all on the same page and we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing. Again that’s project

management.’


Evaluation This partnership was not evaluated. This is partly because the partnership evolved organically, through the delivery

of Fun Palaces and shows in the triennial. It reached its present form through gradual development, rather than

deliberately being decided upon, and this seems to have meant that evaluation of the partnership was not considered,

although there are plans to evaluate each of the mini-festivals. Interviewees felt that in the future it would be

beneficial to introduce an evaluation framework for the partnership from the very beginning of the process.

Nevertheless, interviewees felt that in place of a formal evaluation of the partnership they had always maintained

ongoing internal conversations that considered what had been working well and what hadn’t which was a form of

informal evaluation.

Case Study Folkestone - King's College London · Case study: Folkestone kcl.ac ... it was more just...

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