Arts, Culture & Heritage Service Development Manager – Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation

Background

Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation and it’s local partners are entering a very exciting phase of its development, which will pave the way for the strategic future and growing importance of the town’s arts, heritage and culture offer.

Covid-19 significantly impacted the Foundation, but, following some successful fundraising and reframing of our operating model, we have created some sustainability around our services. Building on this, we have developed a Culture Committee, consisting of key local partners, who have created a draft Letchworth Culture Strategy, for which we are currently consulting our community.

We have been well supported throughout 2021 to begin embedding a new operating model and now seek a consultant to complete the implementation of the model and associated systems and processes.

The overarching culture strategy focuses on achieving two key objectives:

1. Letchworth being known for its cultural offer
2. supporting a diverse range of audiences to experience what we have on offer.

Purpose

We are looking for a highly motivated and experienced individual, with a track record of working within a cultural organisation, bringing together teams to develop, implement and deliver culture strategy. You will be responsible for the implementation of our culture strategy, developing systems and processes to support the successful creation and delivery of programmes and operations that align with our financial and outcome targets.

The individual will lead the development of a framework for the teams to consistently develop programmes that meet the Heritage Foundation strategy, town’s culture strategy and audience development plans. The postholder will develop tools to enable the team to develop and deliver a range of projects, programmes and activities to support our ambitious plans. These tools will be the legacy of this contract and you will empower our team to use these tools to benefit their programming, delivery and the leveraging of external funding.

You will need to work very closely with the existing team, quickly understanding the gaps that exist and creating solutions to enable the completion of this embedding phase.

You will work across the service to support key areas in our pursuit to become a community-led service, including,

• Implementation of the culture strategy
• Delivery of audience development plan (ADP)
• Embedding of consultation tools, data & evidence gathering and responding to feedback
• Creation of funding applications and monitoring/evaluation of existing funding awards
• Implementation of enterprise development plan

We are all committed to ensuring our key services are adequately resourced to remain open to the public and are safe and inviting for a diverse audience.

Timescales

We envisage this being a six months post, approximately 3 days per week. There will be a requirement to attend site regularly.

Key deadlines are included in the tasks section. Further milestones will be developed when successful consultant is identified.

Application 

Please submit a CV and expression of interest outlining how you will meet the brief and key tasks on less than two sides of A4.

Please include costings and references.

Deadline for applications is 21 February at 9am.

Contact Stuart Sapsford for an informal discussion 07711 765937.

Key areas and tasks 

1. Programme framework and development
   • Create a programme planning framework that ensures activities link directly to strategic priorities, cultural strategy and audience development plans
   • Work alongside curators and activity deliverers to support programme design and populate the programme framework, capturing all relevant information, including costings, timings, resource requirements, target audiences and desired outcomes
   • Work with Arts & Heritage Officer to create effective administration processes and ensure these processes are embedded
   • Support the creation of new programmes that expand and diversify our offer
   • Own the programme framework and embed its use within the organisation, working closely with other colleagues, include Fundraising Manager and Research & Evaluation Manager
   • Work alongside Research and Evaluation Manager and key ACH staff to update, monitor and evaluate ADPs
   • Work with Head of Community Partnerships, Research and Evaluation Manager and Head of Marketing and Communications to understand community need, partners and create collaborative responses

2. Strategy development and delivery
   • Work alongside the Exec Director – CCH on the implementation, delivery and monitoring of key elements of the Letchworth Culture Strategy
   • Be a key member of the Letchworth Culture Committee and support the culture festival committee
   • Provide research and insight to support an evidence-based approach to programme delivery
   • Support teams with programme curation, ensuring we meet strategic objectives and key audiences, identified in audience development plans
   • Provide monitoring and evaluation tools, and subsequent reports, to support strategic and programme decision making

3. Consultation
   • Support implementation and embedding of CommonPlace consultation software to create evidence-based programming
   • Create a continual feedback loop and action plan for delivering elements of feedback
   • Where appropriate, create a community-led element to the programme, feeding into the programme development 

4. Fundraising
   • Provide Fundraising Manager with high quality information to support the creation of high quality fundraising applications
   • Review, update and lead implementation of enterprise development plan for Arts, Culture & Heritage
   • Create monitoring and evaluation tools to measure enterprise and fundraising performance
   • Support achievement of income targets