Curatorial Digital Leadership

The Curatorial Digital Leadership programme was developed with the Association of Arts Museum Curators (AAMC) to support art museum curators to develop their digital leadership skills.  

Full funding to participate in all aspects of the program has been generously provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Over the course of the programme, participants received peer-to-peer support to advance their digital literacies, storytelling skills, and knowledge of audience engagement. 

This programme used our long established and successful Let’s Get Real methodology that is always tailored to the cohort’s needs and contexts and takes a human-centred design approach characterised by:

• Learning from others – LGR brings in a variety of voices and perspectives from within and beyond the cultural sector, to inform, support, guide and reflect on the challenges at hand
• Learning by doing – We support participants to test out new ways of working in the context of their everyday activities
• Learning together – LGR creates a community of supportive peers with a shared sense of purpose. We actively seek out ways to foster and promote collaborative exchange, combining and analysing people’s wealth of individual experiences, expertise and knowledge, turning them into invaluable shared sources of understanding for their peers across the cohort. 

Between July 2022 and April 2023 participants took part in a series of workshops, group sessions and one-to-one sessions with an in-person meet up in Philadelphia in November 2022 providing an opportunity for the group to come together for network building and deeper learning activities. 

Participants developed a deeper understanding of what digital leadership means for their organisations, learning tactics for embedding change within their organisations and developing their own personal confidence, understanding and literacy surrounding digital. 

Participant feedback showed:  

• for almost everyone the experience has been very positive and for some transformative. 
• the process of experimentation and the mindset to continue to develop new ideas through this method was something the cohort valued. 84% felt it was either very or extremely helpful with all pledging to continue to experiment going forward. 
• Some came to understand that they were not as confident as they thought at the start, because it became clear all things digital in their museum were bigger and more complicated than they had realised. One participant talked about better understanding what is expected of them within their role and that there are some digital skills, particularly competencies & capabilities, that are simply not in their remit.