Culture Commons joins consortium to scope new National Cultural Data Observatory

In 2025, Culture Commons joins forces with the Centre for Cultural Value, The Audience Agency and MyCake to develop a blueprint for a game-changing national data project.

We know that the creative, cultural and heritage sectors make significant contributions to people’s lives, society and the economy. Nonetheless, they continue to struggle to make the case for investment and support at a variety of spatial scales.

At the heart of this issue lies a crisis within data. Datasets associated with our sectors are currently poorly aligned and not always fit for purpose. As devolution extends, new regional data sets are also emerging that aren’t always speaking to one another. Fragmented data makes it difficult for the sector to demonstrate its impact and for decision makers to make the right decisions.

Throughout 2025, Culture Commons will be working as part of a consortium of partners that will investigate the practicalities of establishing a new observatory that can gather and analyse smarter data and provide a trusted evidence base for the arts, cultural and heritage sectors. It is hoped that better cultural data will underpin better cultural policy for the public good.

Culture Commons will be contributing our policy and advocacy expertise, ensuring that the programme is engaging with key policy brokers and decision makers at the local, regional and national levels as the development work progresses. This will see the National Cultural Data Observatory being designed in a way that addresses the real-world needs of those nurturing our sectors on the ground.

This project builds on a 15-month scoping study led by the Centre for Cultural Value Making Data Work, as well as a one of the core recommendations that emerged from Culture Commons’ four-nations open policy development programme examining cultural devolution.

The scoping phase of the NCDO project is being funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Culture Commons involvement is made possible through support from the Research England Policy Impact Fund.

You can read more about the project in this blog post by Professor Ben Walmsley (Centre for Cultural Value) and Patrick Towell (The Audience Agency).