Kove Park is an international art centre and charity situated
on a 50-acre site overlooking Loch Long here on the Rosneeth Peninsula in the west of Scotland.
Founded in 1999 by Eileen and Peter Jacobs, Kove Park runs an internationally acclaimed
artist residency programme. Artists work in all art forms who come here and Kove Park supports
and promotes their work whilst they're here in residency. They also run a public participation
programme creating opportunities for people to engage with the work through events, community
outreach and an education programme. Kove Park is all about giving creative people the
freedom to do the unexpected. On the other hand, physically, we're all about four cows,
thirty sheep, four staff and, not coincidentally, ten artists who will be here at any one time.
They'd be artists from across all the art forms. They might also be people from the creative
industries and they are all here, as I said earlier, to enjoy the freedom to do the unexpected.
So, in terms of selection, we think about how this place is, what these different artists'
ambitions are. It works also from our understanding of contemporary arts and, from fundamentally
deep down, a belief that the ability of artists to make new work is kind of fundamental to a
creative society and to the health of society generally.
Kove Park engaged with digital development programme Ambition Scotland back in 2009.
They recognise that they had some operational and communications needs that were holding
them back from being as well known, well understood and as well capitalised as they could be.
Remotely located here in the Scottish mountains and locks meant that broadband was limited
and the IT and communications support is far away. Therefore, digital hadn't been considered
as a way forward before.
Yes, well, before Ambition, communications both with the outside world and among ourselves
were haphazard, lots of different databases. People in and out of the office didn't quite
know when they would be and when they wouldn't be. All our alumni, we didn't know where half
of them were or how to reach half of them and yes, it was a general error for let's
try this, let's try that, different things would be invented each different year and
there was no continuity and no kind of holistic attitude to that whole subject.
The Ambition approach is a change methodology that enables any organisation to consider
how their business could make the most of digital opportunities across all areas of
the organisation's activity. I facilitated Cove Park's journey through the Ambition
approach, helping them audit where they were at, diagnose where they'd like to be, create
the business case and implement those plans. We worked over a period of months to complete
the Ambition approach and to build the team's digital capability, capacity and confidence.
Cove Park have now successfully implemented a number of digital tools across the organisation
and are now ready to reflect on the impacts and benefits that they've gained.
The tools that we've used for this are HiRISE, which is a cloud-based database system and
Basecamp, which is an online document sharing system, which has enabled us to work together
as a team, whether we're actually in the office or outside, which is very important
for a small organisation like ours. The website, which we're very pleased with because it's
much more than ever before, actually reflects what we are as an organisation now, which
is very important. Social media, in particular Facebook, is something that we perhaps understood
as individuals, but we now use as an organisation and it's very powerful as a way of keeping
in touch with artists and wider public as a promotional tool. MailChimp, which has revitalised
or transformed actually our way of publicising what we're doing and recruiting people to
come to Cove Park.
I receive applications for the craft residencies that we run each year, along with a panel,
select artists to come and have residencies here. The digital development for Cove Park
has really helped in this process, particularly for receiving applications. I think we've
become a lot more confident to ask and receive them digitally. That's particularly helped
me this year. I was on maternity leave for a period and applications came in at the same
time that I was away, so we were able to put them all in one place on base camp. We started
to use base camp. I was able to get them remotely from home rather than coming to get them here
as big jiffy bags, hard copies and myself and the panel were able to just look at them
from one location and then talk about them over the phone.
High Rise has been very useful in bringing people in from the board and the founders,
because they know a lot of individuals, they know a lot of contacts and they've been able
to add those to High Rise themselves, which is information that would have been lost in
the past. We've also been able to, in my catalogue, everybody who's been to Cove Park, that's
a big project to get everybody who's ever had a residency or could be a donor on to
High Rise, which is then information that's incredibly useful to us.
Big training we've received on High Rise, our database, has really helped us categorise
the type of artists or funders or trustees that we need to communicate with. We're able
to filter any communications down through these categories that we have spent a lot
of time putting into High Rise to target specific audiences for events and residencies
and anything that we need to communicate with the Cove Park audience.
The website, although having that in-house has given us more work, it's given us control
over what is on there and I think that it's slipped into the workload very easily. It's
not difficult to do and I think it shows on the website the sort of engagement that the
team has got on a daily basis.
Well being involved with the website from its initial design stages was really important
to us. We wanted to have control over how the website looked and how it functioned and
needed to reflect essentially what Cove Park is and what it does and how it changes season
to season.
With the social media, in Facebook in particular, what we use that for is to follow the successes
of artists who've been here to publicise the results of their residencies or what they've
gone on to do and that has been very interesting because it's the first time we've really
seen that as a team. On a daily basis, things going out onto Facebook about what has happened
here which is very confidence building for us as a team and great for the organisation.
From our experience, I'd want to suggest that you spend a lot of time at the beginning thinking
about who you are as an organisation and what you need and where you're going and that
needs to be done in consultation because it's not something necessarily you can work out
by yourself.
The other difficult thing is to keep an open mind and embrace what is new technology which
in our case we weren't familiar with at all. It's not easy not to be sceptical or to continue
doing what you did before because it's easier. The lesson in all that is we've come through
that learning period to an extent, we're still learning and that enables us to be freed up
from a lot of spurious admin, things that are now I see outside our core activity. We are
freed up to actually get on with what we're meant to be doing.
