Report on Highland 2007 – interesting perspectives on Argyll

For Argyll is emerging from a few days spent immersed in the full evaluation report on Highland 2007. While there are flaws in the report and in its presentation, delving deep is a worthwhile and, oddly, enjoyable experience. On the evidence, all previous coverage to date has been based on the Executive Summary – no surprises there. However, there’s a lot more beneath that surface and particularly in perspectives on the role and performance of Argyll and Bute

Some key figures

Let’s look at some of the figures. A total of £31.6 million was spent on capital projects variously listed in the Report as numbering 100 and 136. The three flagship capital projects were the major updating of the Eden Court Theatre in Inverness, the building of the new Battlefield Visitor Centre at Culloden and the building of the new Fas, Gaelic media production centre at Sabhal Mor Ostaig in Skye.

Tucked away among these projects are some that one would have been expected to have been paid for from other budgets – such as £2.3 million on Nairn Community Centre; £1.81 million on Thurso Town Hall and £100,000 on Lairg Auction Mart. But pragmatism rules in such things and at least these projects were done under the banner of Highland 2007, leaving a lasting benefit for their communities.

£6.6 million was spent on the core Highland 2007 organisation. A further £3.1 million was spent directly on regional events – funding from other sources which did not go through the Highland 2007 office. Highland Council and VisitScotland together contributed a further£3.6 million of value as support in-kind.

1.3% more visitors were attracted to the region by the programme than had visited in 2006. Visitors’ spend in association with the year’s events was £4.5 million. A multiplier was applied to this figure in the report to measure the trickle-down effect of such income through the Highland economy. This method brings the impact of visitor spend to an estimated £6.1 million.

The value of estimated repeat visits to the Highlands and Islands stimulated by the year’s events is put at £260,000.

Argyll and Bute

Argyll and Bute Council was one of the partner councils outside the Board for Highland 2007 – which consisted of three representatives put forward by each of th funding bodies: Highland Council, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and the Scottish Government.

10% of the spend on programme projects was in Argyll and Bute, which, with Skye and Lochalsh was joint-3rd highest. Inverness was highest with 21% and Lochaber was 2nd highest with 12%.

The evaluation report showed ‘consistent negative comment’ on Argyll and Bute Council’s requirement that project funding applications should show a projected economic benefit, with additional visitors attracted to the area. The consensus of objections was that a greater focus on matters cultural would have been preferable.

However, say what you will, it worked. Argyll and Bute had the lion’s share of ‘additional visitor nights’ – at 39%, wth Inverness second at 17%. Subtracting ticket price values from this figure – which in the case of a major contributor, the Connect Festival, often included camping charges, brought the Argyll and Bute figure for ‘additional visitor expenditure’ to 24%, still way ahead, with Inverness, after a similar adjustment, coming second at 16%.

A major and recurring criticism of Highland 2007 by promoters – and one which involves Argyll – was that it bred too many festivals and that the competition was detrimental to pre-existing events. The Belladrum Heart of Tartan boutique festival singled out Argyll’s Connect Festival, along with Inverness’s Outsider (one of the four main events in the overall programme), for providing unfair competition. The 2008 Skye Music Festival has been cancelled for lack of interest, put down to post-Highland 2007 ‘festival fatigue’.

Some key factors need to be considered here:

• the survey evidence from young people, the main festival going audience, showed that they welcomed the number of events they could go to throughout the year
• the identity of the festivals and their geographical location act against them being serious competition for each other
• the impact of the spirit of competition itself, which raises the game of the fit-to-compete – did so in the case of one established festival which organised a new range of side events and did well
• major conflicts in the programme schedule did impact negatively on some festivals and should not have been allowed to happen. The Skye Music Festival was cross-scheduled with the Invernessfest, one of the four main events in the entire programme. A Lochaber Festival was scheduled to coincide with the huge Mountain Bike World Championships in the same town of Fort William.

Marketing

In every way – and aggravated by the lack of a coherent vision for the initiative, marketing was the failure of the event. Awareness of Highland 2007 did not reach much beyond the Highlands and Islands with 60% of Scots outside the region remaining unaware of the year-long event.

While contributing factors were problems in establishing and maintaining the brand and a lack of ‘promotional dressing’ (banners and flags), there were three major factors in this failure:

• inadequate staffing – marketing had a core staff of two – a heavily under-resourced unit for so major an event
• the role of VisitScotland – which was bedevilled by the ‘Bad Fairy’ syndrome familiar to Sleeping Beauty fans. Unlike EventScotland which provided on of the Scottish Government’s three appointees, VisitScotland was not represented on the main Board for Highland 2007. Nevertheless it had agreed to provide £2 million of support in-kind for the event, on the marketing side.
• no real awareness in any area of responsibility within Highland 2007 of how websites need to work in the 21st century, in their technical structure, in their operation and in their design. Yet the website was – theoretically correctly – regarded and used as the major marketing instrument in the campaign.

The consequences of VisitScotland being left as a disconnected outsider were that:

• It did not specify until well into 2006 quite what the benefits were that it would provide.
• It did not adopt a collaborative approach to the marketing of the project, preferring to make its own decisions and take its own actions rather than be guided by the wishes and strategy of the permanent staff with responsibility for the event.
• This left the Highland 2007 marketing staff unable to shape the campaign as they would have wished.

There is no doubt that VisitScotland brought value to the project through its contacts and its systems, but that value was less effective than it could have been had it felt more included and had its stance been different.

The consequences of inadequate online marketing knowledge and inappropriate website capability were that:

• it was almost always behind in updating – with information coming from providers, through Highland 2007 staff and then to the website manager who worked part-time
• it had no advanced Search facility
• its core function was unclear – with confusion between its role as a conduit of information for projects and promoters applying for funding to add events to the programme and its role as the main source of information on the programme for potential audiences. The survey foud that downloads from the site were almost exclusively information packs on the funding process.
• it lacked visible prioritising of the core programme events, failing to distinguish adequately between them, the major regional events and the raft of community events included

Management issues

While the work of the three main funders at Board level (the Scottish Government, Highland Council and Highlands & Islands Enterprise) was seen as open, cooperative and something of a model for public sector partnership, two key issues are recognised by the Board itself as leaving room for improvement.

• The lack of any private sector involvement at Board level may have deprived management of some critical areas of expertise and of credibility – in event management, in festival organisation and in cultural programming.
• The lack of a coherent, consistent and manifest vision left Highland 2007 attempting to be all things to all people and to be indiscriminately inclusive in its programme, weakening the brand.

Conclusions on the event

Former First Minister, Jack McConnell who began the initiative, set it specific challenges. One of these was that it should change the perspectives of the rest of Scotland on the Highlands and Islands. It didn’t come close.

On the figures, the event could not have been judged a success. It didn’t ‘wash it’s face’ in the relation of cost to income generated. A 1.3% increase in visitor numbers is quite a modest return on a significant overall investment. An estimated increase of £260,000 per annum in repeat visits the year has generated is close to negligible.

But the investment in capital projects that would not have happened without the commitment to run Highland 2007 has left significant benefits to the cultural infrastructure of the region and embraces the Gaelic culture in no small way.

The fact that there were in the end 400 community events in the programme as opposed to the prior estimate of 150 is testimony to the spread of the event across the Highlands.

Another positive was that young highlanders were shown, through the surveys, to have reported a changed sense of Highland culture, in distinct contract to older people who reported little. The younger audience also said that it was a year when there was plenty to do – an unusual and welcome experience for young people in rural areas.

Lessons have been learned outwith those noted above. A continuing criticism was the contracting of Unique Events, producers of Edinburgh’s annual Hogmanay street party, to create and run the main elements of the programme: the opening and closing events, Invernessfest and Outsider. While this company has the expertise and experience to run major public events safely, the report notes that there was little planning to transmit some of this knowledge to locals working with the company throughout the year.

While it is important not to adopt a ‘Fortress Highland’ approach, presenting highland-only acts and employing highland-only contractors, it is vital that the employment of top flight (and expensive ) professionals from elsewhere is managed to leave a local legacy of skills and experience.

A system for doing this could be deployed not only in the cultural industry but in economic development. Where international firms in any field are attracted to operate in Scotland through the offer of state subsidy, the same system for a transfer of skills and experience could be applied. This would ensure that when the end of the contracted operating period is up and such firms depart for new subsidies elsewhere – as they do (see Vestas and Campbeltown as a current example), there would be a methodically prepared local team to take over.

Conclusions on the report

As the formal report on a three-year evaluation process, which must have been an valuable contract, the report is recurringly careless in much of its detail, unsound in some of its core methodology and casual in its digital presentation.

Figures are rendered variously throughout. The event is said to have funded 100 capital projects, then later that figure is given as 136. A list of the main capital projects funded included Thurso Town Hall and Nairn Community Centre. A similar later list, omits these projects, though both involved significant financial commitment.

The way investment into the core operation of the event and into the core-funded key elements of its programme was managed remains opaque in the report’s account.

While the report rightly applied a multiplier to visitor spend on the year-long programme in order to calculate its true value to the community, it did not also apply a multiplier either to the funding for the Highland 2007 organisations or to the investment in capital projects. Had it done so it would have illustrated better the total positive economic impact on the Highlands of the year-long event. It may well have chosen not to do so in order to lessen the negative gulf between investment and return but as a financial analysis this is incomplete.

Presentationally, while the pagination of the hard copy form of the report would be manageable in the hand, that is not the case with the digital pdf form. Here the failure to include the Executive Summary in the pagination means that the page numbers given in the Table of Contents do not correlate to the page numbers in the pdf page scroller. This omission makes it a frustrating document to read as the guess-and-stab solution is time consuming.

Key evidence from the report

Finally, the report produced a compelling piece of evidence that could contribute to planning for future events. Both residents and non-residents of Scotland gave their top three perceived strengths of the Highlands as the lansdscape / environment; traditional music; and historic places and buildings. (Non-residents reversed the order of the last two elements.)

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