 I don't know if everybody here was here, I was lucky enough to be here on Tuesday and some of you hopefully will have heard the keynote speech by Geoffrey Crosig, a very thought provoking speech. Amongst other things he noted in his opinion, the personal experience of culture has been undervalued. The value does not reside in the document, the artefact or the performance, but in the process and engagement. He also noted that the cultural sector needed to develop more sophisticated and nuanced ways to demonstrate value. Both these observations resonated with me as my paper this afternoon is in a small way about enabling us to continue to help people engage in our collections whilst the task of creating more nuanced advocacy at a national level is achieved. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to show a little of how we have tried to demonstrate the value of Worcestershire Archive and Archaeologists service in ways that address the values, concerns and pressures on colleagues within the County Council and so enable them to be advocates for us. This inevitably boils down to money. To do this without losing your soul or should I say your professional values, you do need I think to hold two thoughts in your head at the same time. One is the intrinsic value of engagement with our collections and the second is the need to use the language of a monetary value to ensure their continued existence and until we have more effective ones. I am conscious that you, like me, engage in this every day, so this is not a paper on how to do this, but just one way we have tried and the lessons we've learnt along the way. First I'm going to do a very quick background to what we have and have not achieved just to give it a bit of context. Okay, so who are we? We are archaeologists and archivists who work separately and together, increasingly together on projects supported by a cross-service learning and outreach team. We were created in January 2012 from two separate services, obviously to save money, and we moved into the Hive, a big golden building in spring in 2012. At that point we had 58 full-time equivalent staff. As of now we have 46 full-time equivalent staff, but between in those five years we have lost an additional 60% of our budget. We'd already lost some, obviously, and it starts to get a bit difficult to work out exactly how much it is, but I'd say it's between probably 60-65% a little more overall in about the last six years. So what do we do? You're not supposed to read that it, what I'm saying really is. Like many local government organisations we have to be all things to all people. We deliver a very wide range of services to very varied stakeholders. And then you might say well it's all right for you because you're in a lovely big golden building and indeed we are. The Hive is an amazingly beautiful building. It is the only combined public and university, properly combined university and public library in Europe, and it is the only one in the world that has those services and an archive and archaeology service and a hub. And it's a joy to work in. The children's library is as big as a small school, and I love the bounce and rhyme sessions which you can hear all over the building. So it is an absolutely amazing building. It's open 100 hours a week, which is a challenge in itself, but I would just say it has not protected us from cuts, but it has helped raise our profile, which I think is very significant. So here is the challenge. What we have here is our turnover in 2011-12, 1.26 million. Last year 1.03 and it's probably about 1.1 this year, when we get to the end of it hopefully. But the point is in 2011-12 we got 1.15 million pounds from the county council for our statutory functions. And what I have done, if you note underneath, this doesn't include our commercial archaeological field section because they've always been externally funded so county council money didn't go towards them so they skew the figures. So this is just our statutory archive service, our learning and outreach service and also our historic environment record and archaeological planning service. So at first we brought in 117,000 pounds, not bad at all. By last year though as you can see the county council funding has gone down to 534,000 pounds and our external funding has gone up to 497. I think this year it'll just kind of go like that. So that's been a big change for us. And here we look at our staffing level so if we look when we moved in, again not including the commercial field section, we've got 37 and now we've got 32 full time equivalents. And I have to say that so we're quite pleased about that. It's gone down but not too much given the huge cuts. So I just want to talk a little bit about the journey. As we know nothing stays the same, without change there is no history so however it's my experience that you get better at change. You see more opportunities, you develop partnership working with colleagues, for instance Archive West Midlands. So I thought I needed to just kind of take you quickly through the journey of where we came from, where we are now. So in the first instance when we moved into the service we created a vision of a service funded by local government and external funding based on archaeological and archive models of our own services. The archaeological side were used to putting together small amounts of money, joining it up and employing people for permanently. The archive side, their model was to have big and very successful grants to take people on and lay them off. If you put the two together that's quite good. So we put the two together we get big grants and small grants but our aim is not to take on and then lose staff. So our aim was to minimise the effects of budget cuts by moving staff from internal to external funding. And therefore we reorganised all the services and made roles more flexible and income focused so that colleagues were aware of the changes within their job descriptions and also understood about the model that we were trying to present. So things were going really well, you know, it was great. And then savings targets were greatly increased. I remember, I can see it now, July 2013 my manager came to me and said sit down Victoria you need to take an extra £300,000 out and by the way I want the business case next week. So it was like, all right, okay. But on top of that, on top of actually something that we could actually plan for, I'm sure in all organisations you'll recognise this. There's always like surprise cuts which always come at the end of the financial year and they increase, they decrease the amount of money you have and they make budget planning almost impossible. So we realised at that time that external grants couldn't deliver a surplus. So we needed to, and a surplus was what we needed to protect ourselves and give ourselves more financial stability. So we needed to develop a more commercial model. So from 2015 to 16 we've been, we were selling the concept of a business within local government to the directorate. Now we looked at all sorts of models but we need, for reasons I'll come on to in a minute, we needed to stay within local government at the moment at least. So we asked the scrutiny committee to come and look at us. They thought we were very good and we had nothing to hide and it was very positive and the document from that really helped us. We went through the commissioning process. For those of you who don't work in local government that means every service has to take it all to bits, you look at all the different bits of it, you decide which are value for money, which are not value for money, which could be delivered externally and then quite often what happens is they're broken up. But we did manage to demonstrate we were excellent value for money and I'll get on to that. So what we have now is local government with privileges as I like to call it. I don't think it's got, it's not a tackle, it's not a, you know, basically we keep the bank of Worcestershire. For a service like mine cash flow is the most important thing. We're getting lots of little bits of money and because we've got the bank of Worcestershire as long as we bring in the money we need for our staffing and our costs at the end of year, that's okay. To service a bank loan would be, it just wouldn't be possible at the moment. We got, so we got agreement to stay within the county council. We got an agreement to no more budget cuts which amazingly has actually happened and that we would share the surplus. We haven't actually made any yet but that's the principle and you'll see later on why that seemed attractive to them. So if any surplus they get 25% we keep 75%. We got investment from our directorate in product development and marketing and that was an externally created website and more importantly the kind of marketing that goes with that which the county council doesn't, they don't need to have that kind of marketing expertise but we needed it. We had the ability to carry over a surplus within the directorate, in other words we could develop reserves and we could invest. This gave us financial stability and the possibility of growth in the future. So how are we doing? Well after four years we finally have permission to speculate to accumulate thanks to our directorate. We have a modern payment system at last. We have a commercial website and marketing support provided by an excellent organisation called Connecting Element based in Birmingham. And we have developed a new offer which we hope will appeal to the international family history market and a little bit more on that later. Lessons learnt. I'm sure these are probably fairly noddy but I'll give them a go anyway. The first and most important is you are the best advocate for your service, wherever you are in that service. If you don't believe in what you're doing then why should anyone else? People need to trust you. If they do not trust you they will not listen to you and I think that's something that it took me quite a long time to work out. All your team must be very clear on what your goals and strategies are and the strategies for achieving those goals. I'd be looking at three to five years but obviously that could change as I mentioned earlier in a week. So just our goals, they're not necessarily, nobody else may necessarily want them but our goals and they have been, they're quite simple and straightforward and they've stayed with us right from the beginning. The first is to continue to deliver what we believe is an excellent service and the second is to grow that service at the first opportunity. We need capacity. So our strategy to deliver that is to maintain staff levels as much as possible by increasing external income. Now obviously we have had to make some redundancies, you could see that from the slides that I put up but I think the important thing about that is that all staff however they actually funded when there were issues of redundancies everybody was in the same pool. So nobody was privileged or the opposite and I think that's really important for staff morale and for them actually understanding where we're trying to go. So the third one which I feel very strongly is always do it to yourself before someone does it to you so that you can retain as much control as possible. So we asked to be looked at by scrutiny, we went through commissioning a year or more earlier than we were programmed to, we reorganised when we wanted to, we weren't told to do it. And I feel that's really, really important. So creating advocates, we gradually learnt that we need to create real advocates within our organisation and that external advocates can help us to do that. One of the most powerful we found has actually been the National Archives so thank you very much. But the example I'm going to use is one a little closer to home. The chief, we were very lucky, the chief executive of Hereford and Worcester Chamber of Commerce and a business consultant who are interested in what we did gave us their time for free to develop our ideas to add in new ideas and to help us write a business case, a business proposal to pitch to our director. Now because of who they were that was written in the terms of a business case you make to a bank but it got us to that first stage. And I think really importantly the chief executive of the Chamber of Commerce came with me to the meeting. I've worked in local government 30 years and I think it's perfectly reasonable for people to say what does she know about business. You know it's like really you know. So I think it's really important we had somebody there and he literally said it's a no brainer do it. Not totally sure if that was true but that's what he said so that was good. So you have to have advocates that's fine but you have to have advocates within your organisation and you have to give them the information that they need to support you. If you need to write business cases again and again in different formats do it. You need to give each set of people the information in a form they feel easy with. For instance having agreed to our business plan in principle our director needed to go through the commissioning process so I had to rewrite all that stuff in the form of a commissioning a needs assessment for the commissioning process. My heart sank but actually it was the most valuable document I have ever written because it allowed us to show the value of what we did in the terms our head of service director and cabinet member could use to support us. Now this is the dullest slide in the world and I don't expect you to read it but I had to put it up because this little calculation is our golden ticket or possibly our holy grail. My services within economy and infrastructure largely to do with the archaeological and planning element of it and our director has his own way of determining what is good value which of his services are good value. He uses this concept with services that have elements of statutory work in them. What is the cost to mothball the service? If we could deliver for the same or less then we got his support to pursue our strategic goals. This was a really interesting piece of work. We produced lots of other statistics but this was the absolute killer and we got a lot of help with this. What we did was I thought let's take our statutory services and get rid of absolutely everything else and then put that down to its absolute minimum so it would be maybe we had access to original documents for 20 hours a week but we had nobody taking inquiries, we had material coming in, there would be somebody to basically box it and look after it but that would be about it. So the salaries come down massively obviously when you do that. But then the key was we deal with thousands and thousands of inquiries a year and there's a calculation that can tell you which one of those would be freedom of information requests. So we went through one year and worked out what percentage of our inquiries if we weren't there would have been freedom of information requests. All through this process I was trying to keep it down because I wanted to be absolutely sure, I didn't want to inflate it, I wanted to be absolutely sure that this was solid. So I put up salaries for a service that might have lost us our place of deposit possibly but I thought well go for the absolute minimum. With the freedom of information requests I didn't increase them over time or I actually took a sort of average and I also didn't take the national cost for each freedom of inquiry, I made it a lot less. I put in a bit for supplies and services and then I put in a little bit of the cost for our HR and planning advice, historic environment record and planning advice that the county council does need and it came to £470,000 £434, £470,434, I won't speak any more at the end of the day. Now if you look at those other figures you'll realise that's awfully close to the £500,000 which is what we're actually having this year. So in other words you get rid of everything, you get rid of our amazing service which has one plaudits and is very well respected and like to get rid of our learning and outreach team. You get rid of our archaeological team, you get rid of everything and it's still only going to save you a few thousand pounds and of course realistically it wouldn't actually save anything because really it's more than that. So basically at this point it became very clear that our commercial and grant money was in fact subsidising the statutory service and that if they take any more out and we fall over they will actually end up paying more and this is why this was the golden ticket. This was and still is our strongest definition of good value and by its very nature makes the case for all of the services being together because all of them have to create money to support the statutory role so that we can deliver all this for the cost of almost nothing. All through the process of the scrutiny committee and commissioning within the county council, we have needed advocates, we have needed advocates within the county council so obviously our advocates were my head of service, the director, our cabinet member but also I feel very very strongly that you also need advocates in HR, procurement, finance, the commercial teams that were supporting us through the commissioning process, admin, IT and other service managers and without them I think it would have been probably almost impossible to have achieved what we did to have got those agreements. People will help if they can, you know the ones who don't so don't waste too much time on them, most people actually want to help you and these colleagues are actually your greatest allies in making the case and very importantly they're at meetings you're not and I think that's really quite significant especially with finance colleagues. So that's advocates there, I think also the other very powerful lesson that we've learned is that working with other professionals in similar or more different organisation makes all the difference and Archive West Midlands again is like a perfect example of this. This enables you to deliver larger projects, to share skills, to increase profile and it seems to be positive by local government and I think probably every other organisation as well. Now I'm just going to run through very quickly a whole range of slides about one of our commercial ventures. This one that I'm going to talk about very briefly is the riskiest but potentially the most lucrative. Just before I start however I want to emphasise the principle behind our principles behind commercialisation. This is why I think you have to hold two things together in your head at the same time. If you visitors access to data and advice is free as are our online catalogs of course but if you wish to access documents remotely or ask us questions by ringing us up or asking us to do a piece of work for you there is a reasonable charge. That is how we make sure that we're actually still acting on behalf of the people of Worcestershire and as a statutory service that's the way we see it. We have a new website which is nice because our county council one wasn't very nice. This is absolutely the minimum at the moment and we will be growing it. And it's really at the moment a vehicle for our research guide. This is our most risky but positively most lucrative product. We created a research guide to English Archive collections but focused on our own. This is a downloadable PDF. It points to people in the direction of online resources, our own included but on the history find my pass etc. But then shows how they can use our services to get access to particular documents that only they might need. And all through the document it points to the commercial services we can offer and points them into our enquiries and payment system. So for advice, digitisation, research, conservation, whatever. We've only just launched this and it's £6 which is a bit of a bargain and if you'd like to have a look at it please feel free to download one. We are focusing on the markets in the rest of the UK but particularly on the English speaking diaspora which I think is potentially a huge market for family history resource. Of this type. We're breaking into a potentially huge or touching at the moment a potentially huge but not developed market. Imagine if all the archives in the country offered this facility or something similar. We have unique collections and would therefore not be competing against each other but collectively we would be providing really a quite gobsmacking service and one that could help us to raise money. And it's much cheaper than the cost of a plane ticket. And just going to whizz through a bit this is just some very nicely designed and we have archaeology as well so that's helpful. To conclude I'd like to emphasise that this is only one approach and there are many others. So this is just what we've done. But finally I'd really like to pay tribute to the inspiration, hard work and professional dedication of my colleagues particularly in the archive and archaeology service but also in the rest of the council without which we wouldn't be where we were. So thank you.