Cost	Percentage
Research & Development	395,931	7%
ECF digital, incl. LabforCulture	307,301	5%
Publications	49,391	1%
Total Sources of Knowledge	752,623	12%

Narratives for Europe

2012 marked the end of the first phase of our investigation on Narratives for Europe, which has been a key theme for ECF over the past four years. We published our findings through both online and offline platforms, as well as contributing key topics to ECF’s Imagining Europe event in October. ECF is one of the few cultural organisations that is investing in a long-term reflection on these narratives, which articulate an urgent need for new European visions that are shared by citizens and policy-makers across Europe.

Highlights of 2012 include:

• The publication Remappings – The Making of European Narratives brings together the views of key intellectuals and comic artists who have been involved in ECF reflection groups over the last three years, exploring the ways new narratives emerge in a changing European context. This publication launched in Amsterdam on 6 December and is the first of a new ECF collection of publications.
  • In our online ECF lab, Narratives for Europe offers inspiring insights on these new European stories: young journalists, activists and artists from Europe and beyond discuss the current processes that shape the European landscape of today and tomorrow. The Reading Room section offers reflections and essays on the making of new Narratives .

Developing an evaluation methodology for ECF

ECF has begun to gather information and to identify tools for evaluating long-term cultural projects and their social impact.

Alongside research on communities of  practice in the cultural sector (Bigger than self by S.Wright and C. Tims – MMM, UK), ECF has commissioned the Erasmus Centre for Strategic Philanthropy to carry out a study on how to evaluate the effects and impact of our core Networked Project, which begins in 2013.

Narratives for Europe
We have built up a network of more than 40 renowned journalists, activists, writers and academics, as well as artists and comic artists, who have contributed to the Narratives for Europe online space.

Press
Prior to the ECF’s Imagining Europe event, ECF and De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch weekly magazine) published a supplement called Een ander Europa/Imagining Europe, which was distributed to 22,000 people. The content was delivered by contributors to ECF’s online Narratives for Europe space and by De Groene Amsterdammer journalists.

Social media
An important objective of the Narratives for Europe website is to build up an international high-level expert community that makes an important contribution to the topic. In 2012, we opened both a dedicated Facebook page (with a potential outreach of more than 200,000 contacts) and a Twitter feed (as well with a potentially large outreach – for example, one of our followers alone has 350,000 followers). Through these channels, we are seeing a steady growth of dedicated key personalities from the fields of media, culture and politics. The target for 2013 is to keep this growing momentum and to maximise the use of these communications channels and broaden ECF’s network and outreach.

The dedicated e-zine on ECF’s publication Remappings – the Making of European Narratives generated a good deal of interest, with more than 500 copies of the book sent out, generating more than 300 new contacts for the ECF database.

Assessing the impact of long-term cultural programmes is virtually terra incognita. ECF should partner with other cross-border cultural organisations and research agencies to enhance experiences and capacities for impact assessment in the cultural sector.

The establishment of an R&D policy offers real added value for ECF, providing it is strongly embedded in all ECF’s activities. However, we realised we do need to engage in collaboration with universities and research agencies in view of raising our research profile.

ECF will reinforce its R&D activities by merging with our Advocacy team in 2013. Following some paths mapped out by our reflection on narratives, ECF is investigating the thematic of Europe seen from outside (in close collaboration with our Advocacy work – see More Europe). Also we have started to investigate an intergenerational approach regarding the experience of, and engagement in, Europe (pilot project: Generation). Further to this pilot, ECF and two partner organisations have started to explore ways of turning intergenerational questions within organisations into advantages at both staff and governance level.

Upcoming highlights include:

• Conference in May 2013: The Dwarfing of Europe: the old continent, new perspectives on an old world in cooperation with Tilburg University and De Balie in Amsterdam.
• Developing the online community of Narratives for Europe and the collection of contributions to ECF’s work; expanding also to contributors from the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China); engage in a content partnership with Writers Unlimited, Winternachten Festival.
• Initiating several debates on culture, creative communities and democracy.
• Application for EU funding in process on intergenerational learning in cultural working environments and beyond (in cooperation with the British Council).

An ECF Lab is an online space bringing together like-minded people. A Lab provides online tools aimed at simplifying communication, promotion, creation and engagement within a particular topic. Labs are multifunctional, and can be used as a portfolio, a micro blogging platform or an online discussion space.

In April 2012, the ECF Digital and Grants teams began to collaborate more closely to find new ways of looking at the STEP Beyond Travel grants scheme. Four months later, we published a new online application form that encourages young artists and cultural workers to join the ECF Labs community.

The new site allows each applicant to monitor submitted projects, to follow the grant process and to share information among a network of peers. Behind the scenes, a tailor-made monitoring system also allows ECF’s Grants team to manage the workflow process for each application.

Modelled on the ECF’s own Intranet, the STEP Beyond Lab was the first externally-facing and entirely user-generated space on ecflabs.org. Very soon we were able to look at exciting new possibilities. We designed a framework that is flexible enough to be applied to unlimited purposes.

We identified ECF staff as a natural testing group to measure the involvement of individuals using our new online tool. In October, we relaunched the ECF Intranet following the new ECF Labs model. It quickly became a very vibrant space, buzzing with comments, media shares and uploads.

In the future, ECF Labs aim to host a growing number of Labs that are run and moderated by their community members. We believe that an Internet-based social network involving creative people will result in more rewarding networking possibilities and a targeted audience that is both receptive and accessible.

ecflabs.org encourages direct feedback from the community and connects diverse perspectives on European issues. The united voices of its members will be instrumental in creating this specialised social media network that shares a commonality – a desire to propel European art and culture towards the future.

The launch of ECF Labs represents a major shift towards becoming a more synergetic online community. However, LabforCulture.org has not been forgotten. In November, ECF hosted a Labforculture Steering Committee meeting, demonstrating how the LabforCulture project has evolved into the ECF Labs collaborative online community.

Although it is no longer updated with edited content, LabforCulture.org represents an important step in ECF’s Digital history. After careful review, we decided to run LabforCulture.org as a read-only archive from 2013, onwards. Current LabforCulture community members will be informed about the launch of ECF Labs and will be invited to register on the new online platform.

This planning phase took more time than we anticipated, reminding us just how much effort and dedication is required to simply maintain an online community space.

In 2013 ECF Labs will evolve into a highly collaborative online community focused on special interests. The objective is to encourage discussion across wide-ranging subject areas, where the content is entirely generated by users.

In 2013, we will first open a project roadmap blog, to introduce the online audience to the team behind ECF Labs and gradually unfold a long-term strategy. We are planning to release the final version of the ECF Labs online framework in April. The next Lab in 2013 will welcome the Young Cultural Policy Researchers forum, currently hosted on LabforCulture.org.

In the second half of the year, we will focus on promotion and communication of the new community space, together with the development of a mobile interface to ensure a user-friendly experience.

In 2012, we produced a wide range of publications, both online and offline, to support our programme-based activities and our corporate activities and events. In December 2012, we launched Remappings – The Making of European Narratives, a collection of commissioned essays inspired by our Narratives theme. This is the first in a series of new publications that encourage reflection, debate and knowledge sharing. We also engaged in our partners’ publishing work, especially within our European Neighbourhood Programme.

Check out our publications here.

The new house style as developed in 2011 proved to provide a valuable grid for a variety of ECF publications, for corporate communication tools and programme-driven books and booklets alike.

However, consistency of publications published in partnerships is still an issue, as is distribution: we do need to develop effective ways of “selling” what we do and we also continuously need to invest in media partnerships for wider outreach.

One of our main goals for 2013 is to set up a framework to manage the frequency, variety and consistency of our publications and to ensure that we get our message across to all relevant target audiences.

We will develop a publications strategy that supports and enhances ECF’s work and that is in line with the new strategic plan for 2013–2016. This strategy needs to consider quality, accessibility and distribution.