We are proud to announce that we have won in the first ever Digital Culture Awards for the ‘Data Driven’ category. This was a result of gathering data to understand the needs of our communities, producing meaningful change.
Over the past year, we have collected and released data for Black History Month, International Women’s Day as well as the COVID-19 impact survey. All three data drops helped shape how Sound and Music caters to our communities, in order to champion equality.
We are still one of very few organisations that publish our data annually. It means that we can be held accountable and people can see what we are doing to bring change.
Our Black History Month 2021 data was released in November last year. It highlighted where the organisation is doing well or not so well, without bias, simply presenting facts. Our CEO, Susanna Eastburn MBE then reflected on these findings — creating a plan for the future.
In May of 2021, International Women’s Day came around we released and reviewed our data surrounding women. Similar to Black History Month, we used this data to empower our goals of gender equality. We have predicted that Sound and Music will reach the goal of 50:50 representation by 2022.
Finally, we released a COVD-19 impact survey in February 2021. This survey revealed how different composers were affected by the pandemic. For example, the COVID-19 Impact Survey showed that the impact of the pandemic on composers was being felt more greatly outside of London. This allowed us to ringfence all funding for round 3 of the COVID-19 Composer Awards for composers outside of the capital.
Sound of Music has spent years battling to dismantle the barriers people face when creating music and we have used data to empower this fight — we will continue to use this approach in 2022.
Read our data driven projects that helped us get shortlisted:
Black History Month 2021
International Women’s Day 2021
COVID-19 Impact Survey