Pre-Piloting Diagnostics at Cultural Trend Lisbon (CTL)

As a cultural organisation, we generate and manage a significant volume of data. Our pre-piloting diagnostics revealed that while our diversity data is abundant, it is not yet structured in ways that consistently inform strategic decision-making. With the launch of our new multicultural space, Casa Capitão, our data needs have evolved significantly. This shift has made us realise that we need more structured, human-centred tools to analyse, interpret, and share insights across our network – an essential step for maximising the Accelerator’s impact.  

Our cultural ecosystem

Our ecosystem is purposefully diverse. Above all, we value artistic diversity, experimental artists, and focus intensely on supporting anti-racist and inclusive messaging in our audiences, communities, artists and partners.   

We organise festivals, multidisciplinary projects, and manage a cultural centre that includes a concert venue, an after-hours dance venue and a restaurant, representing culture through food. We also organise discussions and support written-word activities through critical reflection sessions and workshops.   

Our digital environment is shaped by both structural pressures and emerging opportunities. On one hand, we face persistent challenges common to the cultural sector: fragmented data systems, decentralised information flows, limited integration across platforms, and the ongoing need to adapt to rapidly evolving technologies. On the other hand, we see strong potential in using digital tools to better understand our audiences and their preferences, and to foster more collaborative, data-driven management processes. Navigating this tension defines our current digital reality.  

We joined EXCENTRIC to address these challenges, learn from peer organisations, and co-develop practical tools. We are particularly motivated to contribute to an open-source solution that can benefit the wider cultural sector.  

Key challenges and organisational needs

Throughout EXCENTRIC, we have identified several organisational needs. Most notably, there is a clear disconnect between what we aspire to achieve and the absence of internal tools and policies to effectively measure and track those accomplishments.  

The diagnostic process to date has revealed a significant gap in documented, written policies that can be easily shared with new hires and across departments. In addition, there is a lack of structured, recurring reviews of these policies and of our overall performance and results.  

One of the key challenges within this project is bridging this gap while avoiding unnecessary administrative burdens. We operate in a fast-paced, constantly evolving environment, which requires our operations to remain agile and adaptable. At the same time, we must establish clear frameworks that enable us to measure outcomes, ensure accountability, and communicate our results transparently to our partners.  

Along with our Portuguese partner venues, we are part of the CURVA Festival, which aims at promoting diversity, inclusion and representation. We have been collecting and analysing diversity data for years to better understand our program offering, as well as to compare and improve programming diversity with our partners across the country.  Our current need, therefore, is an analytical tool that can help us gather and analyse more diversity data, so that diversity is not just a concept but a measurable metric we can use to further diversify our programming decisions.   

New opportunities ahead

Once we mapped our data reality, we discovered several important opportunities. First, we identified the need for clear, structured policies that support onboarding while serving as practical reference points for current staff. Second, the process highlighted the value of establishing recurring feedback loops, especially regular policy reviews and structured evaluations, to assess progress, identify gaps, and guide decisions based on measurable outcomes.  

We also identified an opportunity to design policies that are adaptable to our fast-changing environment. Rather than static documents, our policies can be living frameworks that are reviewed and refined regularly to remain relevant and effective.  

The diagnostics clearly showed us that there is an opportunity to create a tool that could measure diversity. Through EXCENTRIC, we hope to find ways to standardise our existing data, write out clear definitions of diversity markers and create a tool that would help us retrieve, manage and analyse the diversity data to create a positive impact on our programming. As far as data sharing opportunities, we are open to sharing our process, our data and hopefully the tool with any interested pilots.  

Our next steps with the accelerator

Through the Accelerator, we aim to formalise and align our internal policies, ensure they are accessible and collectively owned across CTL, and establish recurring, data-informed review moments. By the end of the process, we want measurable indicators especially around diversity and programming to be structurally integrated into our operational workflows and future decision-making.  

The primary beneficiaries of this use case are our staff, who will gain clearer frameworks and shared reference points to guide their work. Artists and audiences will benefit from a more consistent, transparent, and diverse programming approach, supported by a diversity tool embedded in our decision-making. In the long term, we expect this to foster more inclusive cultural offerings and attract broader, more diverse audiences.