Barker Langham launches financial planning tool for culture sector

19 April 2021 Consultancy.uk

Cultural consultancy Barker Langham has launched a new tool that enables cultural institutions to build business plans for museums, galleries, arts venues, cultural and heritage projects.

Barker Langham is a global cultural consultancy, creating pioneering and sustainable projects for museums, historical sites, governments and charities. It has delivered over 250 projects, from community oral history initiatives to international mega-museums, while its team includes museum and culture professionals living and working across Europe, China, Africa, the Middle East and North America.

Due to the firm’s every-day work with cultural organisations, Barker Langham was acutely aware of the difficulties faced by many institutions as they move forward in a post-pandemic world. As a result, the firm has launched Barker Langham Analytics – a business planning tool that allows efficient modelling of financial data to help institutions make business decisions.

Barker Langham launches financial planning tool for culture sector

Darren Barker, Founder of Barker Langham, explained, “Barker Langham Analytics was initially developed to help our clients develop dynamic business planning models that address these challenges, and we want to support the wider industry by making this tool available to all.”

The online tool assimilates financial data in a financial model to produce a budget or a business plan. Barker Langham Analytics contains separate modules where organisations can enter information about their staff, audiences, income streams and expenditure – before creating and reporting a business plan in a single, cloud-based location. The output is a summary of an entity’s expenses and earnings over a period of time, in the form of visual graphs and tables, while the tool also calculates the impact of a future event or decision via easily adjustable sliders for real-time scenario analysis.

Barker Langham is making the tool available without charge, something it says is “our contribution to the renewal and re-imagining of business models for the sector.” According to a release from the firm, Barker Langham Analytics will ultimately enable the cultural sector’s professionals to make better use of their time, pivoting away from investing large amounts of time in intensive business plan preparations, and spending more time assessing risks and making evidence-based decisions. 

Business planning has also proven essential to the ability of the non-profit sector to survive the economic impacts of the pandemic. The coronavirus crisis has placed third sector organisations under mounting pressure throughout the last year – and consultants have been working on various corporate social responsibility projects to help good causes around the world adapt and thrive during Covid-19.