The Hidden Cost

Introduction

Understanding hidden digital labour in the cultural sector

Chapter 1

Why this report

“What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

This is the second in an annual series of investigations into the conditions surrounding digital work in the cultural sector. The first, Beyond the Promise, looked at digital failure, specifically why it happens, what it costs, and what the sector keeps getting wrong in its approach to digital projects. That work found that digital failure is rarely technical, instead the root causes are often organisational, and they cluster around issues like unclear goals, poor planning, inconsistent buy-in, and a persistent gap between what digital work actually requires and what organisations are prepared to invest in it.

The questions I’ve chosen to focus on this year come directly from my own experience. Across a career spent in-house, agency-side, and now as a consultant, I've repeatedly noticed how much of the digital work I was doing, or that the people I was working alongside were doing, was simply invisible to everyone outside those roles. Early in my career I was often the first person hired into newly created, dedicated digital positions, and I found that my job description quickly bore less and less resemblance to what the job(s) actually required. In a relatively short amount of time my responsibilities had often ballooned, which was usually exciting, but I also felt that very few of the people that I worked with understood the real breadth and nature of my work and what I was required to do, which caused a number of issues and frustrations.

Fig 0.1. Placeholder — artwork to come.

Chapter 2

Hidden digital work

I've since worked with hundreds of digital practitioners across all levels of seniority and in most types of cultural organisation, and a version of that same dynamic has been present in almost every situation.

What I have discovered is that so much of what the digital specialists working in cultural organisations actually do is deeply necessary but is often unplanned, goes unrecognised, or is simply not understood or even seen by the people around them. This is what I'm calling hidden digital work.

I wanted to understand how widespread this hidden work was, what forms it takes, what causes it, and what its impact is on the people responsible for doing it. This report is an attempt to answer those questions. It draws on a survey completed by 187 digital practitioners across the sector, and a series of 15 in-depth interviews in which people shared with me the complex and often exhausting reality of work that their organisations depend on but rarely see or acknowledge.

I hope it makes and supports the case that this is not a niche problem or a matter of individual circumstance. It is endemic and it is worth taking seriously because the cultural sector depends on digital work to reach audiences and sustain its operations. Neil Williams, Executive Director of Technology and Digital Transformation at the British Film Institute, describes the role that digital actually plays for cultural organisations, “it’s core to how you deliver your services and how audiences perceive you, it’s your best opportunity to scale access and revenue, it’s an ever-evolving suite of products that need constant upkeep and iteration, and it’s a real-time insights engine to inform how you continuously optimise everything you do”. This description makes the gap between that reality and how most organisations plan for and resource digital work all the more striking.

This report will of course be received differently depending on who is reading it. If you work in digital, then I hope some of what follows feels true in a way that is useful — that it gives you language and evidence to start conversations you have probably been trying to have for a while. If you lead a cultural organisation, I hope it gives you an honest picture of what is happening in your organisation that you may not currently be able to see, and a sense of what it would take to change it. And if you fund the sector, I hope it makes visible a set of costs that almost never appear in an application or a report, and raises some questions worth asking before your next round.

The people keeping cultural organisations' digital infrastructure running are doing more than anyone ever formally asked them to do, in conditions that aren't improving. But those conditions aren't fixed. They were made, and they can be changed.

Ash Mann September 2026