BFI National Lottery Innovation Challenge Fund seeks to improve understanding of diversity in the film production workforce

The BFI National Lottery Innovation Challenge Fund is awarding £200,000 to the Creative Diversity Network (CDN) and £30,000 Design Otherwise CIC to address the longstanding challenge of collecting robust diversity data for the UK’s film production workforce. The funding enables research, consultation with industry and the testing of new technology to establish effective ways to collect and report diversity data. This will provide a clearer demographic picture of the sector and help drive transformative change to build a more diverse and inclusive industry. 

“We set this challenge as the film production industry has encountered a number of barriers to developing a coherent, industry-wide and systemic approach for collecting diversity data,” says Rishi Coupland, BFI Director of Research and Industry Innovation. “The BFI’s innovation funding will allow for essential R&D to make a lasting change in this area. We were impressed with the approaches of both CDN and Design Otherwise CIC towards building a more inclusive industry.” 

CDN will work alongside BAFTA Media Technology on their two-year project, using the funding to research and prototype a new system that collates diversity data for the UK’s film production sector. This system will be designed to collect data which is interoperable across existing film industry systems and embed advanced privacy measures, paving the way to safe and secure access to the data needed to understand the workforce. Through research, significant consultation across the industry and user testing, CDN aim to tackle cultural, technological and process barriers that have prevented these systems successfully being implemented for the film production workforce previously. Having created the Diamond data collection system for television and currently developing Diamond 2.0 to improve the existing system, CDN has significant expertise to bring to the project. 

Design Otherwise’s Evolving Equality project will review existing systems and criteria for diversity data collection. Led by Deborah Williams OBE and working with Corrick Wales & Partners, Evolving Equality will identify achievements and limitations, and improve our understanding of what data is needed and how data can be used to build more inclusive workplaces. Evolving Equality will provide recommendations and actionable insights to inform best practice. The project’s findings will help future-proof diversity data collection systems for greatest possible impact. 

The BFI National Lottery Innovation Challenge Fund, as part of the BFI’s National Lottery Funding Plan, 2023-2026, seeks to support new solutions to the UK screen sector’s most critical challenges. Between 2024 and 2026, up to £1.8 million will be distributed across up to six challenges, to help not-for-profit organisations to innovate, developing new approaches to persistent problems, whilst also gaining insights that benefit the whole screen sector. Its first call focused on the video games industry, followed by the AI for screen archives.