Digital Cultural Awards. Meet the Winner of the Using Data category! – Noise Solution CIC

We’re thrilled to announce the winners of the 2025 Digital Culture Awards!

Presented by the Digital Culture Network and Arts Council England, the awards recognise and celebrate the very best in digital transformation, digital engagement and use of technology in creativity and culture across England.

This year’s awards attracted almost 200 entries from a vast range of organisations and individuals. Our judging panel – made up of industry-leading digital experts from the sector, Digital Culture Network and Arts Council – chose six winners across the five categories, narrowed down from a longlist of over 60.

The winners were chosen for their exceptional use of digital tools and technology to transform their work, deepen engagement, and build resilience and inclusivity within their business and creative practices.

For over six years, the Digital Culture Network has been supporting organisations and individuals with their digital transformation projects, and we never cease to be inspired by the sector’s innovation and agility. Through the Tech Champion nominated Digital Culture Network Award, we’ve also recognised four additional organisations and individuals that we’ve supported, for their outstanding commitment to digital skills development or use of digital technology to drive change.

The breath and quality of the entries were outstanding this year. Library services used interactive digital installations to engage younger audiences, museums enhanced access to collections with AI, and individuals developed new ticketing integrations for eCommerce platforms and worked with tech companies to improve product inclusivity – to highlight just a few!

We were particularly excited to see a rise in entries to our Using Data and Digital Ambassador categories – reflecting a growing sector-wide recognition of the value of data, and the important role digital advocates play in driving change and building confidence.

Access and inclusive practices continue to be a key priority for many organisations and projects, employing digital technology in ambitious and inventive ways to create work by, with and for people who are often excluded from enjoying creativity and culture, and to engage with hard-to-reach communities.

Using Data

Noise Solution CIC – Beats and Stories: Demonstrating and improving outcomes

About Using Data  

This category recognises the innovative use of data collection and analysis to steer decision-making and drive impactful change. Entries could include but are not limited to; the use of user surveys, Google Analytics 4, data visualisation tools, customer or CRM data, or marketing data such as social media or emails.  

The Shortlist for this category was decided by our external Judge Katy Raines, Founder and CEO at Indigo Ltd – with support from the experts from the Digital Culture Network, and Arts Council England.

The Winner

Noise Solution CIC, based in Suffolk, is a social enterprise that strives to transform how individuals see themselves. It uses an evidence-based approach to deliver music mentoring programmes.

The winning project

Beats and Stories uses a blend of face-to-face and digital approaches to deliver exciting and engaging one-to-one music mentorship workshops to at-risk young people, working with 250 young people a year.

Personal mentoring from a music professional, which is focused on beat-making, is combined with a bespoke digital platform. This approach allows for tracking well-being in real-time through weekly individual reflections, supported by contributions from family members and professionals, creating a rich, multi-layered understanding of each participant’s journey.

The project uses a data collection system with an intuitive interface. It gathers extensive qualitative and quantitative data and analyses well-being outcomes using generative A.I. This results in an approach that provides both, meaningful insights and enhances the efficiency of service delivery.

The development of this robust methodology across many years has been central to the impact of the project. Because well-being data collected is analysed for changes and significance and benchmarked against national averages, Noise Solution are able to identify valuable insights at both, an individual and wider population level.

Due to their robust data strategy, Noise Solution can show that Beats and Stories has halved low levels of wellbeing and tripled high levels of those involved, and has benefitted hundreds of young people directly. In 2024 changes in outcomes for Noise Solution participants are estimated to create savings for families and services across the East of England of £6.46 Million