Hubert Reynier, Founding President of Visconti Partners, welcomes Sébastien Cavalier, director of Culture pass.

A few words about Sébastien Cavalier's career

Sébastien has traveled a lot, he had the chance to work in Cambodia, Taiwan, China, and to come back to work in Paris and then in Marseille. He still works in the field of culture but for very different organizations: Unesco, the city of Marseille, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And this in countries that require a great capacity for adaptation.

Precisely, speaking of adaptation, how can we renew the way public policies work based on a start-up culture?

The Culture Pass is an atypical project since in France cultural policies have been largely built around networks of actors. With the Culture Pass, there is a reversal of the trend by giving a voice to an audience (young people) and giving them freedom of choice. It is a first revolution. The second was the fact of creating an agile, flexible, adaptable structure, hence the idea of founding an SAS that has public funding such as the Ministry of Culture and the Caisse des Dépôts, but which in its philosophy remains very private and recruits people from different backgrounds. We must therefore succeed in getting people who do not have the same culture to work together but who, nevertheless, are driven by a common project: to make young people want to be curious and to give culture a central place in their lives.

What did the Culture Pass do to create this common culture?

The Culture Pass first identified the skills it needed: developers, designers, people with expertise in the cultural sector and in the education sector. He then realized that all these people spoke a different language and therefore looked for the common denominator so that everyone could agree on something concrete. First of all, these were very simple political orders, these objectives made it possible to create a common cultural base. Then, Sébastien and his team worked on devices allowing these people to work together and challenge each other while respecting each other. And so, gradually, to create their own language and to get the best out of each one.

How has Sébastien combined the evolution of objectives, the growth of Pass Culture as a company and its current success?

The Culture Pass team tries to adapt to changes and to be open, listening to what their users send back and ask for. The basic objective was: how to make 18-year-old young people want to have more cultural and diversified practices? Three hundred euros were granted to them but for this to work, cultural actors had to make proposals to them. This therefore required a large catalog of proposals, the Culture pass then became a kind of market place. Very quickly, the Culture Pass realized that by putting young people on one side and cultural actors on the other, it produced positive externalities that he had not thought of.

The challenge of a cultural actor is precisely to market itself to these young people...

Cultural actors are very different depending on the sector in which they work and whether they operate in a private or subsidized environment. In all cases, young audiences are difficult for cultural actors to grasp. Because of a lack of knowledge but also the complexity for some of them to move into a more digital world in which young people navigate easily. This requires them to change their practice in order to be able to adapt to the demands of this audience. Sébastien realized that the Pass Culture teams, through the knowledge they developed with young people, could finally have a real mission to advise and support these cultural actors to help them in this change. This is proving to be extremely important, even if they had not imagined it at first. Sébastien and his teams want young people to be satisfied but also cultural actors. You must therefore be in a position to adapt your offer and to make attractive proposals to young people in order for the investment to be profitable.

How has the outlook of the Ministry of Culture changed thanks to this initiative?

The perspective of the Ministry of Culture is changing because thanks to the Culture Pass, it can have a more detailed knowledge of the cultural practices of young people, in a concrete way. This is interesting because it allows him to change his public policies almost in real time and to use the Culture Pass for this. It is therefore a game of permanent interaction in which the Ministry of Culture formulates requests for the Culture Pass, challenges them while they bring up information that also challenges it. They have succeeded in creating a climate of trust in which everyone respects the activities of the other. This allows them to work very fluidly.

This climate of trust is reflected in Sébastien's Management Committee and with his employees, forming a collective and individual harmony. A few words about it.

Sébastien attaches a lot of importance to the issue of the ecosystem. Within the Culture pass, they needed to have a coherent ecosystem in which everything is connected. When recruiting and composing the Management Committee, the idea was to have people who were both very competent in their field of reference and who were both open-minded and in constant dialogue with their alter egos from other departments. It is not easy but they have always tried to keep these notions in the idea that they are an ecosystem that will work as long as they all work together. They work on collective goals, determine how everyone can intervene on them, identify points of interaction and possible points of friction.

The Pass Culture team is young, committed, motivated but also not very familiar with the professional environment, so it is up to seniors to guide the youngest and have them integrate this vision of the project.

For Sébastien, it is essential because the Pass Culture object is too atypical and too new to allow himself to reason other than in a collaborative and systemic way.

The objective is to make all cultural actors and young people concerned understand that the Culture Pass belongs to them. It is a shared public good. And everyone can contribute to their development for the greatest benefit. This idea of appropriating the Culture Pass by all stakeholders is absolutely central.