Issue One November 2014
Asking questions Providing answers
We understand your work We know your audience
Welcome to Culture Republic
In this issue
We provide the tools and insights that Scotland’s arts and cultural organisations need to identify and understand their audiences. Whether you’re looking at attendance, participation, footfall or digital engagement, we can help you see who you’re reaching now; who you’re missing, and where to find those elusive hard-to-reach groups.
Adaptation, evolution, imagination: taking the arts to the audience
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Thurso today; Taiwan tomorrow: gathering data on tour
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Culture Republic events programme, Nov ’14 – March ‘15
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In this first edition of our newspaper, we’ve picked out some of the most notable trends and topics that we’ve seen affecting audience engagement today, along with a host of examples of great work happening in Scotland and around the world.
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Content counts: who’s getting it right?
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Scotland’s new Mosaic: picking up the pieces
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The missing millions: breaking down barriers to access
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Adaptation, evolution, imagination: Taking the arts to the audience
For ticketless organisations, driving and measuring participation and engagement has never been straightforward. But whilst it can be hard to gauge just how far and how wide your audience reach extends, one thing is clear: every organisation in the arts and cultural sector faces an increasingly tough struggle to win their share of mindspace and precious time from audiences whose hours are already split between a host of real-life and online obligations and temptations.
It’s a battle for hearts and minds, and it’s the organisations that succeed in re-imagining their proposition to create an offer or experience that fits the needs and wants of their audiences that always reap the biggest rewards. Amongst visual arts organisations – and in libraries, museums and heritage organisations – embracing the need to adapt and evolve has led to some excellent and imaginative work from all over the world. In the digital arena, a free app for iPhone commissioned from Napier University using funding from Culture Republic’s AmbITion Scotland project is reaping huge dividends for Jupiter Artland – a 100 acre private collection contemporary sculpture park based outside Edinburgh. The intuitive app facilitates visitors’ digital interaction with the extensive onsite art collection, allowing them to pre-plan visits, book tickets, find directions and easily locate the closest artworks as they navigate around the park. Visitors consistently report that the app enhances their visit, and renders the work more appealing and accessible, letting them feel in control of the experience.
Another example of clever digitisation taking place right here in Scotland is the partnership between The SCAPE Trust coastal conservation charity and Timespan Heritage and Arts Centre and Museum in Helmsdale, which has transformed a community archaeology project into an interactive digital experience that captured the imagination of thousands. Through clever digitisation, the team have not only helped local communities understand more about local history and their own place within it, but have brought the work of the SCAPE Trust to a brand new global audience. New York’s Metropolitan Museum has used digitisation to build its international audience by targeting Weibo, the Chinese micro blogging site that enables them to get around China’s ban on Facebook and Twitter. Its “Timeline of Art History” accounts for one-third of the museum’s web traffic, and its visitor statistics are mindboggling – six million in-person visits annually and 29 million visits to the website.
They have also introduced quirky “room-hopping” events such as The Mustached Men of the Met – a guided tour through the considerable number of moustaches on display throughout the collection. Taking the work to the audience doesn’t always mean going digital: it can, in the most literal sense, mean packing up and driving out into the community to locate and captivate new audiences. The Uni Project in New York city is a non-profit group that takes this hands-on approach to engaging with underserviced New York communities. Using a van, some architect-designed bench seating and a circular set of bookshelves, the team creates a portable, multigenerational, open air community reading room in the heart of shared, public spaces. The informal, welcoming environment means that residents of all ages feel totally comfortable pulling up a chair to enjoy reading a book, solving puzzles and other activities. The Uni Project actively encourages area museums to move beyond their traditional means of engaging with communities to hold programmes outdoors in the portable reading room. The team has learned that bold clear signage and solving physical needs (for shade, shelter and places to sit) are key, as is creating walk-up experiences which allow people to be together and easily interact with the experiences on offer. Keen to extend engagement further afield, the group launched in Boston this
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summer and ships reading room kits around the world so that others can benefit from this community learning experience. Back in Scotland, Glasgow Life and the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) focused on encouraging in-person attendance and participation with “Generation” – a £2 million series of linked art exhibitions staged to coincide with the 2014 Commonwealth Games. They created free exhibitions across more than 60 locations to ensure the widest possible reach, whilst their accompanying education and outreach programme – designed to fire imaginations and increase participation – drew in young people aged 12–25 years. Common to all of these examples is the message that, whatever your audience engagement priorities, blending a little imagination with a targeted, strategic approach that identifies and brings on board key communities, supporters and funders can deliver outstanding, sustainable results with lasting impact. The organisations that reap the greatest rewards are those that apply the same creativity to their engagement and outreach activity as they do to their core work, constantly striving to re-imagine, adapt and evolve. See our website for further reading, examples and links to each of our case studies.
Thurso today; Taiwan tomorrow: Gathering data on tour
Catherine Wheels is a small, active, artist-led company that tours internationally, playing to an audience of children and families. They see festivals and theatres as their main ‘audiences’, rarely selling directly to the public and rarely dealing in transactional, box-office type data. Key to success in this approach is their focus on relationships with programmers and festival managers, who represent their main conduit for audience data. Paul notes that a particular challenge for the team at Catherine Wheels is the lack of a consistent offer. Their touring schedule means that they may not return to a particular venue for two years, by which time the audience from their last show will have grown up. As a result it’s important that they’re active in developing those relationships that can be relied upon, year on year – for instance, ensuring that they always have a tour available for schools at the same time every year. The Catherine Wheels team focuses on measures such as overall performance numbers, attendance, and total numbers of performances in key venues and schools. They hold data from rural and urban settings stretching back 12 years, allowing them to measure trends and identify deviations. Paul stresses the need to temper any review of data with a clear understanding of the work, the setting, and the population itself – where a population is small; an audience of just 30 could be the equivalent to a sell-out show in the city. The strategic strength of Catherine Wheels’ proprietary database of venue and production information comes into play when, for example, a venue may ask for additional performances. By interrogating previous years’ data, Catherine Wheels can project likely ticket sales based on whether those performances sold well with family audiences, and through trying various approaches, they have found that basing decisions on data of this kind is more practically useful for them than box office data. Catherine Wheels are highly proactive on the partnership front, and have found that mutual benefits flow from partnering with communities, independent theatre production groups, venues and other companies operating in the sector. They have also forged working relationships with rural training agencies, identifying opportunities to work with young people not in education, employment or training.
It’s tough enough building a relationship with your audience when you’re based alongside them all year round. But when you don’t have that constant physical presence; when your audience is scattered around the country or around the world; when you visit a location only once a year or less, then opportunities to connect in person are few and far between. Read on for an interview with Paul Fitzpatrick of Catherine Wheels, and head to our website to read an interview with Svend Brown of East Neuk Festival.
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They actively share data sets with other companies making work for young audiences – Paul explains that, as neither Catherine Wheels nor their peers have access to tools such as segmented audience lists, this is an invaluable collaborative approach. Whilst one could argue that these companies are sometimes in competition for funding, Paul observes that they are never in competition over the work itself, noting that their particular niche of children’s theatre in Scotland is simply not big enough at the moment for that to present a problem. The team at Catherine Wheels have enthusiastically embraced social media which is delivering some excellent results on both the audience engagement and strategic data collection fronts. Where comments cards were once the sole source of feedback – and Catherine Wheels still distribute these, erecting a banner saying ‘Tell us what you thought’ to encourage honest feedback – young social media-savvy parents are now proactively tweeting and posting their comments, waxing lyrical about their experiences and encouraging others to attend. Social media tools are empowering Catherine Wheels to develop and maintain ongoing relationships in locations where they may not return for some considerable time - whether that be Thurso, Taiwan or Tasmania. Paul notes, with interest, that the majority of social comments and feedback are now emanating from audiences where previously conversations were largely peer-to-peer. A key target for Catherine Wheels, going forward, is to develop a nucleus of committed champions for their work, and they already have some contenders in place for these roles. They perceive this approach as a logical extension of their overall strategy – far more useful than, for instance, harvesting thousands of emails. And, as in everything that Catherine Wheels do in the field of audience data, the key consideration is to ensure that every single resource is focused in such a way as to deliver maximum return. Thanks to Paul Fitzpatrick for sharing insights into Catherine Wheels’ approach to audience data and decision making. Find Catherine Wheels at http://www.catherinewheels.co.uk/ and @cwheelstheatre. Visit our website for our interview with Svend Brown of East Neuk Festival.
Culture Republic events programme
Winter 2014 – Spring 2015
To register or find our more about an event visit: CultureRepublic.co.uk
Event
Date
Location
Information
Cost
Wider & Deeper: Building audience engagement
Monday 17 November 2014
Dovecot Edinburgh
We’ve teamed up with Anne Torreggiani, Chief Executive of Culture Republic’s sister organisation the Audience Agency (England), to bring you the latest developments in audience research from across the UK. Join us for actionable insights into audience behaviour and engagement in the visual arts, performing arts and at festivals in England and Scotland.
Free Let us know you’re coming by registering online
Facebook advertising workshop
Wednesday 26 November 2014
Glasgow Sculpture Studios Glasgow
This workshop will give you an introduction on how to plan and deliver a Facebook advertising campaign. Learn from Culture Republic and Alienation Digital how to use the tools that Facebook provides to make the most of your current contacts, connect more effectively with the people who already like your page, and find new potential audiences.
£88 Culture Republic Partners £154 Other cultural sector attendees
Festive First Wednesday
Wednesday 3 December 2014
Culture Republic office Edinburgh
It’s a Culture Republic First Wednesday with a twist! Combining holiday cheer and useful learning, our December First Wednesday will kick off the season in style. Four mystery speakers from our sector talk about their best research, digital, communications and engagement work this year.
Free Watch for your invitation via email
Digital communications workshop
Wednesday 17 December 2014
Gracefield Arts Centre Dumfries
This full day workshop is a thoroughly practical session designed for communications teams from arts, culture and heritage organisations with day-to-day responsibility for digital communications. It guides participants through the process of building a tailor-made Digital Communications Plan for their organisation. At the end of the session, teams will have a plan that they can start using straight away.
Free Refundable registration fee
Festivals 360º: Past, present and future
TBD January 2015
TBD Glasgow
In collaboration with The List, a celebration and exploration of festivals in Scotland, including the launch of Culture Republic’s new festivals data sets and The List’s new festivals listing for 2015.
£TBD
First Wednesday: Everything you ever wanted to know about the new Mosaic Scotland profiles (but were afraid to ask)
Wednesday 4 February 2015
Culture Republic office Glasgow
Mosaic Scotland is a source of postcode-based profiling information that Culture Republic uses to analyse Scottish audiences. The quality and accuracy of this information has just taken a big leap forward, with the launch of their updated classification system - learn all about it at this practical, fact-packed workshop.
Exclusively to our Partners & industry colleagues
Box Office Best: Practical data management workshop
Wednesday 11 February 2015
TBD Edinburgh
Making good marketing and engagement decisions needs good information. Box office staff have a key role to play in making sure that organisations have the best possible intelligence about their audiences. This workshop will train box office staff in best practice for data capture, data collection and data protection setting you up for effective data analysis and intelligent decision making.
Free Refundable registration fee
Demystifying the digital A seminar to conquer digital fear
TBD February 2015
TBD Glasgow
The past five years have seen consumers wholeheartedly embrace digital and especially mobile communication technologies. Marketing and engagement professionals have had to rapidly adapt their practice, learning on the job to keep in meaningful contact with audiences and participants. If the nagging voice in the back of your head has you worried that you are not making the most of the ever changing digital landscape, this seminar from Culture Republic is for you.
£TBD
Arts and Creative Learning Seminar
TBD February 2015
TBD Edinburgh
Building on the work of the Creative Lives project, an opportunity to explore the latest developments in creative learning throughout Scotland and beyond.
£TBD
First Wednesday: Topic TBD
Wednesday 4 March 2015
Culture Republic office Edinburgh
Culture Republic’s First Wednesdays topics are chosen to provide practical insights for audience engagement professionals and Scotland-wide relevance. Whether its great practice you can learn from, new tools for engagement or revenue generation, it is always worth coming along to learn something and connect with your peers.
Exclusively to our Partners & industry colleagues
Joined up CRM systems & integration seminar
Wednesday 10 March 2015
TBD Edinburgh
A partnership event. Make sure that your internal data gathering systems are optimised so that you get the most out of them. More details to come!
£TBD
Digital tune-up workshop
TBD March 2015
TBD Glasgow
Hands-on training helping you to analyse, measure and grow your audience online. More details to come!
Free Refundable registration fee
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Content counts: Who’s getting it right?
Let’s start with one of the largest digital experiments ever attempted by a UK cultural icon. Between June 21–23, 2013 The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) partnered with Google’s Creative Lab for a digital production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming” to be viewed by an as-yet-to-be-determined global Internet audience, and supported by communications across all of the RSC’s social media channels. The RSC’s Digital Producer Sarah Ellis is quoted in Native, the magazine from the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts, saying: “The project reached 30 million people on social media through all channels: Facebook, Twitter and Google+. We had a core community of 1,000 people over six weeks. We uploaded 3,000 pieces of content, of which 1,000 were audience members uploading their own and 2,000 were RSC commissions.” Interesting to note that fully one-third of content was generated by audience members, with the remainder emanating from the RSC team.” RSC Executive Director Catherine Mallyon added: “If we’re dealing with a sell-out house it’s 1,000 people, if we’ve got three sell-out theatres, we’ve got 1,700 people. But if we’ve reached 30 million people, what does that mean for us as an organisation?”
Following its 2013 membership survey, the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) revealed that 42 percent of marketers publish daily or at least multiple times per week, with 90 percent publishing at least monthly on up to six channels. The growing emphasis on multichannel, content-driven marketing is at the heart of the modern marketer’s dilemma: how important is it to keep ahead of the field in the race to adopt new channels of communications? Is six channels enough? Or is it better to focus on fewer channels showcasing only superior content? Visit England’s report ‘Visitor Attraction Trends in England 2013’ revealed, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Facebook (43%) and Twitter (31%) are the most popular channels used by organisations in England’s heritage and tourism sector. Mobile apps experienced the strongest year on year growth, with a particular proliferation within heritage venues. 21% of venues now offer online ticket and event booking facilities; enewsletter usage came in at 17%, and YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, online blogs and mobile sites all racked up usage levels between 6% and 11%.
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Attractions offering digital communications enjoyed higher revenues and admission figures, particularly among child visitors, highlighting the crucial importance of digital communications for family audiences. So which channels should you focus your efforts on – and how can you make them work for you?
Stepping away from the cultural sector for a moment, WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) is, literally, on top of their social media game with over 172 million users across a range of platforms and accounts. At first glance, wrestling might seem worlds away from art and culture – but as a performance-based ‘product’ looking for audiences, it’s perhaps not so dissimilar after all. WWE receives less TV time than other sports yet more than makes up for this through its smart communications channel choice. Their communications strategy focuses on regularly sharing exclusive behind-the-scenes images and footage across multiple social channels, encouraging interaction with their already heavilyinvested fan base. A prime example includes the September 2014 tongue-in-cheek “between bouts” “Rockpaperscissors exchange between WWE South African superstar Adam Rose and The Bunny, his lifesize furry-costumed competitor – one of many such incidents involving these two popular performers. WWE integrates all aspects of online and offline marketing, and every team member is actively involved. Twitter handles are displayed when wrestlers enter the ring; every live show has a hashtag and commentators plug the social channels, with everyone encouraged to tweet at major competitions such as their “Night of Champions”.
Back to the world of arts and culture, the 2014 Edinburgh International Festival scored a huge hit by teaming up with Virgin Money, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and East Lothian developer Hippotrix to create a free “Curate your own fireworks festival” app for the iPhone. The app comes complete with Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture as soundtrack, and allows visitors to choreograph then run their own fireworks finale in tribute to the famous fireworks which annually close the Festival. Digital content that encourages engagement and participation is the holy grail for many marketers, and in social media there’s no substitute for ‘real-time’ reactivity: when customers feel that you’re living the moment beside them, that’s half the battle won. Smartcar USA did it brilliantly in June 2012 when they picked up a cheeky Tweet from ad agency creative director Clayton Hove, who quipped: “Saw a bird had crapped on a Smart Car. Totaled it.” The Smartcar team rose to the occasion and whipped up a light-hearted Infographic comparing weights of “Pigeon, turkey and emu craps” before tweeting back “Couldn’t have been one bird, @adtothebone. Sounds more like 4.5 million. (Seriously, we did the math.)” Pantene, meanwhile, scored their own Oscar night success by having an artist on hand to sketch the stars in real time as they stepped onto the red carpet, then tweeted out the glamorous drawings complete with #WantThatHair directions on how to achieve the same look using Pantene products. Elsewhere, clever use of Vines is on the increase, including online behemoths such as AOL which opted for a simple talking heads piece from musical duo Husband and Wife which had racked up over 120,000 loops at last count. Closer to home, Dundee United FC nailed the Vine approach by featuring six seconds of adrenalin-fuelled crowd action that has already scored around 6,500 loops. Simple stuff and easily created – check out The Drum’s weekly Brand Vine Chart for regular inspiration. Common to each of these examples are some fundamental principles. They are the work of marketers who have harnessed every nugget of available data governing the tastes and behaviours of their target audiences, before serving them up with a piece of killer content. So, how many channels should you use? How should you use them? There may be no magic solution, but if you know your brand and you know your audience, there’s nothing stopping you from using the channels that you’re already communicating on right now to become content marketing’s next runaway success. See our website for further reading, examples, and links to each of our case studies.
As with every marketing riddle, there is no one-size-fits-all solution – but there are plenty of inspiring examples out there. Success in content-driven marketing comes to organisations whose communications campaigns concentrate on the channels where they know their customers are active, and make the very most of those channels through the creation or curation of content that’s developed with the medium in mind.
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6.
7.2 4
34
9.7 9
9
6.0 5
2.42
10.8
9.72
5.53
Scotland’s new Mosaic: Picking up the pieces
7.4 2
New
Families on the Move
Renters Now Owning
Small Town Propriety
11.18
Aspiring Homemakers
Prestige Positions
Family Basics
Low Income Families
Country Living
Transient Renters
Country Lifestyles
State Beneficiaries
Rural Reality
Municipal Challenge
Urban Sophisticates
Shades of Grey
Senior Security
Vintage Value
Suburban Stability
Modest Traditions
Domestic Success
Rental Hubs
14.48
11.9
8
9.83
13
Mosaic Scotland provides the postcode-based profiling information that we use at Culture Republic to analyse and report on regional populations and arts attendance. If you’re accustomed to receiving reports from us, terms such as ‘Upper Echelons’, ‘Families on the Move’, ‘Urban Sophisticates’ and ‘Renters Now Owning’ will probably be familiar to you. These are all umbrella ‘groups’ of households, and every group is further broken down into ‘types’, each having a detailed set of descriptors associated with it. These identify dominant characteristics, family units, hobbies, online behaviours and even typical names that can help you visualise your customers as individu als and communicate with them in a way that respects their needs and preferences. Armed with this information, you can:
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4.71 4 7.9
6 .5 1
This classification system is now more detailed than ever before, and has been created using over 150 variables and 850m pieces of information. Where the national population was split up into 10 umbrella groups and, within those groups, 44 different types under the ‘old’ classification system, it has now been reclassified to create 14 groups, further divided into 57 types. The new grouping responds to changes in popular behaviours and household profiles, including:
Mosaic’s new, more detailed classifications can enable you to create more accurate profiles of your audience than ever before. It also means that making like-for-like audience comparisons with past reporting periods may appear more challenging. The new depth of information means that every one of the familiar ‘old’ groups and types has been broken down and dispersed, scattering the component individuals right across the new classification system.
The boomerang generation: young adults staying in the parental nest for longer, which has an impact on the spending power within the household;
So where is your audience now? For arts and cultural organisations accustomed to using Mosaic information to inform targeting decisions, there’s a need to realign your terms of reference with the new, more accurate classification system. If you would like to discuss the impact and potential of the new Mosaic classification system for your own marketing communications or audience profiling, please get in touch.
Identify the predominant ‘groups’ and ‘types’ that make up your audience;
A significant increase in private renting driven by lifestyle choice and cost of living, which has impact on locations in which individuals are choosing to live;
Look for ‘more of the same’: see where people of the same groups and types are living within your local area;
A rise in people living alone across the affluence spectrum placing very different demands on brands;
Understand the extent of your reach into your community;
A new baby boom being driven in part by professionals in their thirties entering parenthood at a later stage in life than previous generations;
Identify ‘missing’ segments of your local audience: who lives in your local area but doesn’t attend?
10.09
6.13
7 6. 2
If you know your customers’ postcodes, you’re just a short step away from unlocking a wealth of data that can help you understand their characteristics, lifestyles and behaviours. The great news for marketers is that the quality and accuracy of this information has just taken a big leap forward, with the launch of Mosaic Scotland’s new improved classification system for every household in the country.
11.97
5 7.8
City Prosperity
4.29
Town Centre Singles
.9 8
Upper Echelons
7.0 7
Old
A change in the lifestyles of retired people, driving an increase in demand for access to leisure and entertainment in less traditional retirement locations; ‘Rurban migration’ – those choosing to live in rural locations without giving up the comforts of an urban lifestyle.
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See our website for a range of illustrations of the movement of the population from the old to the new Mosaic classifications. Analyses of the shifts in Scotland’s arts and cultural audiences are coming soon.
The missing millions: Breaking down barriers to access
This is the situation faced daily by staff at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Centre in Ohio. With a deep-rooted commitment to its access and equalities agenda, the hospital is already recognised as the “Best Healthcare Facility for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Patients and Families”, and work is in progress to develop a clinic to serve the particular needs of transgender adolescents. In 2012, staff at the hospital cared for young patients from more than 90 countries. This massively culturally diverse group included many patients and their families with limited proficiency in English. To dispense with language and cultural barriers and bring every patient and family member into the fold, the hospital switched to universal signage and introduced training to ensure its effective use by medical interpreters. As a result, more communities can access healthcare services, including assistance from patient services units trained in improving culturally-sensitive, competent healthcare skills. Young patients and their families benefit from clear communications, enhancing their treatment experience and interaction with clinicians and staff.
If you’re involved in building audiences for culture and the arts in the UK today, the chances are that maximising ‘Equalities and Access’ is high up on your agenda. Throughout our sector, venues and organisations share a common goal of increasing the number and range of people engaging and participating in the cultural experiences on offer, ramping up engagement levels beyond “traditional” audiences to reach those groups and communities currently least engaged. In Scotland, several respected groups are making headway in developing organisational change programmes that place equalities at the heart of their day-to-day operations. They include Artlink Edinburgh, Dundee Rep Theatre/Scottish Dance Theatre, Enterprise Music Scotland, Glasgow Film Theatre, Macrobert Arts Centre and the Scottish Poetry Library, and they’re working together under Creative Scotland’s Promoting Equalities Programme initiative to fly the flag as equalities leaders, advocates and developers for the cultural sector. Head over to our website for links to their work and projects. We’ve taken a closer look at some of the practical tools and creative solutions that other organisations within and beyond Scotland’s cultural sector are using to understand and connect with the new or hard-to-reach groups that have historically been absent or under-represented in their audience profiles.
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The dance world has an impressive track record when it comes to delivering work that tackles the barriers people with disabilities face in accessing quality arts activity. Staged by Scottish inclusive dance development company Indepen–d ance at Glasgow’s Tramway between 27–30 August 2014, Gathered Together Festival was another example of bringing together international performers to showcase work and share best practice. Gathered Together Festival formed part of Scotland’s first International Inclusive Dance Festival: itself part of Get Scotland Dancing and the Glasgow 2014 Cultural Programme. Back in England, meanwhile, charitable organisation VocalEyes’ London Beyond Sight project concentrates on ‘translating’ landmarks and features into rich, verbal pictures for blind and partially sighted listeners. Well-known Londoners describe their favourite city sights, including VocalEyes patron Sir Derek Jacobi (who can be heard describing the Old Vic); human rights campaigner Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty; Radio 1 DJ Rob da Bank, and ITV News presenter Sir Alastair Stewart. Strategic thinking and clearly-focused audience targeting and engagement loom large in this project. VocalEyes drew in locally born celebrities, initiated funding partnerships and established firm production goals, recording only those 40 celebrities for whom they had available funding. It’s a great example of using shared language to extend cultural access to specific audience groups – but what about organisations whose mandate requires them to serve the widest possible audience, where no common language exists?
Closer to home, Glasgow Museums has also been swift to grasp the power of sign language to overcome barriers to inclusion, in their case for deaf visitors. Through a series of short videos, produced in British Sign Language (BSL) and International Sign, the Museum’s teams deliver helpful visitor information profiling their most popular attractions. Videos are displayed online and at the entrances to Riverside Museum and the Peoples’ Palace and Winter Gardens. An informal monthly BSL Language Café is held at St Mungo’s Museum of Religious Life and Art for novices and veterans alike. Access and inclusion programmes frequently target both young people and the elderly, though not necessarily in tandem. One particularly heart-warming project that links these groups as well as transcending geographical barriers to inclusion comes from the education sector in Brazil, where CNA Language Schools worked with creative agency FCB Brazil to launch “The Speaking Exchange”. CNA has half a million students learning English, many of these being young people keen to practice their language skills with a native speaker. FCB Brazil spotted an opportunity to connect these young people with the largely house-bound residents of the Windsor Park retirement Community in Chicago, harnessing web-cam based technology to provide the elderly community with the stimulating conversation and social interaction they craved, whilst giving students a real-life opportunity to practice their language skills. Teachers were present throughout to subtly monitor and record proceedings. The Speaking Exchange has proven a massive hit, and not only with its conversational participants: widespread international news coverage followed the launch, with one YouTube video alone having attracted close to 1.5 million views. Back in the world of arts and culture, for many organisations financial means presents the greatest barrier to participation for local community groups. So, how about doing away with ticket prices altogether? A bold proposition, but Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis, USA has pioneered exactly that.
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At the instigation of their Board, the company launched its Radical Hospitality programme in September 2010 in response to audience research that consistently revealed ticket prices as the biggest barrier to access. Mixed Blood aims to produce challenging, thought-provoking work, while diversifying their audience. When people see the work onstage, they experience it as part of a widely-differing group that contributes to the experience. Their Free Speech programme further allows audiences to engage with work via social media, in writing and in person. Post show Free Forums allow the audience to lead conversations around issues they consider important, while a Sunday Salon series extends further access to material by engaging experts to discuss issues raised within the play. In Wales, the five-year Sherman 5 project - with disadvantaged communities in Cardiff and beyond - offers more welcome success stories of opening access for local groups, with a single pilot scheme resulting in 594 new audience visits to Sherman Cymru productions at the company’s Cardiff theatre base. New audiences joining Sherman 5 receive a membership card, information booklet and free ticket to their first Sherman 5 night, plus ticket deals for further visits. Eight “Sherman Families” are to be recruited to receive free entrance to productions for one year, with the only condition being that they commit to reporting their theatre experiences through news site WalesOnline. Another Sherman 5 success involving a Romeo & Juliet Mash Up saw Shakespeare reworked though music, art and dance, involving an international cast. Audience members were photographed, and 130 portraits of new Sherman 5 members exhibited in the foyer. To summarise: a whistlestop, transatlantic tour of engagement and participation projects firmly focused around the Access and Equalities agenda. Different organisations, different situations, different audiences – but one common thread: these real-life examples all prove that lateral thinking, innovation and creativity can help to encourage diversity and increase participation among traditionally ‘hard to reach’ groups, through activities that identify and address the needs of diverse audiences to generate increased engagement and sustained buy-in. After all, a hard to reach group is simply a group of individuals with particular circumstances. If you take the time to understand those circumstances and their implications, and take steps to make your offer welcoming and accessible to the individuals affected by them, then the old principles of programming and communications remain the same – no matter which audience groups you choose to focus on. It’s just your tools and methodology that may need to flex a little. See our website for more details and links to all of the examples mentioned above, and to read more about our work to advance the access and equalities agenda.
Knowing your audience has never been more crucial. The need for cultural venues and organisations to be able to make confident, informed decisions about programme development, communications spend, pricing strategies and audience growth has never been greater.
We’re open for business for every cultural organisation in Scotland, with a full programme of training events and workshops; benchmark publications; one-to-one consultancy support and partnership packages to fit budgets of all sizes. Wherever you are today in terms of attendance, participation, footfall or digital engagement, we can help you to access and interpret the audience intelligence you need to make the right decisions for tomorrow. Glasgow 0141 248 6864 Edinburgh 0131 656 5970 CultureRepublic.co.uk scotland@culturerepublic.co.uk Twitter: @culture_public