“Scarborough Museums Trust has been five years in the making and, looking back over that five years, the support offered by Audiences Yorkshire has been invaluable.
Scarborough Museums and Gallery Service was a local authority-managed museums and gallery service.
It had suffered from the inevitable financial
stringencies imposed by a small and far from rich Borough Council. The Service spent less than 1% on publicity, had no marketing staff and was project driven.
The move to Trust status created the ability to effectively fundraise and the redevelopment of the museum provided impetus. The Rotunda was an exquisite, if crumbling, early 19th century building with a remarkable history.
It is the only
building in the UK to have direct links with William Smith, ‘the father of English geology,’ one of the very few museums designed specifically to illustrate a science and the second oldest still functioning purpose-built British museum.
The first step was to examine existing audiences. Audiences Yorkshire undertook, on our behalf, an extensive programme of both qualitative and quantitative research. 2005.
The quantitative research covered Easter and the School holidays in
We used a team of 12 Market Research Society trained interviewers
recommended by Audiences Yorkshire. The results were fascinating and culminated in the Audiences Yorkshire team carrying through qualitative research which gave us a clear forward path.
The audience development plan was wholly informed by this work and included a full marketing training programme for the Museums and Gallery staff. This programme had to deliver an understanding of marketing and bed down the marketing team within the Trust.
Thanks to funding from Arts & Business New
Partners Fund, we opened out the training to all the smaller organisations in the Borough at the low cost of £10 per person per session.
The sessions covered
Marketing, E-marketing, Press and Public Relations and Direct Marketing.
The
quality of the training was excellent – good enough to hold together a group with varying levels of knowledge.
Amongst all sorts of other practical support, Audiences Yorkshire delivered two key strands without which we could not have delivered our Audience Development Programme – an understanding of our audiences and how we could grow them and an understanding and acceptance of the tools to do that.
The work of Audiences Yorkshire allowed us to have fun among the serious audience development work. We had hoardings illustrating the first geological map of Britain, brought four leading geology professors to run lectures for the kids of Scarborough, held all kinds of competitions which allowed us to seal in the family audiences, examined how we worked with older people and worked with the Stephen Joseph Theatre youth theatre, Rounders, to deliver a history of William Smith over three years.
Our relationship with Audiences Yorkshire became a partnership which still supports our ongoing audience development.”
Shirlie Stone Head of Business Development Scarborough Museums Trust