Enter text here …Danielle Black

Membership, Programmes and Events Manager

Audiences NI

An introduction to Writing an Audience Development Plan

Enter text here …An introduction to Audience Development

Hello and Q’s

Enter text here …Content

•What is Audience Development and why is it important?

•What’s the difference between marketing and audience development?

•Why do audience development.

•Barriers to attendance

•Knowing and targeting your audience

•Key elements of an audience development plan

An introduction to Audience Development

Enter text here …

“It is not necessary to change.

Survival is not mandatory.”

W. Edwards Deming

An introduction to Audience Development

The definition of the word “audience” in this respect depends on your circumstances, but a good place to start is to look at whoever is consuming your product.

This can include attendees, visitors, readers, listeners, viewers, participants, and learners.

What do we mean by “audience”?

What is Audience Development?

How are marketing and audience development different?

Audience Development and/or Arts Marketing?

Some people see little (or indeed no) difference between Audience Development and Arts Marketing.

One way to consider the difference is between Efficiency (Marketing) and Effectiveness (AD)

What is Audience Development?

Audience Development involves:

•breaking down barriers to access to the arts•staff members across organisations, not just the marketers•developing relationships with communities of target audiences•activities which are meeting the needs of audiences•a planned and targeted management process to deliver the organisation’s objectives

Key principles of Audience Development?

•Think long term

•Think organisation-wide -education workers, artists, senior

team, front-of-house, marketers, box-office, volunteers

•Think existing & potential audience

•Think ongoing process, not short term projects

•Think plan, evaluate, review and plan

Exercise

What is Audience Development NOT?

• A one off initiative• Tokenistic placing of publicity material• Something which only generates short term results• All about new audiences • Simply giving free tickets to events that don’t sell• A tick box exercise to satisfy your funders

Core reflective questions:

1. Do you do audience development already?

2. Is it a high/medium/low level focus?

3. Who has an Audience Development plan? Is it different from your Marketing Plan?

4. Why do we do Audience Development?

“Arts and cultural organisations carry out audience development for different reasons. Overall, though,

they see developing audiences as a way of achieving their objectives, whether these are

artistic, financial, social or all three.”

Heather Maitland “A Guide To Audience Development”

Why do it?

ARTISTIC: To develop a better understanding of the arts being presented to enable a greater range of arts to be presented.

FINANCIAL: To develop income with more attenders, attending more often and spending more on tickets to attend or when onsite (coffee shop, gift shop etc). To attract more funding, through better organisational development.

SOCIAL: To achieve a better representation from your local communities. To be able to target excluded and disadvantaged groups.

Why do it?

Typical barriers to attendance

http://www.artscouncil-ni.org/news/2007/images/barriers0908b.pdf

Lets look at the basics!

Thinking

Feeling

Saying

Doing

“Successful audience development is the perfect ‘Zusammenspiel’ (translation: ‘interaction’) of almost all departments.

Christian WaltlPresenting at Intercom 2006

Audience Development needs to be holistic

Knowing your audience

What do you currently know about your audience?

Do you know it OR do you assume it?

There’s a big difference.

Developing your strategy/plan

Never forget - There are only two real ways to Develop Audiences.

1. Get new people to come

2. Get the people who already come to attend more often

Developing your strategy

An Audience Development strategy for your organisation should:

• Break down the barriers which stop people attending

• Develop relationships with communities

• Encompass all aspects of your organisation’s activity

• Meet the needs of your audiences

• BE MEANINGFUL TO YOU AND YOUR ORGANISATION

•Enable your organisation to achieve its artistic, financial and social objectives & to fulfill its obligations to funders and society

Developing your strategy

There is no one size fits all Audience Development strategy.

It has to fit your organisation, what it’s trying to achieve and how your staff team like to work.

Some people crave structure and specificity, others find that level of detail constrictive. It’s about finding the level which (a) fits how you work as a team and (b) delivers on your organisation’s objectives.

If (a) is fine, but (b) isn’t being achieved, you may need to think about how you work as a team to deliver at a higher level.

Knowing your audience is where it starts

Ticketed events Non-ticketed events

Your database on your website Your database on your website

Box Office system – postcodes - location Surveys: online, face-to-face, telephone

Surveys: online, face-to-face, telephone Desk Research (ACNI, ACE, AudiencesNI, DCAL, TGI)

Desk Research (ACNI, ACE, AudiencesNI, DCAL, TGI)

Bespoke research in clusters

Mosaic NI - types Social media analytics

Social media analytics

Google Google

Knowing your audience

Some things you might want to know about your audience:

Where do they live?What age and gender are they?How often do they attend?What kinds of events do they attend?What do they think of your organisation?Where do they find out your events?What other kinds of things do they do?

Knowing who isn’t your audience

Some things you might want to know about the people who aren’t currently attending:

Where do they live?Are there any barriers to attending?Do they know about your organisation?What other kinds of leisure activities do they do?Is there anything you can do that would encourage them to attend?

Segmenting your audience

It can help to group your audiences into particular segments to help you understand how they engage with you more effectively. You can model this segmentation around a number of different factors:

•Demographics (like Mosaic NI)•Geographic location•Frequency of attendance•Event/exhibition type•Motivations for attendance

Segmenting by one characteristic alone often lacks insight (women), but segmenting by too many.

You try!

Developing your Audience Development Plan: Building up your picture

A good audience development plan will take into account the complete context of your organisation.

As such, before you write your plan, you need to make sure you have a good picture of the following:

Focus on your organisation

Focus outside yourorganisation

Focus on your audience

Focus onyour product

Focus on your organisation

Conduct your SWOT Analysis

Strengths Weaknesses

Opportunities Threats

Focus on your audience

• Consult your existing market research to establish what you know about your audiences.

• Refer back to your SWOT analyses to establish what you don’t know about your audiences but need.

• Fill your gaps with additional research.

EXAMPLES OF PERTINENT QUESTIONS:

Who goes to your organisation?

How often do they go?

Why do they go? How do they find out what’s on?

Who do they attend with? What benefits do they get from attending?

Do different audiences go to different things?

Targeting

Targeting makes sure we:Talk to the right peopleAbout the right thingsIn the right way

A target market is a group of people who have something in common, so that you can talk to everyone in that group about the same things in the same way using the same communication methods and stand a good chance of persuading them to come to your event.

A target market is defined by:

What the people in it have in commonWhat sets them apart from everyone elseThe reason you have for wanting them to be involved in your organisation

What about your non-users?

Solely focusing on who does visit you is only part of the picture. Don’t forget to consider who doesn’t visit!

You can tell a lot about who isn’t coming by looking at the profile of your audience and comparing that with what you know about the population in your local area OR what you know about visitors to your peers (this requires accurate benchmarking to be in place).

Beware! Researching existing audiences is much easier, because they’re coming in and out of the building and/or you have their customer data to select them to take part. This isn’t the same for non-users and you have to be very careful how and who you select to be researched. If 90% of your respondents are male, but 70% of non-users are female, then your findings will be skewed.

A simple model to help - Ansoff Matrix

1.Market Penetration

3. Product Development

2. Market Development

4.Diversification

Existing Work New Work

Existing

Attenders

New

Attenders

An example – local arts centre

Market Penetration

People who come to our music showcase once a

month to come to our new festival

Product Development

Getting young professionals to come to our special Fri evening pizza and music (6pm)

Market Development

Getting more families to come to our work for

children

DiversificationStarting up a new

drawing class

Existing Work New Work

Existing

Attenders

New

Attenders

Are you ready to develop your Audience Development Strategy?

Blank Canvas?

Surrealist interpretation?

Picture Perfect Photo?

The Audience Development Traffic Light check - how clear is your picture of your audience and your organisation?

STOP WAIT GO

Monitor, evaluate, benchmark and share knowledge

• What were our aims and objectives?• Did we meet them?• If so how?• If not why not?• What worked and what didn’t and why?• Can we refine our thinking for a better chance of success?• How did our organisation benefit overall?• What have we learned?

These are the questions you’re going to want to ask afterwards, so as part of your planning, it has to be more than how you’re doing to do them, it also has to be how you’re going to measure and evaluate your work. Too often this is an afterthought

Key elements of the Audience Development Plan

Introduction – where are we now (SWOT)

Vision – were will we get to (Use the boxes)

Target audiences – Who (use the info you have)

Objectives/targets - SMART

Timetable – what by when – (not a few weeks)

Action plan – main tasks

Responsibility – who (not just marketing person)

Resources – budget, staff time, funding needed

Monitoring & Evaluation – counting what counts, how, (get more info)

Risk assessment – what things might go wrong

Appendix – relevant reports etc

Enter text here …How can we help?

And we have a lovely staff team ready to answer questions and point you in the right direction!

Enter text here …

KEEP CALM

AND

DEVELOP YOUR

AUDIENCES!

Thank You