Special feature - Audience development in the Highlands & Islands

As easy as ABC…D

August 2006

Marcus Wilson, HI~Arts’ Audience Development Coordinator, looks at the trends and challenges for attracting new audiences to the region’s arts.

With the approach of 2007, the year Scotland celebrates Highland culture, audience development is a key concern for the cultural sector, with many organisations – large and small, professional and voluntary – keen to make the most of the increased interest in the region’s arts and heritage.

Whilst many such national and regional celebrations focus on large scale and flagship events, it is easy to forget that a large proportion of arts and events in the Highlands and Islands are delivered at a local level. Indeed, a network of community promoters often working on a voluntary or part-time basis, are key to the provision of arts and entertainment for audiences across the region, and will also be key to the delivery of the Highland 2007 programme.

This local delivery of the arts provision by promoters that know their community intimately leads to the sort of audience statistics that larger-scale urban venues can only dream of! In some cases, a local community or island arts event might have a turn-out of 70% of the local population. Imagine similar audience penetration in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Perth, Dundee or Aberdeen!

Practical sales and audience development tools such as HI~Arts’ Events Guide and Arts Journal (www.hi-arts.co.uk), and thebooth online ticketing service (www.thebooth.co.uk), launched by HI~Arts in January 2005, are doing much to increase access to cultural events by making event information and tickets available around the clock to audiences from far and wide.

Both of these tools will play a major role in the promotion and sales of Highland 2007 events to audiences. Since its launch, thebooth has sold 35,000 tickets representing over half-a-million pounds of revenue for the cultural sector, and the HI~Arts website attracts around 5,000 unique visitors every day from around the globe to its thousands of pages of arts and events information.

Screenshot from www.thebooth.co.uk

However, that is not to say that there is little more to be done in the way of audience development and marketing. Many factors provide barriers to arts attendance across the region. Low or non-existent marketing budgets make it difficult for promoters to publicise their events, transport links to venues are often poor, national media coverage of regional events is rare, and the development of strategic and coordinated approaches to audience development is difficult in such a dispersed and predominantly voluntary sector.

Highland 2007 offers a key opportunity for arts venues and event promoters to bring their work to the attention of a wider public, both in Scotland and abroad. Whilst the population of the Highlands and Islands is just 400,000, tourism accounts for an additional 4 million visits to the region each year, and HI~Arts are working to assist promoters across the region to expand their audience.

HI~Arts’ new Audience Development Capacity Building (ADCB) project aims to provide practical tools, training and support for over 200 arts and heritage sector organisations to develop their marketing activity and audiences in the run up to, and during, Highland 2007.

This ambitious project, which has been funded by the Scottish Arts Council and Highland 2007, will involve a team of experienced arts marketers working directly with groupings of cultural organisations, including professional arts venues, community promoters, festivals and museums.

The ADCB project will seek to:

Raise the skills, ambitions and confidence of events promoters in audience development
Encourage best practice in evidence-based and strategic marketing planning, using audience data that has been built up from thebooth online ticketing project, amongst other things
Assist event and venue promoters in reaching new and tourist audiences
Increase access to cultural and events information for audiences
Create a network of audience development workers across the region

As a result, the aim of the project is to increase access to, and attendance at, cultural events and venues and thereby maintain viable event promoting venues and festivals at a local level.

Amongst other initiatives, the project will include the region’s first intensive strategic arts marketing training course for the audience development officers in the region, focussing on developing skills from writing press releases and designing posters, to researching into audience behaviour and developing strategic marketing plans.

The project will also deliver familiarisation events to promote the cultural offerings of each area of the Highlands and Islands to workers in the tourist industry, empowering them to promote the region’s cultural activity.

If Highland 2007 is to have a true impact, audiences in 2008 should be much increased from levels in 2006. The ADCB project is one of the ways is one of the ways in which HI~Arts is working with Highland 2007 to achieve this.

More information on the Audience Development Capacity Building project can be found at http://www.hi-arts.co.uk/audiences.