Arts Council England

An Audience Awaits

Emily Claire Bickerdike Marketing Manager , , , , , ,

Reflecting on our show, I believe it is important to consider the audience we received, feedback we collated, and how this data could have differed through different marketing techniques based on ACE policy.

Arts Council England divide the Audience Spectrum into 10 distinct groups:

Metroculturals, Commuterland culture buffs, Experience seekers, Dormitory dependables, Trips and treats, Home and heritage, Up our street, Facebook families, Kaleidoscope creativity, and Heydays.

Based on my knowledge of the LPAC’s usual audience (mainly College of Arts students and younger to middle aged people), I predicted that our main audience segment would fall under both:

Meteroculturals – “Prosperous, liberal, urbanites interested in a very wide cultural spectrum” (Arts Council England, 2017).

and

Experience seekers – “Highly active diverse, social and ambitious, engaging with arts on a regular basis” (Arts Council England, 2017).

These groups are both what ACE call “highly engaged” (Arts Council England, 2017) with the arts. Therefore, much of our marketing was focused on social media, particularly Facebook which these audiences use on a regular basis. The promotion of our material across Facebook was targeted to people between the ages of 18 and 40. However, what I noticed from seeing our audience on the day and the feedback we received on social media was that a large proportion of our audience were older than this, and mainly fell under the Trips and Treats segment. These are people who “Enjoy mainstream arts and popular culture influenced by children, family and friends” (Arts Council England, 2017). This is because our cast invited their families and family friends to celebrate the occasion.

Learning from this, I would have perhaps approached marketing our show slightly differently and spent more time distributing flyers and posters in town and making conversation to members of the public who fell under this category, rather than targeting younger people and students on campus and in trendy coffee shops. The feedback we received from our older audience was wonderful and showed us that our show is suitable for people of all ages, not just the young.

Works Cited:

Arts Council England (2017) Culture-based segmentation. [online] Available from http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/participating-and-attending/culture-based-segmentation [Accessed 27 May 2017].

Arts Council England

Holly Margaret Lomas Choreographer , ,

The Pin Hinge Collective are a subsidised company. This means we are a not-for-profit organisation and we can only fund the work we make. As we are a small-scale theatre company, if we were to seek government funding we would primarily look at the Big Lottery Fund, and specifically the Grants for the Arts pot, which is their “open access funding programme for individuals, art organisations and other people who use the arts in their work” (Arts Council England, 2017). Here you can get grants between £1,000 and £100,000. The type of projects they fund are outlined on their website, and include “festival, organisational development, original work, participation, performance, production” (ibid). Despite being eligible for government funds, they will only fund up to 90% of a project and so fundraising is key to ensuring we receive a grant. We have already successfully raised money from a themed quiz night and a raffle, and so we are able to prove our stability and innovation when applying for this grant.

However, in order to receive funding from Arts Council England we would not only have to provide a detailed income and expenditure’s list alongside suitable eligibility, we also have to give details of our organisation’s artistic quality. Because we are an emerging theatre company with no past work to reference to, we would have to give details on how the current project will develop our organisation. We would also need to give details on public engagement; from this it is important to understand the ten different audience segments that The Audience Agency identify. For our performance of Kalopsia, the identified audience segments we will be engaging are Metroculturals: “[p]rosperous, liberal, urbanites interested in a very wide cultural spectrum” (ibid), and Experience Seekers: “[h]ighly active, diverse, social and ambitious, engaging with arts on a regular basis” (ibid); this is due to the diverse student population of Lincoln. By intertwining a straight play with contemporary means such as Black Light elements and physical theatre, these segments are engaging with modern cultural performance.

As choreographer, my focus principally falls on the artistic quality and public engagement of our project. I need to understand which audience segments our project targets and to understand our audiences level of cultural engagement, to determine how the demographic will respond to the content we create. As  our primary audience are already engaged with the arts on a regular basis and are open to new cultural experiences, I am allowing for a more liberal exploration with our use of physical theatre in the performance as there are fewer limitations.

 

Arts Council England (2017) Grants for the Arts. London: Arts Council England. [online] Available from http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding/grants-arts [Accessed 16 May 2017].

Arts Council England (2017) Culture-based segmentation. London: Arts Council England. [online] Available from http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/participating-and-attending/culture-based-segmentation [Accessed 16 May 2017].

Theatre Company Funding- Arts Council England

Emma Jane Haigh Costume Designer ,

The Pin Hinge Collective are a small scale theatre company and a not for profit organisation. Arts Council England provide funding opportunities for up and coming companies in the UK. They look to support artists, organisations, artists and events which help them to achieve their mission to provide ‘great art and culture for everyone.’ (Arts Council England, 2017)

If The Pin Hinge Collective were going to apply for government funding, we would apply through the Grants for the Arts scheme. This is a programme aimed at individuals, arts organisations and people who use the arts in their job, it is Arts Council England’s open access funding programme. Through this programme they offer grants ranging from £1,000 to £100,000. On the Arts Council England website, it states that they will only fund up to 90% of the project. We would have to fundraise some of the money ourselves. We have been raising funds over the last few months for our upcoming show, Kalopsia. We held a themed quiz in a local pub where we charged for entry. We have also been selling raffle tickets for the opportunity to win a luxury stay from which we managed to raise £250.

Arts Council England (2017) Grants for the Arts. London: Arts Council England. [online] Available from http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding/grants-arts [Accessed 28 April 2017].

 

ACE Marketing

Emily Claire Bickerdike Marketing Manager ,

How do Arts Council England define marketing?

“Marketing is the process of communicating the value of your work to potential audiences, visitors and participants. A good marketing plan will allow you to meet your goals and the needs of audiences. It encourages you to consider the audience perspective as you plan your activity. You should look at things like choice of activity, where and when the activity will take place, possible costs for the audience, and methods of involving and communicating with potential audiences and participants.”

ACE suggest that you make a marketing plan to achieve the above, consisting of:

“Background information on you and your current activities

Briefly describe what you currently do, and explain why you have decided that you need to do the audience development and marketing activity that you are asking us to fund

Your (audience) objectives

Clearly set out the objectives and targets for your audience development or marketing activities. Make them smart (SMART) – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely. For example; increase audience aged 55 – 65 for Jazz performance by 5% before October next year. Look for evidence that these are realistic

The details of your activity

Describe the target audience or participants for the activity (be specific, identify each ‘audience type’, for example students aged 18–24). Provide details of how many people you are hoping to involve (be specific and break this down by each ‘audience type’). Describe the benefits and why it would appeal to them. Describe what is unique or different about your activity and plans

Demand for your activity

Describe how you know that there is demand for your activity from your target audience, and provide details of any research you have carried out

Audience development and marketing methods

Describe the tools, approaches and methods you plan to use to reach your target group

Timetable

Provide details of the timetable for your activities, give exact dates if possible

Budget

Provide details of the income and expenditure for your audience development and marketing plan, and remember to include the costs of evaluating your plans. Where possible break down the figures to show the detail of the budget. For example, If you were engaging a freelance marketing advisor for 4 days work and they charged £250 per day, you would express this as: 4 days @ £250 per day = £1000.

Evaluation

Describe how you will evaluate the success of your plan against your objectives and targets. For example, how you will find out if you have reached the people you wanted to reach. Include information on when you will do this and who will be involved. Remember to reflect, review and evaluate to inform future work.”

This is the plan that I roughly followed when constructing our company’s presence on social media, our brand, and our relationship with our potential audience. This plan aims for a company to be able to apply for ACE funding by knowing in detail all of the above questions, and I believe that with a slightly more detailed understanding of the Timetable and Demand for Your Activity sections, The Pin Hinge Collective’s marketing plan would be ACE funding worthy.

I knew from the ACE website and from reading works such as This Way Up by Caroline Griffin that in order for our marketing to be in-keeping with ACE funding requirements, I would have to focus heavily on our “identity” (Griffin, 2007) as a company and how to get this across, particularly through social media, our copy and our print. These methods in particular are some of the most common ways a “customer can come into contact with [our] organisation” (Griffin, 2007), and therefore needed to be consistent and in-keeping with our company ethos/manifesto.

To ensure I did this, I made the textual content put out across social media warm, welcoming and for the most part, informal. This was to build a rapport with an audience and act as a very personal form of communication. I also made sure our visual content was diverse, bright and colourful to not only be eye-catching, but to appeal to different people in different ways, going alongside our desire to create personal, intimate theatre that celebrates individuality.

Something that Griffin promotes in This Way Up is the use of word of mouth or “friends” (Griffin, 2007) as advocates for our association. I made use of this advice by engaging consistently and confidently with other theatre companies across social media platforms and in person, networking and advertising each other’s shows to branch out into each other’s audience pools. This became extremely useful during our fundraising period as other theatre companies such as Rubbish Theatre were interacting with and sharing our fundraising activity to their audiences – and this gained results! Networking is an extremely important part of marketing!

Works Cited:

Arts Council England (2017) Audience development and marketing, and Grants for the Arts.

Griffin, C. (2007) This Way Up. Cambridge: Arts Marketing Association.