Audience Segments

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].