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The first of the ‘five portions a day’ challenged us to see our world from the audience’s point of view. How much do we really understand about the audience of today? Keynote speech: Peter Fisk (The Foundation) ……………………………….. p2 Claire Eva (Tate) …………………………………………….. p9 Seminars: Keynotes in conversation …………………………………… p16 Call my data bluff – James Gough …………………………… p21 Speaker biographies ……………………………………………p28

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Keynote speech: Peter Fisk (the Foundation) and Claire Eva (Tate) Peter Fisk, the Foundation Go to www.a-m-a.co.uk/images/downloads/PeterFiskKEYNOTE.pdf to download the Power Point presentation How well do you know your audience? Where do you fit into our lives today?

• We spend 5.3 hours reading, 2.3 hours cooking, 1.5 hours shopping, 1.4 hours exercising every week.

• .. and we spend 2.7 hours online every day • We bought 45 million books, 26 million cars, and 15 million ‘Make Poverty

History’ wristbands last year • We drank 10 billion pints of beer, 6 billion cups of tea, and 2.5 billion cups of

coffee and we ate 2.8 unhealthy snacks every day • 25 million of us went to a football match, 24 million to a museum, and 12 million

to the theatre and spent 15% of our disposable income on leisure activities How do you meet our different needs?

• 6% of us are Gay, earning 45% higher salaries, and buying twice as many plasma TVs

• 7% of us eat porridge at least once a week (doubled in last 10 years) • 8% of us are vegetarian, significantly more women than men • 10% of us sleep on an IKEA bed • 28% of us have viewed adult content online (by accident of course) • 35% of us shop weekly at Tesco, and 60% have a Tesco Clubcard • 37% of us are overweight … significantly more men than women (despite what

they say) • 56% of us host a dinner party every month

Do you connect with our new behaviours?

• We have downloaded1.6 billion tracks from iTunes (at 79p each) • We make 100 million Google searches every day … with ‘National Lottery’ the most common search term • 78% of US teenagers log on to MySpace every day

… reducing teenage crime by around 60% • We have 2 billion mobile phones worldwide (1.5 per person)

… including 17% of all 7 year olds • 180 million of us are eBay users, spending £780 every second • 69% of TV programming is reality TV shows … and we create 75,000 new blogs every day

Are you keeping pace with our changing world?

• It only takes us 2.6 seconds to make most purchase decisions … and little longer, 90 seconds, to decide whether somebody is attractive

• Teenagers can typically do 5.3 things at the same time … suffering from ‘partial attention syndrome’

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• Did you know that creative people have twice as many sexual partners? (ooh) … and that married men change their underwear twice as often as singles? (ugh)

• Men get bored shopping after 1.2 hours … and women after 1.7 hours

• 64% would consider trading-off salary for less working hours … time, well-being and learning matter more than ever to us

• Of course statistics are largely useless … • Nobody is an average. Everybody is different. • But they make you think about your audience

… In a different way I wonder how Picasso would market the arts?

• He wouldn’t do what everybody else does ... he would see things from a different perspective

• He wouldn’t just try to do things better … he would do what nobody has thought • And crucially, he wouldn’t start with the art … but he would deliver extraordinary

results He wouldn’t look at the obvious things; he’d look at things from different perspectives; he’d take different angles, look from an edge. He’d be spending time on the beach, time in the pubs, looking at how his audience sees things differently. That’s what I want to encourage you to do today – to see things from how audiences see things, not from how we see things. When we reach out to our diverse communities …. Start with them. Let them come to us and create a place for us. Picasso wouldn’t just try to do slightly better than anybody else was doing. The problem with any organisation today is that they tend to be incremental; incremental leads to irrelevance if you are not careful. The crucial thing is to see things that nobody has seen before and to think what nobody has thought. If you can do this I am sure that you can create some extraordinary things for the organisation that you are marketing. I want to take you through three thoughts about what matters most. First thought – See Things Differently

• Immerse yourself in the outside world • Reframe the way people see the arts • Embrace segment-specific aspirations

This comes from work I am doing with Marks & Spencer at the moment. Who eats a Marks & Spencer meal or visits the store in a typical week? Lots of you, well it’s going to get a whole lot better and be a whole lot different, so watch out.

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The big challenge they have is that they keep growing, certainly but Waitrose and Tesco are growing faster. So the real challenge is for them to do things better. Stuart Rose and the senior management immersed themselves in the outside world; we had to get them thinking how their customers think. Stuart Rose had never been to Ikea before, but 70% of his customers had. Our challenge was to get him to think like his customers do. Google Technology up-start … customer starting point Steve Chew had never been Google before, never been to the Apple Store – what a waste of square footage in retail terms they thought the Apple Store on Oxford Street was. He couldn’t believe the idea of being able to search for anything in the world at any time, and he kept going on all sorts of journeys through the web as a result. The big thing from marketing’s point of view is that marketing text books teach you about communication, about pricing etc, but the reality for people nowadays is that most processes start with a ‘Google’ – this is about the customer starting the process, not the marketer – customers being proactive and not passive. Guggenheim, Bilbao Interesting outside … interesting inside? If you look at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the first thing you see is the outside and not the inside. In the past we didn’t think about the outside of our buildings we were in, but when you walked up to the Wales Millennium Centre today, weren’t you astounded by the size, the enormity of it, and in here, the spectacularness of the auditorium matches the outside. So, we must match the inside with the outside – Guggenheim attracted 30% more visitors to Bilbao in the first 6 months of its operation. It attracted 15% more visitors than other museums in the city, but most people came to see the outside, and getting them inside is the challenge. Alessi Object of desire … functional tableware I guess that challenge is the same with all sorts of things, if you take Alessi’s objects. They are combining desire and function at the same time, and being able to fuse things that are beautiful, things that are desirable, things which inspire people and are at the same time useful to people is a big challenge. Like the inside outside thing, it’s about combining the artistic and the practical things. How do you combine those different needs for different audiences in your organisations? And these needs will be different for different audiences and different art forms. Cirque du Soleil Maverick Circus … populist ballet?

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If you look at Cirque du Soleil, fantastic entertainment – here is an example where they are taking two different worlds, two different sectors of the circus and the ballet. How do you fuse these together? How do you start to redefine the market you are in, and fuse together sectors that weren’t there before? If you look at O2 as a company; they are a phone company, a broadband company and soon to be a television company, so they are fusing sectors and growing markets. Cirque du Soleil have defined their own sector and you can define your own sector and if you do it first you can make a name for yourself, and if it leads to more customers, even better. Second thought – Do Things Differently

• Innovate the artistic experience • Deliver experiences on audience terms • Seize the best new opportunities first

You need to do different things, once you’ve seen the opportunities and have the guts and the boldness to do things which nobody else has done before. If you look at Virgin, for example, here is – this is SpaceShipOne and that’s an example where they are trying to seize an opportunity first. They are really serious about this, and their top marketer moved from other products in the Virgin Group and is entirely focused on trying to make Virgin Galactic happen. Don’t sell products, sell propositions, about customers’ wants and issues and then be able to get them across through customer experiences. iPod A better music player … reinventing an entire industry Who’s got an Apple iPod? The music player is just part of it, and Jonathan Ive, the designer who used to live in Cardiff, spent two years trying to perfect the curves and the translucent whiteness of the iPod, but what Steve Jobs was thinking about was iTunes. Because it was iTunes that fundamentally changed an industry that up until 3 years ago was concerned with ‘what’s going to happen to published music, CDs, music, the whole artistic process and he transformed it. And if you think about the world arts you can do that too … Belsay Castle Preserving our heritage …cutting edge fashion This is a small English Heritage location, Belsay Castle near to where I come from in Northumberland. And I went there with the kids hoping to have a nice day out in an old rambling castle, but what I found there was a fantastic crystal horse in the centre of Belsay Keep, by Stella McCartney. I went into another room, and I found it decked out by Vivienne Westwood and I went into another room and found Paul Smith’s library. All of this was bringing an ancient monument to life in a contemporary and new way. It also allowed artists from the modern contemporary commercial world to express their art in a different environment and through different media.

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Live 8 Campaign against poverty … the ultimate rock concert Last year’s Live 8 in terms of really supporting the campaign against poverty and not doing that in an explicit campaigning sense but actually doing something that really captured people’s imaginations. And yes, they had some backlash because they used first world and not third world artists, but they stubbornly stuck to that because they knew that if they wanted to attract attention all around the world and in terms of global leaders they had to get the biggest names and they had to really shape people’s imaginations. And a bit of controversy is always useful Oxfam Helping to change the world … or just stuck for a gift? And if you look at what Edward Fox, a great marketer, has done at Oxfam ‘Oxfam Unwrapped at Christmas’, how many of you bought a goat or a cow or a donkey for somebody last Christmas? The ability to turn something again what was a campaigning organisation into a gift was about looking at something in a different way. He sold more gifts than Hamley’s has done in the last three Christmases, so it was tremendously successful and also transformed people’s perceptions of Oxfam the brand. Thought three – Deliver Extraordinary Results

• Outside in, future back, left and right, right and fast • Standing head and shoulders above the crowd • Sustainable, profitable growth

So how do you do extraordinary things? How do you combine seeing things differently with doing different things and ensuring it has an impact for audiences? Starbucks is another brand that polarises people. But it has got at least half the population paying at least £2.50 for a cup of coffee when ten years ago, five years ago they’d have been struggling to pay 50p. Starbucks in itself has captured real difference in its world, and like iTunes has transformed its world. Starbucks took on the idea of moving from being just the place where you get coffee to being the third place – the place where you do your homework and then you hang out in. It did that by working in certain ways, by working from the outside in, working from the future back, and working left and right. Dreaming and then making it a reality. Geek Squad Quirky computer cops … high growth business And this guy dreamed! This is one of the hottest growth companies in the USA in IT services company – boring stuff – but it recognizes that one of the biggest growth segments in the market is home workers and small businesses and so it created a business called the Geek Squad. The Geek Squad is a bunch of technicians based at the precinct – you take your computer in, or you can call them and they will make a home visit, blue lights flashing in one of these crazy vehicles. You can even make boring, serious, technical things fun, different and exciting!

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And if you think about Maslow’s hierachy, people’s wants, essential etc – people want things that are different in their lives, things that rise them above, even things that look like differentiation are energizing. Westin Hotels Yet another hotel room … the best bed in the world This is Westin Hotels, a big chain of hotels. It did lots of research and concluded that not the lobby, not the restaurant which most hotels spend all their time making fantastic, but it’s beds that matter – people want a good night’s sleep. So, it created something called the ‘heavenly bed’ and it now has 20 times more Google hits for the bed rather than the hotel. In the last 6 months they’ve started selling the bed and they are outselling the hotel rooms with beds themselves. Agent Provocateur Naughty knickers …. Intimate luxury And if you look at Agent Provocateur – when Joseph Corre and Serena Rees started this company, selling provocative lingerie in that way was seen as a seedy, naughty thing to do, but they were bold and different and they wanted to celebrate things. Moving from something as a sexy secret to helping people become sexy superheroes, as they say. So, transforming people’s perceptions in terms of how they see things. And things that might be seen as narrow and niche and something you don’t talk about into something people had heard about. Jones Soda Even if people don’t like it …. they can still want it and love it And this is the most fantastic company in the world. It’s Jones Soda, Canada’s second biggest drinks company. They have 130 drinks flavours, all nominated by customers, and the number one drinks flavour at the moment is Turkey and Gravy soda! And Peter van Stolk who created Jones Soda 5 years ago people said he was crazy to enter a market dominated by Coca Cola and Pepsi etc, but he said I don’t need to do the same thing as they do. I don’t have to meet people’s needs, I don’t have to meet people’s wants. He said himself: ‘People don’t need my shit, people don’t want my shit, but people love my shit’, because people want something different in their lives. And you can only buy this through sports stores, music shops and tattoo parlours, you can’t buy this in supermarkets.’ So, lots of companies throughout the world – commercial, and artistic and charitable organisations who are beginning to see things differently. So we think about Picasso. We think about him as a bit of a mad man, but he was an incredibly technically trained guy. His dad was Professor of Arts at Madrid University, he trained with the Impressionists in Paris, and he really did have an artistic underpinning, but in order to get his inspiration he went out there and he saw things differently and he then interpreted things in a different way. Steve Jobs … do different things

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And that’s exactly what Steve Jobs is so fantastic at doing. Every year at Macworld in San Francisco, people want to know what’s going to come out of his pocket next, in terms of next gadget, the next thing he has seen differently before anybody else has. Philippe Starck … deliver extraordinary results Constantly, the ‘enfant terrible’ of the design world, but constantly trying to provoke people – a £35 toilet brush, the Asia de Cuba restaurant – fantastic expressions of things beyond the usual, and being able to work with organisations to achieve extraordinary results. Phil Knight – Nike And Phil Knight – the guy who started selling trainers off the back of his truck; he started by inspiration – one day, coming back from a run, he left his trainers in his kitchen on his hot waffle iron and he picked them up and spotted the pattern on his shoes, and this was his inspiration to do something differently. I heard Phil speak at Nike World last year, just before he retired, and he was giving a rallying cry to the guys there. He said ‘you’ve got to be living on the edge; you’ve got to be searching for the possibilities. Whatever you can do, or think you can do … begin it because boldness it has power, it has genius and it has magic in it.’ So I encourage you to constantly look for the edge, constantly look from your audience’s perspectives and see what you can see, what everyone can see, and then to think what nobody has thought before. Remember that you can do extraordinary things by thinking differently and you can change your world too.

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Claire Eva, Head of Marketing, Tate Go to www.a-m-a.co.uk/images/downloads/ClaireEvaKEYNOTE.pdf to download the Power Point presentation I am going to talk to you about two case studies today, Tate Britain – Create your own Collection campaign and Tate Modern – The Long Weekend I hope you can go away and think about how you are using marketing research, how you are conducting market research and how a really solid understanding of your audience can change the way you market your products. I think we are really lucky at Tate – people are at the core of our business. Tate’s aim is ‘to increase the public’s knowledge, understanding and appreciation of art’. The core brand value of our business is ‘people before art’ and people are at the heart of everything we do, what is the experience when people visit our galleries, what do they want to see, how do they want to consume art when they visit us? That goes right across the board into how our restaurants are laid out, how our signage is planned, our education work and we spend a lot of time on trying to find out who is coming and what kind of experience they are having whilst they are there. How do we know who our audiences are? Before we go into attracting new audiences, we need to find out who our audiences are. This is actually the bread and butter stuff, but we live and breathe by it completely. The core of what we do is our tracking surveys. Three times a year we undertake the basic demographic surveying, finding out where people are coming from, so we can track unusual tracks, so when the bombings happened last summer we could look at how quickly the galleries recovered, and who was coming back when and who we were missing. On top of that we have database analysis. In performing arts organisations you have box office data and it is considerably easier for you to find out who is coming and who is coming repeatedly. In galleries, we don’t have that information, so we have to rely on other information sources. Then we do one off surveys, finding out who is coming to specific events, but the two main areas of work I am going to concentrate on today are the Visitor Audit and Desk Research. The Visitor Audit was a huge project, undertaken by Morris Hargreaves McIntyre in 2003, which took months and involved Tate Modern and Tate Britain, where we looked into everyone who was coming and what were the main differences between them. We were stalking our audiences really – we secretly followed them – saw whether they came in and used the toilets first, went to the café, moved to the left, went to the right. And then when we started seeing the patterns we started doing extended interviews, asking why they came, how they chose our gallery over others; we started looking at people’s attitudes and behaviours. It really revolutionised how we looked at our customers. The second area, which is one I think organisations really forget about, is desk research. The National Museums and Galleries of Wales’ Social Inclusion Audit, which they undertook, with Leicester University inspired the two campaigns I’m going to

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discuss today in 2004. We gleaned a huge amount of knowledge from this work. There is no point in commissioning new research if similar stuff exists out there in the ether. First case study – Create your own Collection Aim: to raise awareness and attendance of the Tate Britain Collection displays This case study used information we gathered from our Visitor Audit. As you may be aware, Tate used to have Tate Gallery and everybody used to go there. We realised our collection was too large and too many people were going to the one gallery, so we opened Tate Modern down the road. We estimated 2 million visitors a year to Tate Modern and 2 million to Tate Britain, but in reality we achieved 4-5million visitors a year at Tate Modern and had falling visitor figures for Tate Britain. The campaign aimed to look at ways of addressing this problem. We’d tried ways of tackling the problem with some marketing campaigns, but they really were not working, so we went back to the Visitor Audit.

This is how we segmented audiences at both galleries based on their behaviours and attitudes towards art and how they consumed it.

• Aficionados – visual arts professionals looking for inspiration and escapism • Actualisers – non-visual arts professionals seeking inspiration or soul food • Sensualists – non-visual arts professionals, culture vultures seeking emotional

experience • Researchers – visual arts professionals on research and development visits • Self-improvers – people developing their visual arts knowledge • Social spacers – people visiting or meeting with others, wanting to make the

place their own • Site seers – mainly tourists who want ‘to do’ the Tate • Families – mixed age groups, social and intellectual in their motivation

We honed in on the Social Spacers. They are a huge market for the visual arts, but they are also very socially active and go to lots of arts and other events, so we are competing for their time and attention. Here is a pen portrait of a Social Spacer:

• Professionals who live in London and visit galleries fairly regularly, but see it essentially as a social activity

• Many visits are incidental, they like to just drop in (not coming to see something specific)

• Interested in the art but like drifting around the building in a fairly unfocused but confident way

• Respond to iconic objects that have received media attention • Looking for a way of making the space their own • Feel aware that there are people who are more at ease with the art and

apparently more knowledgeable than themselves (they are therefore quite intimidated)

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We are getting Social Spacers at both galleries, (total market is 296,000 but if you look at this diagram, you’ll see we are getting far more visiting Tate Modern.

What Tate Britain Social Spacers think of Tate Britain…

It shows us that there is an enormous potential for us to tap into for Tate Britain. While undertaking the research, we found out more about this market segment. Our research showed us that Tate Modern Social Spacers think of Tate Modern as energising, interesting, accessible, contemporary, must see, exciting and fun! Tate Britain Social Spacers think Tate Modern Social Spacers of Tate Britain as … think of Tate Britain as .. High quality Dead artists Stimulating Unreachable Escape Big paintings Depth Worthy Welcoming Dull Warm Traditional Surprising Educational The Tate Modern Social Spacers have a specific perception of Tate Britain – that’s not really what it is like. This showed us what we were up against, and we had to strip away the preconceptions and help them along the way to thinking that the gallery was their own – a place where they would really feel comfortable. So we came up with the Create Your Own Collection Campaign. We worked with an ad agency on this, and it took three years to get to the point of creating the campaign.

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17 Leaflets in the Entrance The campaign is based on 17 different leaflets, some examples of which are the ‘I’m Hung Over Collection’ or the ‘I’ve Just Split Up Collection, ‘The First Date Collection’. The campaigns were all pretty jazzy and contemporary, trying to smash the preconceptions that this market segment had. They took people around the gallery, giving them breaks in the café etc We had ‘The Greatest Hits Collection’ which took people around a selection of iconic paintings, made lots of jokes and were quite irreverent. We worked very closely with the curators on the copy to ensure we were not belittling any of the work or the artists themselves. We also had an ‘I Come Here All the Time Collection’ for the aficionados and there was the blank collection for people to invent their own. It was brilliant watching people enter the gallery and see how they interacted with this big rack of leaflets and watching which they picked up. Cross-track posters on the Underground We had lots of press coverage all over the world for this campaign – it was very popular with other marketers. Therefore, we did not have to spend a lot of money on PR. We did though create a poster campaign for The Underground. Research had shown that people have a 3-minute dwell-time on a station platform. Their phone doesn’t work, it’s too cramped to read a newspaper, and so people do read the posters. We came up with some long copy ads, very friendly, informative and trying to resonate with the state of mind travellers might be in. We stood outside train stations and handed out leaflets on different days, and we made them topical. On Valentine’s Day, we slipped The First Date Collection into Time Out, and targeted specific stations. We are also thinking about creating opportunities and events around football, Christmas and New Year resolutions. Evaluating the campaign It is particularly difficult to measure the effect of any gallery campaign, but we looked at the following:

• Increase in attendance figures to Collection – the campaign started in September 2005 some six weeks after the London bombings – we saw a 20% increase in visits to Tate Britain

• Pick-up rate of leaflets – we had to reprint in 8 weeks, and some ran out faster than others

• Positive response in on-site research – very positive, emails from people • Monitoring levels of Social Spacer visits • Vox pop quotes • Grand Prix and Gold Lion award for Best Outdoor Campaign at the Cannes

Lions International Advertising Festival (beating Orange, Nike etc) Second case study – The Long Weekend Aim: to attract existing and new audiences to Tate Modern’s Permanent Collection

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Tate Britain has a different set of needs to Tate Modern. The Social Spacers who visit Tate Modern want to have a coffee, come to the restaurant etc. We wanted to look at other ways of engaging people and getting them to make repeat visits. We have recently re-hung the permanent collection at Tate Modern, which was the first time since it opened 6 years ago, and is a pretty big event. We knew we would get a lot of press coverage because of this and we knew that all the art community would come along and look at the re-hang. We wanted to look at getting new people in, people who had never been to the gallery before. Our target audiences were:

• Adult Londoners – occasional gallery attenders aware of Tate Modern (mostly Social Spacers)

• Young Londoners who don’t usually visit galleries, 16-24 year olds • London families • Regular Tate gallery attenders, including Members and art world

16-24 year olds are particularly difficult to target. They generally have no interest in coming to galleries. We undertook some desk research on this group; our Media Group undertook an analysis of TGI data for us and gave us a profile on this segment – they are interested in brands, mobile phones, music – art is just not on their radar at all. We have a group called Raw Canvas (16-24 year olds); they work with us and put together their own types of events in the gallery. They are very honest and give us lots of feedback on what they and other people like them think. Here are some quotes from some work we undertook with this group to see why they did not want to undertake a career in art galleries: ‘they had museum people on Midsomer Murders; they were old people who wore long brown coats’ ‘it’s like Ross on Friends. He is the nerd boy one. No one wants to listen to him when he goes off on one – he works in a museum’ This is the perception we need to change! The Long Weekend – what was it? It was four themed days across the May Bank Holiday weekend, programmed by each target market identified above. We wanted to complete a different experience for each of these groups, and the marketing department worked as events managers and creators. We worked closely with the curators and artistic directors. We let Raw Canvas get involved in the programme for the 16-24 year olds. We themed the days with different names:

• Futurist Friday – DJ Spookey, • Surreal Saturday – Joan Miro’s fantastic puppet show • Abstract Sunday – Courtney Pine, music by John Cage

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• Minimalist Monday – Trisha Brown Dance Company We tried to get the balance between having lots of new things happening, but also trying to keep our core audience happy as well. Events such as the puppet show – enormous puppets and procession across from St Paul’s cathedral. It was on all the local news stations, we got lots of press coverage etc. We had Harry Hill doing talks about the paintings. We had workshops, skate ramps etc (16-24 year olds). The campaign for the adults was pretty straightforward so let me take you through what we did to target the 16-24 year olds. These are the additional youth-targeted activities:

• Skate park on North Landscape with graffiti by cult graffiti artist Sole • Live graffiti and digital graffiti workshops • Motion break dancing with Jonze D • Open mic and DJ sessions • Spoken word competitions • Film and video workshops • Food carts and juice bars

The Youth-Targeted marketing campaign

• Worked with Raw Canvas to programme and market events • Commissioned illustrator from ‘Pimp’ skating magazine to create bespoke flyer

and poster distributed to targeted list and handouts • Created a youth-targeted min-site ‘Long Weekend Raw’ • Raw Canvas initiated email and text mailout • Choice FM radio competition with Masterstepz • Ads on XFM • Poster and leaflet distribution to youth clubs, skate parks, relevant music gigs

Attendance and ticket sales

• All ticketed evening events were filled to capacity (1,000 per night) • 111,000 visitors to the gallery over the four days of The Long Weekend • Busiest period at Tate Modern since its launch • Market research conducted throughout the weekend to track audience against

past research • 44% more visitors than on a normal Bank Holiday

The socio-ethnic diversity increased to three times its usual level; 36% of visitors were first time attenders; 85% said that they would be interested in similar events in the future; 92% rated their visit as good/very good; 49% of attenders would not have come if The Long Weekend had not been on. We have real proof that the campaign did attract new people and the types of audiences we were looking for. I just wanted to end with a few tips about making campaigns resonate with your target audience:

• Use market research methods to understand who is coming and who isn’t

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• Use both desk and field research to find out about target audiences • Work with the peers of your target audience who know them better than you,

e.g. Raw Canvas • Find out their barriers to attendance • Devise campaigns that address needs rather than just advertise, eg the Tate

Britain campaign • Don’t try to compile a campaign that appeals to everyone, particularly your

director! • Test the creative on the target audience before you go to print – don’t need to

spend a lot of money on this • Monitor the effects of your campaign and use this information to inform your

next campaign Most importantly, you can’t have one off hits with these audiences. Social Spacers are a key target for the next few years, and we will be working to attract both these and the 16-24 year old segment.

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Keynotes in conversation Peter Fisk (The Foundation) and Claire Eva (Tate) Q You gave some fantastic examples of big organisations Peter. We are all

generally a lot smaller; has scale got anything to do with being visionary? PF In a way, if you are a smaller organisation it’s easier to change and it is all

about seeing things differently. I’ve been working with The Co-Operative Funeral Services and their big issue was to examine how they could work in a different way. The funeral business in the UK is fragmented, people don’t pay ahead for their funerals and they tend to go for the basic package in a time of stress and distress.

In countries such as Holland 80% of people pay for their own funerals before they are aged 30. They see it as part of their own personal financial planning, and sort it out when they get a mortgage etc. What we found in the UK is that death is a big taboo, and there is a huge block with customers because of this. The Co-Op Funeral Services had fifteen managers in its head office and we worked on how we could get people to do life planning that included planning and paying for your funeral while you are living ‘let’s talk about life, not death. In the USA there is a huge growth in ‘celebrations’ when people die – sending ashes to heaven in fireworks etc. In the UK the challenge is changing the context by seeing things differently.

Q Claire, you are talking about ‘framing the whole experience’ and the big

question of what galleries are for. What problems have you faced in this area?

CE We’ve spent a lot of time looking at the barriers, e.g. why people are coming.

Our key strength is that we have a visionary artistic leader in Nicolas Serota, who works with Alex Beard, deputy director. Alex is the money person, the business person. They are a great partnership and they respect each other. It’s also important that my boss, Will Gompertz (director of communications) is on the same level as gallery directors. We are supported in marketing, but some curators are naturally suspicious of marketing. Many of the ideas for promotions do not happen. For example, we wrapped artists’ images around coffee cups at Café Nero. We tried to do this with Howard Hodgkin, but he didn’t want us to do it.

Q It’s apparent that marketing at the Tate is not just a bolt-on function. CE Yes, our marketing team is treated with respect and we get recognition from our

directors for our campaigns.

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Q Peter, isn’t the point really that Picasso wouldn’t want to market art? Won’t artists feel even more demoralised that their art becomes indistinguishable from a marketing campaign?

PF Your point is very true and artists could feel side-lined in this situation. At

Microsoft their developers are the heroes of their business, they get the best car parking spaces etc. Microsoft is selling propositions rather than products etc, and all of this has made the technology and the developers less important to the organisation and this is a good thing. You don’t have to create the best product – best is what is right for each customer. I’m not at all sure that the artist is the most important thing in the equation.

CE No two artists are the same. One wanted me to advertise their show ‘on the

clouds’. Some artists help, some hinder, but the marketer and the artist must have respect for each other.

Q I work with the development dept in Belfast trying to market the city and

its culture. We’ve got some way, e.g. in developing a cultural strategy. We are good at targeting visitors from abroad, with 6.5m visitors a year to the city. We need to do more with the domestic market. How do I make the case to the ‘powers that be’ to invest in and support their city?

PF When you say ‘culture’, what do you mean? It made me think of an

organisational culture, usually termed as ‘the way we do things around here’. Changing a culture is a big thing to do. I can think of the example of my home city, Newcastle-upon-Tyne where I have noticed the shift in events and attitudes of people over the years every time I visit. Things like the Tall Ships Race and the Sage Gateshead took time to get support. I suppose you need time, and you need to get the decision makers on your side. Our example of sending Stuart Rose out to be a customer might help you. He couldn’t believe the Apple Store, e.g. the waste of square footage, the fact that teenagers were playing on computers and not buying. Get the important people to see the city from the perspective of the people of Belfast – immerse themselves in this world.

CE I know it’s good to have a clear set of benefits and arguments as to why you

should get money and support for your ideas, but it’s worth spending more time putting yourself in their shoes and rehearsing all the objections you think they will come up with the answers you will give them.

Q I think we’ve got a problem with creativity in our industry. It is all invested

in one person, usually the artistic director. How can we change our culture so that everybody in an organisation and his or her creative input and ideas are valued?

PF This is a challenge across lots of sectors. The starting point is that leaders need

to recognise everyone’s views matter. Without empowering creativity, people can’t be creative. The balance at Tate sounds good, e.g. two people with complementary skills. It’s also about being bold, asking forgiveness, not permission.

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• More arts organisations are challenging the situation but these are still the minority of organisations. We need case studies, and presentations on internal projects. Tate is an interesting example, but I wish it were more widely known and understood.

PF There is innovation in the way Tate presents and engages. Creativity is only

half of innovation, so therefore an artistic director is only half of the answer. Innovation is what we are trying to do.

CE It is a way of thinking, not just about the logo and the brand. Q Claire, would your creativity have been hindered by a smaller budget for

the campaigns you discussed? CE I am lucky in that I have a recognisable brand. We do a lot with media

partnerships. For example we had £100,000 of media space for free with our Constable campaign. We worked with the East of England Tourist Board, who included details about the exhibition in 1.5m door drops. We arranged press trips, brought their tourist guides down to see the exhibition etc. We had a competition to win a free trip to the exhibition and a break in the region. All of this was free.

We’ve also done similar things with The Ritz in Madrid – a promotion for the tour of the Howard Hodgkin exhibition.

The Long Weekend would have generated smaller results with a smaller budget, but we did get a lot of money from a sponsor, and this was used for marketing. Tate decided to use this money for marketing instead of anything else, and this demonstrates their commitment.

Q Claire, you seem to have turned CRM on its head by asking your

customers to segment themselves. Were you also discussing looking at people who never come to Tate at all?

CE For information about non gallery attenders we tend to rely on research from

arts councils and academia. We are DCMS funded, and all such funded galleries and museums are now standardising our research questions so that we can compare our research results. We are also talking to Audiences London about a mapping project. One of our limitations is that we do not have live box office data on our visitors. MOSAIC gives us a rough idea of our customer profile, but it is visitors’ attitudes that are most important?

Q Do you think there are simpler ways to segment our audiences then? CE As galleries, we all rely so much on our market research for valuable data.

Within regions, for example the East of England, it’s important how galleries position themselves within the offers made by outdoor attractions, e.g. zoos etc.

Q Have you measured and evaluated the long term effect of the Long

Weekend Campaign?

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CE We will be able to pick up changes in trends through our tracking survey, e.g. if

the number of 16-24 year olds increases; we also interested in tracking participation through our outreach and education work.

Q I went to the Long Weekend, and must admit that it was too busy for me. I

found it horrendous, and I wondered how you felt you dealt with people who said that the marketing was great but the experience didn’t meet the promise.

CE It’s very difficult, and we can’t do something for everyone. There are lots of

operational issues we can’t control especially with the free and open access events.

PF We need to realise that when organisations failed to deliver, the situation is

retrievable. Service recovery is the biggest driver of customer loyalty. The way in which a complaint is handled gives you the greatest opportunity to engage with your customers.

Q If you are creating special events and adding to the offer, how do you get

these visitors to come back? If you are only targeting them for special events then surely this is defeating the point of trying to get new visitors into the main gallery?

CE It’s about concentrating on the needs of the visitors. We are sometimes using

events as ‘carrots’. We have to be careful that events match with our artistic policy.

Q In Stoke, we want to improve the quality of the businesses on the street

where our theatre is located. Many of the shops are closed and there is no culture on the street. There have been one off events such as French Food Markets, but we need to create longer term answers.

PF In the arts you are all so incredibly separate. I want to go somewhere different,

gallery one day, theme park the next. You can get to different people by working in partnership with other organisations. It’s about building communities of different customers – bringing people together, creating things that mean more to people. You should be thinking of partnership not sponsorship.

CE There are examples of the V&A working with Habitat and Top Shop on joint

promotions. PF It’s also about taking people up through different levels of engagement and

intimacy with your organisations. We’ve been working with Disneyland Paris, and how they can build levels of engagement and increase visitor frequency. You need to decide what you want to do with customers at each level or stage of engagement.

Q What did you do to make more Social Spacers go from Tate Modern to

Tate Britain?

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CE It’s been a difficult one to crack. Visitors to Tate Modern have their TM head on;

leaflets confuse customers. We’ve had a mini Tate Britain on the lawn, and we’ve had the boat between the two sites. None of it has really worked. Customers don’t always want to do too much in one day – there is the issue of time. We’ve tried cross selling of shows, and some discounting of tickets. We have to have the right show in order to do successful cross-selling.

PF Disneyland Paris has had a similar experience. They have an adjacent studio

where the focus is on making films. The theme park and the studio offer different experiences – different things but connected.

Q From our experience (at MHM) we’ve found that there are more similarities

than differences in segments of gallery and visual arts visitors. It would be useful if galleries worked together on this and could work through how they could then better engage with their visitors

Q What do you think of the value and effectiveness of pod-casting? PF You need to do different things with pod casts. They provide a chance for a real

person to talk about real things. For example, VW have Dr Bernard doing a pod cast – it’s basically a chat about what he loves about cars, very friendly etc. You need to use pod casts regularly; it’s about the story behind the cover, linking very specifically to a targeted community. Richard Reed, the founder of Innocent, creates a regular blog. Accenture has put its entire marketing budget into blogs.

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Call My Data Bluff – James Gough, (amh) Hello, and thank you for coming along to Call My Data Bluff. I’m just going to start our session and for ten minutes talk seriously about Audience Data UK (ADUK) before I unleash these six talented people onto the stage. For those of you who are fully versed in ADUK, I apologise, but let’s get back to basics. Its aim is to ‘help people who work in the arts to make use of data and information about audiences’, which is a broad aim and something that ideally we’d all like to achieve. Specifically, the initiative wants to:

• help people to improve the way they use data • increase the understanding of data and therefore the understanding of

audiences • enable people to process data more successfully • encourage a wider sharing of data

I feel a little embarrassed because last year at the AMA Conference I encouraged people in the audience to say to each other ‘my audience is your audience’ and I feel nothing much has changed, so maybe we’ll try this again later. So, where did this initiative spring from? Well, we can all blame Beth Aplin and Catalyst Arts. They were commissioned in 2003 and produced The Thirst for Knowledge report. A series of further work was suggested in this report:

• Definitions and protocols • Art form classification • Guidelines about who should own and share data • Standard box office system reports

They were reports commissioned from consultants looking at these specific areas. So Peter Verwey, the Peter Snow of the arts world, was commissioned to look at the art form classification system, and it is now being tested. A number of organisations are using the system. What Peter has come up with is creating a broad top tier of classifications and ADUK will collate feedback on this work. The second piece of work is the A-Z of Commonly Used Terms and Protocols used in the arts sector. It contains 85 definitions. There are data ownership guidelines, by Tim Baker and Roger Tomlinson that are now being tested. Standard Box Office Systems Reports Feasibility Report – from which some other work is developing.

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So, my name is James Gough and I am the Director of amh and I am one of the agencies working on one of these projects – the adoption of the protocols and definitions. Within any changes in our industry this is going to happen, and I suspect lots of you are early adopters and some are laggards. We have to find systems to let this happen. For example, if you are a touring company and you are working with a laggard venue asking how many young people came to your event and they are defining this completely differently from others, then there will be strange anomalies and skewed figures. D + V + F > R

D = Disadvantages of current situation + V = Vision for the future + F = Clear First Steps Must be > R = Resistance to change

There’s a thing about change here, and I love this. It’s about looking at the disadvantages of the current situation and understanding what they are; creating a clear vision for the future and then trying to provide some clear first steps to a solution, and those have to be greater than everybody’s resistance to change. And I think what is very interesting about this model is that we are frequently aware of the disadvantages of our current situation, but we are often not aware of what the better future might look like. And quite frequently we are surrounded by a large number of documents about the future, but getting on and doing the first few steps is the difficult bits. The ADUK initiative is trying to provide the information for organisations and practitioners to make those first few important steps and making those initial changes. Methodology for the A-Z pilot programme The methodology for the A-Z Pilot project is a process of consultation, some directed discussion forums which will take place later in the summer, at the end of August and into September, some training for pilot organisations, running some pilot projects and a big evaluation report. And what this should give us is a picture of how nationally we can roll out an A-Z of Commonly Used Terms, so whether you work in the Northcott or in Pitlochry, and you say that 22% of our audience comprises young people, you know that you are both talking about the same age range, or if not, you are at least classifying the data in a way that makes sense, and enabling comparison. It may not sound important that we are talking about young people in the same way, but when you expand into talking about catchment areas, penetration, and the large group of words we use to define how successful we are as organisations, the more we as cultural organisations used the same language, the easier it is to make the case for our combined and individual value. Development of ADUK training programme A second strand of work is a big evaluation of all the training that has been taking place. AMA and Network will be working on auditing all the training that is currently happening around use of data, and looking at the needs of those working in the sector.

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Glasgow Grows Audiences have sent out an online survey form to practitioners asking about your training needs. Who, in this room has received a survey form? (50% put their hands up). Is the right training there? Is it available for the right people? In terms of the training needs, what exactly do you want to find out about and can we build a training programme to satisfy those needs? Piloting the data ownership / sharing guidelines This work is being undertaken by Henderson Aplin Partnership and the interim report will be delivered shortly. I would now like to start the very first running of Call My Data Bluff …. (music) I have placed on this smart jacket now, and let’s have the mikes up on the teams. Let me introduce the two teams we have with us today: First of all, the team captains – on my right is Andy Ryans, born in 1906, he has risen in his career to now being the Marketing Director of the award winning Hallé Orchestra. He is also well known in certain quarters of most metropolitan cities in the UK. On my left is Beth Aplin, single mother of two children, who from time-to-time earns pin money from doing small amounts consultancy work. Renowned in Cambridge and other parts of the country where she has lived before, as having the tidiest and most disciplined of households, she recently turned down a programme on television because they weren’t going to be strict enough. She would also like to mention that she has just joined a tennis club. Andy, would you like to introduce your team … AR Yes, on the winning team here today I have three spectacular and slightly strangely coloured orchids who will charm and delight you. On my right I have somebody who works for Audiences London; she is ‘conditioner in chief’ to Anne Torreggiani and she occasionally goes to Glasgow – Orian Brook. And on my left, the woman with the home advantage, the Marketing Director of Welsh National Opera; she knows every single square foot of Tiger Bay following an extensive period of marketing research, Lucy Shorrocks. Beth, would you please introduce your team … BA On my right, Stuart Nicolle, a self confessed data nerd, who is now having great success with his company Purple Seven after previous attempts at calling the company Green Four and a Half. I am also delighted to introduce Tim Baker; he earns his living trying to be interesting about things people find particularly dreary. He received his highest accolade when someone at one of his pricing seminars said ‘I thought it was going to be really dull, but it wasn’t’.

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JG – Let’s go through the rules for this game. I will reveal a word, and I will ask each member of Andy’s term to give a definition of the term. I will then summarise the definitions and offer them up to Beth’s team, who will then need to work out which is the true definition and which two are bluffs. You can play it here in the audience, or back at work So, our first term is ‘door sale’. Lucy, please give us your definition of this term. All of the terms we are going to discuss today can be found in the A-Z Guide to Definitions and Protocols, written by Stephen Cashman. The full report can be downloaded from the ADUK website www.aduk.org Answer A (LS) Door Sale: ‘the point that you can relax in an evening. Your Excel spreadsheet and campaign plans and work has kicked in and it’s the point where the show starts and the curtain goes up. We don’t experience door sales in opera much as a typical booker books two years in advance and sometimes even before you have programmed the work. Door sales make every arts marketing person’s life hell, as you have no idea how many tickets you will sell on the night. It’s the point at which you make a sale on the night, more commonly called a ‘walk up sale’. Answer B (AR) Door Sales: ‘MFI, Homebase, Do It All, B&Q and Doors R Us – all places where you can buy doors. But, the original meaning of door sales was first explained by the galleries and museums sector to explain those pieces of merchandise that were actually made available for sale as somebody was entering or leaving the gallery. It’s nothing to do with tickets, but it is the small and not very costly items you can buy when you enter or leave an art gallery.’ Answer C (OB) Door Sales: ‘I am sorry that both of my colleagues are misleading you. A door sale is a sale that happens where there is no data capture, and the majority of these sales are cash sales. Quite a lot of these will happen just before the performance, but we all know that on occasion box office staff get overwhelmed and customer data is not captured, and all of these would be classified as a door sale.’ JG – Beth’s team now need to decide which definition is true and which two are bluffs. BA – I don’t think it would be C, as I know this doesn’t happen at all in our arts centres in the UK. SN – Our experience says that Andy Ryans is renowned for telling the truth. We are going to go for Answer B, especially as Andy mentioned B&Q. AR – Sorry, but my answer was a bluff. JG – The correct answer was A, from Lucy Shorrocks. Our second term is ‘Churn’ – Tim Baker, would you like to start by giving us your definition of this term.

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Answer A (TB) Churn – ‘this is the official data nerd’s definition. Churn is an analytical procedure for quantifying the degree of audience turnover based on evaluating and composing the rate at which new audience members are acquired and existing audience members are lost.’ Answer B (SN) Churn – ‘churn is actually a term that has been adopted by the arts and it’s actually a government acronym for Council House Unique Reference Number, used to differentiate Council dwellings from other types of dwellings.’ Answer C (BA) Churn – ‘churn comes out of all of these large databases that we are all now generating. In the old days, traditional databases were stored in tables, columns and rows. Nowadays, you get large-scale data warehouses, with data stored often offsite on different servers, and these are called data farms, and terminology has had to change in response to this. So the equivalent of a table is now a vat, and rather than columns and rows, we now have churns and pals, obviously!’ JG – so, Andy’s team, which answer is correct? AR – what can we tell you? Anyone in the audience who knows Stephen Cashman will know that it cannot possibly be anything to do with social housing, and really Beth, it was so obviously Tim’s definition! JG – yes, correct! Let’s go into Round 2, and another definition for Andy’s team – Model Data. Answer A (OB) Model Data – ‘well, it’s nothing to do with cars. We are all familiar that you are not allowed to the AMA Conference if you do not have a marketing qualification, so you will all be aware of behavioural models, marketing models etc, such as AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action), but also one of the more commonly referenced and most complex of models such as the Maslow’s Hierachy of Needs. Model data is created when researchers look at the choices that individuals make and they then come up with statistical models of predicted behaviour. For example, if this percentage of people see this advert, this will result in this percentage of awareness, this percentage of interest, desire, action etc’ Answer B (AR) Model Data – ‘Naomi Campbell, Tyra Banks, Kate Moss and Twiggy – you might think that model data is the collection of vital statistics from models, yet no. There has recently been an Association Football Tournament in Germany where Victoria Beckham attended three of the England matches. Victoria, a role model of mine, we share a similar life vision and taste in sun glasses – Victoria kept a little black book about the other ‘WAGs’, and she was writing down various bits of information in this book. It was all recorded in The Sun newspaper. One of the other WAGs, in an interview with The Independent, described this book as a piece of model data’. Answer C

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(LS) Model Data – ‘the true definition is a source of summarised statistical information which gives a representation or indication of the essential nature of the area and the people who live within it. We kind of know what that means, and you should probably take more notice of model data, but I think experiences with well-known but unknown data management companies, for example, trying to look for the potential number of ballet attenders in an area of Glasgow – this was actually four times the actual population. This was wrong, and when recalculated, the answer was actually zero. So, model data sums up information about a particular area and the people who live there.’ JG – so, what is the correct answer? TB – I am afraid that having conferred, that clearly Lucy’s definition is not plausible, neither is Andy’s, but we all dozed off during Orian’s speech, but we are going to say it’s Orian’s. JG – Orian’s was a bluff. Answer C, Lucy’s definition was the correct answer. Let’s go onto Round 3, and the term I’d like you to define is Caveats. Anwer A (BA) Caveats – ‘is the posh word for small print. So while research reports are always presented as gospel, caveats are the exception to what’s just been asserted. By definition, they should not be small.’ Answer B (SN) Caveats – ‘data inserted into research reports before publication in order to massage the figures, thus allowing the commissioning organisation’s funding application to be approved.’ Answer C (TB) Caveats – ‘I am so sorry that my colleagues are so misleading on this. This is a French word, which is French for a Data Warehouse. The origin is obvious – it’s from the French word Cave, a place where they store wine and data, likewise, improves with age. They have taken the terminology further because data that is infected by a virus is said to be corked.’ JG – Andy’s team, what is the correct answer? AR – This is a difficult one. We wonder about Tim’s knowledge of French … We think probably not Tim’s, and then we have a split vote. We are going with Stuart’s definition. JG – It’s a bluff. The correct answer is Beth’s. Now, into our next and final round. The definition for this round is Net Income. Answer A (AR) Net Income – ‘is the income your organisation acquires over a financial year minus tax, costs, expenses, staff time and absolutely anything you might spend anything on.’

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Answer B (LS) Net Income – ‘if you are a touring company, the derisorily income you have left after the mean theatre has taken off all the marginal costs which, let’s face it, they would have anyway, including ghostly crews and bottles of wine that taste horrid but are so expensive they could appear on a Gordon Ramsay wine list.’ Answer C (OB) Net Income – ‘it’s the total income after some deductions, but there is no agreed definition of what those deductions are.’ JG – So, what is the correct answer? BA – we will go with Andy’s answer. JG – Andy’s answer was a bluff. The correct answer was Orian’s definition. JG – Our final term is penetration. (SN) Penetration – ‘in my company we do a lot of database work, so I will bore you with how we define it in our handbook. Penetration is the long word of penetrate and penetrate works in database programming with other key words such as update, insert, delete and truncate. Penetrate forces a tightly bound target datum to an open access pipe allowing delivery of a fast moving payload into its low level logic. Many users of Access will know that without strict selection criteria the accidental use of penetrate as a key word can cause the creation of new data objects which can create long term drain on resources.’ (BA) Penetration – ‘the level of penetration in an organisation is the number of people coming through the door. From a venue’s point of view the more people entering the better, and the further they venture in and the longer they stay, the greater the level of success. Personally I think it’s vital not to over promise and never under estimate the importance of good word of mouth.’ (TB) Penetration – ‘the number of individuals with whom you have a relationship, expressed as a proportion of all individuals within a defined geographical area.’ JG – so, Andy’s team, which is the correct answer? AR - It’s clear to me that Beth has the right answer. JG – No, Beth’s is a bluff. Tim’s is the correct answer. We come to the end of this session now. Like in all home economics and woodwork classes, there is only one lesson to learn. This is not about holding the right end of the chisel, nor about wearing gloves to remove hot things from the oven. There is one place that all of you need to visit, which is the ADUK website. Although we have taken a light hearted look today at some of the terms and definitions, if, as an industry, we continue to ‘make it up’ and use whichever terms suit us, we will be only fooling ourselves. Remember just to go to the website, and get involved in the debate about using data in the arts industry – www.aduk.org

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Speaker biographies: Claire Eva Claire Eva is the head of marketing for Tate. Claire has worked with Tate for five years, previously in marketing manager roles for both Tate Britain and Tate Modern. She oversees marketing strategy and research as well as working on innovative ideas for exhibition and collection campaigns. Claire managed the extensive marketing campaign for the blockbuster Turner Whistler Monet exhibition which won the silver award for best marketing campaign at the Visit London awards in 2005. She also manages the marketing for the Turner Prize each year and has been working with advertising agency Fallon on a series of innovative audience development projects for the collections at both Tate Britain and Tate Modern. Before Tate, Claire managed the marketing for the Hayward Gallery and National Touring Exhibitions in London, as well as press and marketing for Arnolfini, Bristol. She studied art and related arts at the West Sussex Institute before going on to study the communications, advertising and marketing diploma with the CAM Foundation. Peter Fisk Peter Fisk is a highly experienced strategist and marketer, having spent many years working with the likes of American Express and Coca Cola, Microsoft and Vodafone. He is author of Marketing Genius and jointly leads the London-based strategic innovation firm, The Foundation. He was previously the CEO of the world's largest marketing organisation, the Chartered Institute of Marketing, led the global marketing consulting team of PA Consulting Group, and managed brands and strategy at British Airways. He is an inspirational speaker – on customers and brands, strategy and innovation – thoughtful and considered, provocative and entertaining. In January 2006, he was described by Business Strategy Review as ‘one of the most interesting new business thinkers’. James Gough is the director of amh the audience development agency for the south. amh specialises in research, evaluation, market intelligence and audience development for the cultural sector. Graduating from Southampton University with a degree in philosophy, James began his marketing career at Newbury's Watermill Theatre before working at Salisbury Playhouse as the marketing manager and then joining Tickets.com. James joined amh in the winter of 2001 as audience development manager. In the autumn of 2005 he became director. James is on the board of Salisbury Arts Centre, is a trained learning adviser and mentor for the AMA and for the continuing professional development hub for arts managers, All Ways Learning.

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With greater leisure options than ever before and potential reductions in public funding for the arts, what strategies can we employ to communicate purpose, relevance and value to society? Keynote speech: Rufus Radcliffe (Channel 4) ………………………………….. 2 Paul Kaynes (Audiences Central) …………………………….. 12 Seminars: Keynotes in conversation ……………………………………… 17 Arts and tourism in partnership: Adrian Bevan, VisitBritain… 24 Audience focus from the top: Madeline Hutchins, trainer and consultant ……………………………………………………… 50 Audience focus throughout: Dilwyn Davies, Theatr Mwldan . .. 60 Targets, tactics, messages: Debbie Richards, Baker Richards 71 Speaker biographies …………………………………………… 90

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Keynote speech: Rufus Radcliffe (Channel 4) and Paul Kaynes (Audiences Central) Rufus Radcliffe, Channel 4 Go to: www.a-m-a.co.uk/images/downloads/RufusRadcliffeKEYNOTE.pdf to download the Power Point presentation Hi everyone. I am sure you are going to be bombarded by ideas today, and in my speech. I am really lucky in that I have big budgets and access to talent, but hopefully what I talk about today will be relevant, useful and applicable to all marketers in all sectors. This is the brief I was given for this speech today: ‘In a market where audiences are rapidly fragmenting, Rufus will talk about how Channel 4 has created a brand message that integrates E4, Film4 and More4 and discuss how a thorough understanding of the marketplace enables Channel 4 to build programmes, marketing and content that connects with their target audience’ Not particularly snappy as a brief, but in the spirit of this conference I’ve translated that into the following five portions, and these are what I am going to talk about today:

• The power of positioning • Know your audience – this is so important • Marketers as content commissioners • Don’t be a jack of all trades • Recognise change before your consumers do

The power of positioning Positioning is a really vital marketing tool. In a world where there are hundreds of galleries in the market, hundreds of TV channels, hundreds of galleries – we are all competing for people’s leisure time. We need information to help us make decisions. And this is where good positioning comes into place. This is relevant where markets are going through huge amounts of change such as television – analogue TV is dying and digital TV is the future – but it is relevant across the board as well. Every market is affected where communication is changing and where habits are changing as a result. We are lucky at Channel 4 because we have a unique positioning because we are a unique organisation. We are the only organisation in the world that is owned by the government but funded commercially. It means we have an extremely tight remit, but we also need to get a lot of bums on seats! Our positioning is clear because we are defined by a clear set of values and they are a fun set of values to have as a marketer. I will lose my job if I don’t have these values engrained on my skull and they are to be:

• Groundbreaking • Provocative • Inspiring

We also have a clear mission that is to:

• Do it first • Inspire change • Cause trouble

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Since 1982 viewers have had a really clear idea of what Channel 4 stands for, but 1982 is very different from 2006 where digital TV is the future, and to keep up with this change Channel 4 has diversified and has launched E4, More4 and Film4. And I believe their success has been based on having a very clear positioning, which I am going to take you through. With our airtime resources, it’s really easy for us to get high awareness of new services that we launch but if you don’t have a clear positioning you have high awareness and low understanding; these two combined mean that it will be difficult for things to succeed. In 1982 we were competing against three other channels, but this shows we now compete with hundreds of other channels, and the most important thing for us is that in terms of young audiences, this world of choice is all they know. So what does this mean? It means that Channel 4 has not kept its head in the clouds. Multi-channel TV used to be a minority sport, but now over 70% of the UK is multi-channel. In 2012 analogue TV will not exist, when the government switches off the signal, so we have pursued a multi-channel strategy in response. The strategic rationale behind these channels was clear. It was based on core reputations of the channel and clear commercial opportunity. In 2001 E4 was launched. It was targeting advertising friendly 16-34 year olds who loved C4’s brand of entertainment, and it was a quality of entertainment not found anywhere else in multi-channel. At the end of last year More4 was launched. This was targeting older, more up-market 35-54 year olds who had an appetite for news, documentaries and current affairs. And back in 1998 Film4 was launched as a premium subscription channel. The multi-channel market dynamics have changed now, and people are not prepared to pay over and above their monthly subscription, so on Sunday Film4 will be going ‘free to air’. The strategic rationales for the channels were clear but in a crowded market place the most vital thing to do from a marketing point of view was to get the positioning right. There was all sorts of soul searching about this – do we position them against the competition, do we position them against an attitude? Well, I think there is a real danger you will overcomplicate things, and it was while in conversation with Kevin Lygo, our director of television, who said that the best was to position these channels against Channel 4 itself, and he came up with positioning statements that all felt instinctively right.

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Film4 was more difficult to position. What was created was a very cool and aspirational brand, but claimed subscription was always much higher than the reality. So once you have got your positioning right, the most important thing is to get the creative expression of these positioning right, and in doing so, not to wear the strategy on your sleeve. So, Ali G was the perfect vehicle for promoting ‘Channel 4 without the boring bits’. More4 was harder as there was no one person who could encapsulate the channel. The other problem was that if E4 was Channel 4 without the boring bits then was More4 Channel 4 with the boring bits? We did tons and tons of research and we talked to the target audience for More4, and this group were the personification of ‘cash rich and time poor’, and when they watch TV they just hate to think that they are wasting precious moments; they want meaningful entertainment, stuff that serves a purpose. So, More4 could be expressed as Channel 4’s grown up entertainment channel, but to creatively express that we launched it as Channel 4’s ‘adult’ entertainment channel. This allowed a tease phase, where we pretended we were launching a porn channel, and we borrowed the iconographies of the porn industry to do that, and the thing about that is that we got attention (something we are all looking for as marketers); and the second phase was the ‘reveal’ phase, where we revealed that Channel 4’s version of an ‘adult’ channel was actually news, documentaries and current affairs.

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The third creative expression for Film4 is great films you know, great films you don’t and there are tons of examples of bringing that to life in a compelling way. So Ali G delivered Channel 4 without the boring bits, Jon Snow revealed to us that adult TV was really news, documentaries and current affairs, and Dame Judi Dench, dressed as a lobster told us that E4 was going free on Sunday – clear positioning and memorable creative expressions are a vital combination. Positioning needs to be based on the truth; if you over claim, consumers will reject you out of hand; consumers are cynical and fed up with being over claimed to; deliver what you say or you will be found out. Here are a couple of other brands I think have mastered the art of not overselling: John Smiths has rejected hyperbole and has traded on honesty for years, from its no gimmicks campaign featuring Jack Dee to Peter Kay’s non nonsense campaign, and Pot Noodle (love it or hate it!) – they have had real success with calling the product the ‘slag of all snacks’; it’s not a gastronomic delight, it’s not going to impress the ladies, it is what it is. Really know your audience Here is our friend David Blaine, hanging over Tower Bridge a couple of years ago. He operated in a vacuum both literally and metaphorically because he did not know his audience and he misjudged the British public. When he came over he was a cool street magician and he left the UK as a bit of a joke because we did not respond to the pomposity, the lack of a sense of humour and taking yourself too seriously. I think it will be a while before he comes back. I used to work on E4 and we were always aware that our viewers watched BBC far more than us, and you can’t be in denial about this. And so when the BBC launched their new on-air identity which included a range of dance continuity idents, there was much scrutiny and attention and we knew that our viewers would be aware of them and that they would be in the front of their minds. So we did our own interpretation of the dance idents.

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Another couple of examples of products that demonstrate a great understanding of their audiences are: XFM showing an advert for The Ricky Gervais show and the second one is Glamour magazine – a simple idea about creating a magazine that can fit into a handbag.

2/ Really know your audience

An example of someone who pretended they knew their audience and didn’t get it right; it’s the clothes retailer Boxfresh and they were guilty of the ‘trendy vicar’ scenario by commissioning a piece of street art, a kind of Banksy style graffiti thing. It says ‘we are you’ in a guerilla type style, and somebody has written over it ‘no you’re not, you’re an overpriced shop and have no morals’ – a lesson to us all!

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2/ Really know your audience

Marketers as content commissioners We try to have the mindset at Channel 4 that we are not in the marketing or advertising business, but that we are in the content business. So, when we put together our campaigns, we think they are content in their own right. One of the best campaigns, a while ago now, was a series of programmes to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Andy Warhol. There was not one image that could sum up the artist, or his work, so we set up an outdoor exhibition. We featured work such as Jackie Kennedy, cows, flowers, and every single poster that we bought was a different Andy Warhol image. Then we printed a map of all the different sites and distributed it in the Evening Standard and Time Out. And yes, we can be accused of being London-centric but our point is that there was no budget to undertake this on a national basis, and we needed to stay single-minded and focused, and better to do activity well in one area rather then diluting your message. A more recent example was for Jamie’s School Dinners. When we were told about this show, we were really worried. How on earth do you make a show about school dinners entertaining? And we didn’t want to create a campaign that made ‘St Jamie Oliver’. So, we put together a campaign that subverted Jamie Oliver’s image. We did some posters to support this, and in the daytime they looked like this;

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3/ Marketers as content commissioners

And at night they changed into this:

3/ Marketers as content commissioners

I cannot stress the importance of press and publicity in this campaign though, and our department was giving out turkey twizzler size pieces of information to journalists, and this was really the engine room of the campaign. This ultimately resulted in £240m of government funding for school dinners.

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I think the issue facing all marketers is getting people to sample our stuff. We must see ourselves as makers of content, not marketing materials and if we get into that mindset it will be easier to get customers to sample our stuff. I think it is particularly an issue in arts organisations where awareness is far greater than understanding and so sampling is even more important. In 2004 at Glastonbury there was a really hot act and journalist David Aaronovitch said ‘every Glastonbury has a wildcard act, but this was truly the wildest yet. It gave Joss Stone one heck of an act to follow on the Pyramid stage on the Sunday afternoon’ and one of the members of the act said that within 10 minutes you couldn’t see grass for the people. ‘I didn’t feel nervous because of the energy that was coming from the audience. My body was trembling, it was great, I’ve never been in front of an audience as big as that’. The event was English National Opera performing Wagner’s The Valkyrie, and you might think that didn’t translate into ticket sales, but it shook things up, it created lots of press coverage and it created a lot of awareness. The next one I want to talk about is our friends at Innocent. They are great proponents of sampling, and they have built their brand very quickly around non-traditional media, although now they have reached that tipping point and they are starting to use press advertising and TV. They are a great example of advertising as content; they have the annual Fruitstock festival, they give out summer bingo cards and they have a clear and defined voice and many brands are learning from them. Here is an example from their packaging, ‘You should probably try opening this carton at the other end. Not that we’re telling you how to run your life or anything, but it seems to work much easier when the drink comes out of the spout on the top.’ And the point is that clever stuff doesn’t need to cost millions of pounds. Don’t be a Jack-of-All-Trades If you go to timeout.com and type in museums and major spaces you come up with 39 responses; the competition is relentless and so we’ve got to concentrate on the messages we are pushing out and how we are pushing them out. Another example is the Harley Davidson brand. It has the most loyal set of customers in the world, and I’m not arguing that they are a brand failure. In the early 1990s they launched a range of shops selling lighters, t-shirts and loads of Harley Davidson memorabilia and there’s nothing controversial there, but they lost their focus and rapidly diversified into things like Harley Davidson wine coolers, aftershave and perfume. The main message is that we need to stay focused and needless to say, you can’t get Harley Davidson perfume anymore! From a Channel 4 perspective it’s exactly the same and you could argue that the best marketers are the programme commissioners themselves. And quite rightly they want us to get behind the programmes and it’s our job to work out where the real opportunities lie. We could do hundreds of campaigns, but we have to focus and our over-riding principle is to do less things on a larger scale, not more things on a smaller scale. And one of the biggest and most difficult skills we need to learn is the power to say no! Recognising change before your consumers do

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As a consumer myself, I’ve gone through my own personal revolution in the last few years. At home I’ve got broadband, Sky Plus, wireless; I can’t remember the last time I booked a holiday and spoke to a person! I get free phone calls through Skype and I’ve got a relationship with iTunes now, not Virgin or HMV, but I am not an early adopter or a techie – far from it, but I am generally reflective of the population now. As all marketers, I’ve got to get one graph in here:

5/ Recognise change before your consumers do

There are two lines on this graph; the red line is bbc.co.uk and the blue line is myspace.com which didn’t even exist three years ago. The key point is that people are making relationships with brands at a frightening level.

• In 2002, 4% of UK singles sales were downloaded and in 2006 that figure is now 78% (source: Branded).

• Broadband as a consumer product has grown from 0 to 10 million in just over 7 years (source: OFCOM);

• In the US, 12% of newly weds meet online (source: McKinsey Quarterly Jan 2006);

• 57% of US teenagers using the internet see themselves as content creators (source: Pew Internet and American Life Project 2005);

• people spend as much time online as they do listening to the radio and twice as much time as they spend reading a newspaper (source: Internet Advertising Bureau Nov 2005).

So we need to accept in order to get genuine cut through with our audiences, we need to evaluate the tools that we are using, because what is relevant today as a tool might not be relevant tomorrow. The final point I want to leave you with is that it is not all doom and gloom and I don’t want to create some terrifying vision of the future. It’s indisputable that arts organsiations have smaller marketing budgets, but big blue chip fmcg companies with huge marketing departments are desperate to add a bit of flavour to their marketing campaigns. I’ve got an example here of the incredible Sultan’s elephant that went through London a couple of months ago, and the amount of partners on the right hand

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side queuing up to be associated with it. But I do think that this is another example of awareness being far higher than understanding. If you can marry the two up and get awareness and understanding through the roof then you are in really good shape.

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Paul Kaynes, Chief Executive, Audiences Central Go to: www.a-m-a.co.uk/images/downloads/PaulKaynesKEYNOTE.pdf to download the Power Point presentation My task is to relate these ideas to the arts world – to provide examples of some organisations in our field which are looking to their core values as a route to greater effectiveness and delivery of their vision. There’s a very powerful passage in the Arts Council England book called Navigating Difference about cultural diversity and audience development. It’s a quote from Maddy Morton, and it enshrines for me a core principle of what we do: ‘Anyone who thinks they can achieve a diverse audience by implementing whizzy schemes whilst leaving the core of the organisation intact is on a hiding to nothing. The only really effective way to change the make up of your audience is to first change yourselves.’ If we accept that then it follows that building and retaining audiences doesn’t only involve the marketing team – it involves everyone in the organisation, the way we behave and express ourselves, and our values. I could name organisations whose individual functions – programming, marketing, educational activity, the front of house operation – all work highly effectively, but because the people involved don’t have clearly shared values which link to a well articulated audience and artistic purpose, they are not successful. In other words, it’s not just about doing things right, it’s about doing the right things together in the right way. I’m going to tell you about two organisations, who are at very different points on a journey, and then I’ll try to identify how any organisation can make these simple concepts work for themselves. The Fierce Festival in Birmingham is a festival of contemporary live art which happens throughout the city, and in neighbouring cities like Coventry and Wolverhampton. The artistic director, Mark Ball, has been running it for almost ten years, and during that time it has changed constantly. The last three years have seen the most radical changes in response to the company realising that its vision could only be delivered by questioning every aspect of what it does – indeed questioning what it meant to be a festival of contemporary live art. The early festivals were successful artistically, but there were moments when Mark found himself putting on experimental live art shows with 40 people in the audience, and that wasn’t why he was in this game. He wasn’t interested in reaching only die-hard fans – he wanted to reach larger numbers of different people. Although Mark is assiduous about collecting and interpreting audience data, he also has strong hunches. He believed – though he couldn’t quantify it at the time – that there was a large potential untapped audience for the kind of work he was interested in putting on, but they weren’t being attracted by the kind of experimental live art in studio theatre spaces he was using. Key to Fierce’s personality as an organisation is having a strong artistic identity, having a sophisticated understanding of the audience and those they seek to influence, and believing that creativity is inherent in everyone. They take their audience seriously and don’t patronise them. Mark says this:

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‘Valuing the audience’s experience is as paramount as valuing the voice of the artist because the two are interdependent’. So as a result of this re-examination of their role, they decided to adopt a different approach – they aimed to provide what they call ‘stop-you-in-your-tracks’ artistic experiences, delivered in new places. Instead of those theatre-based shows reaching 40 people, they went for large scale, outdoor spectacle events and events in unusual indoor spaces. That’s tough because finding large-scale live art work isn’t easy. The sort of things that they do now include last year bringing over Belgian artist Benjamin Verdonk’s The Great Swallow, (read all about it at www.bbc.co.uk/birmingham/content/articles/2005/05/27/birdman_birmingham_feature.shtml ) which was located on the outside of the Rotunda building in Birmingham’s Bullring for five days. It connected with people way beyond the standard contemporary art crowd. And it’s not just live performance where they’ve been able to create this kind of response and engagement – the programme is now delivered across many different platforms – broadcast, podcast, and mobile – the ways in which you can interact with the festival are designed to meet the needs of a very diverse audience group. The communication of the festival is also innovative and designed specifically around the needs of the audience and the artistic purpose: each event is recorded and can be downloaded from Fiercetv.co.uk on the day after the event. The printed brochure becomes less and less important as other platforms take over. In fact only 6% of the audience finds out what’s on from the brochure – much more important are viral marketing: the festival employs foot-soldiers to go into bars and talk it up armed with print such as beer mats and postcards. The festival has also invested in courting the ten key bloggers in the fashion, music and contemporary art fields. Treating them like valued journalists they invite them to the festival for a weekend, put them up in a hotel and spend time with them to understand their likes and dislikes. The results have been universally positive in terms of profile and awareness due to the independent, trusted comment which the bloggers have written. Audience members are encouraged to send in their own videos, images and responses to the events, and these are uploaded onto FierceTV to create debate and constantly refresh the content. Internally the organisation is not hierarchical – it has a flat structure, with all staff encouraged to use their own creativity: every member of staff takes the lead on the development of certain programme ideas. So what’s happened as a result? Well attendance figures have certainly risen, not least because of the very public, spectacular nature of many of the events. In 2005 there were over 350,000 attendances in total, including those who witnessed The Great Swallow. But attendance has also gone up at the events which still happen indoors, in theatre spaces and elsewhere. Fierce has also seen the average age of its audience fall – these must be some of the youngest arts audiences anywhere in the country.

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Fierce age profile 16-24 39% 25-34 32% 45-54 21% 55-64 04% 65+ 03% How have they done it?

• by being clear about what they wanted to achieve, • having explicit values which they communicate internally and externally • valuing the audience - and audience data, • knowing what they believed artistically, and • getting the whole organisation working together and motivating it to achieve.

Mark has only one fear: have they become too main-stream? This year the RSC sought out Fierce to work with them on their Complete Works Festival – the only regional company to be asked to contribute. Next year there are plans to work with both Birmingham Royal Ballet and CBSO. Are they now part of the establishment? Scottish Opera is definitely part of the establishment – or at least it was … In the last three years they’ve experienced huge change and challenge: there’s been a highly political row about the level of their funding (and the funding of Scottish culture overall to boot) and their role in the life of a small nation. They didn’t come out of it well – they lost their chorus, music director, most of their technical and senior staff teams, and of course quite a bit of media credibility. In trying to create a new direction and plan for the company, the new team - including the director of external affairs Roberta Doyle (who is here so you can ask her yourself) is now engaged in changing the company’s entire operation. But what they’re doing isn’t simply to respond to the political climate by becoming a ‘community opera company’ – which many called for. Instead they have questioned what being a large scale touring opera company means in a small nation such as Scotland. They’re planning to embark on a new business model which challenges the status quo for how an opera company funds, distributes and markets its work. First, they’re being anything but introspective. They’re seeking out partners to ensure they’re embedded in the wider Scottish musical tapestry – and I don’t just mean classical music. Franz Ferdinand, traditional Scottish folk musicians and bhangra artists as well as James Macmillan are all relevant to their quest to become central to Scottish musical life once again. And they’re resisting a trend towards the operatic equivalent of a McDonalds-type consistency where almost every new staging is a co-production with a European opera house, predictable in its style and aesthetics. How could they be a distinctively Scottish company if their productions look like every European company’s? Next they are developing a new model of how an opera company develops funding for its work: if public subsidy and investment is at standstill – or may even fall in the future – then investment in creating new works has to come from elsewhere. So they’re looking to their audiences and corporate supporters to become fundamentally involved in the creation of new work through investment. Their earned income plans are ambitious, based in part on significant investment in marketing, meaning that the marketing function will become more central than ever before and the stakes will be higher too. The marketing and fundraising teams are going to have to stick their necks

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out, delivering challenging, tangible outcomes not just in terms of ticket sales but in earned income overall – derived from merchandising, individual giving, commercial exploitation of the company’s work beyond the box office and corporate support. In getting buy-in from the internal stakeholders for this shift, the leaders of the organisation are devoting significant time to the process of identifying and sharing the company’s values. And that’s not just a series of flipchart sessions. It means living those values internally: for instance if the company has a desire to reach a wider range of people – to become more inclusive – then that means changing the way the company recruits and supports its staff – as well as what it says and does externally. Remember Maddy’s quote from Navigating Difference? Anyone who thinks they can achieve a diverse audience by implementing whizzy schemes whilst leaving the core of the organisation intact is on a hiding to nothing. The only really effective way to change the make up of your audience is to first change yourselves.’ Doing that quickly is key to getting and sustaining buy-in from the whole company and countering cynicism: people need to see change happen quickly – and of course that’s doubly difficult in opera where the pace of change can be slow due to the elongated planning cycles inherent in the opera industry. So the pressure is certainly on. The irony about the popular view of Scottish Opera as an ‘elitist company’ is that it already visits 140 communities a year throughout Scotland and – through its small and medium scale touring and national education work – has done for many years. This is what it must do in order to demonstrate its pan-national role – but that work has traditionally remained ‘under the radar’ – simply too local to make an impact nationally about the value and role of the company. But that’s now changing, with an increased focus on celebrating their work beyond the central belt and the big theatres. I don’t want to give the impression that Scottish Opera has become a small-scale touring company – it still presents grand opera in the big theatres of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Inverness. And the majority of its income is derived from those dates. But by thinking about the needs of the audience and stakeholders it’s found ways of delivering its work to new and different people. This is something which is expected of no other national non-arts cultural institution: the Scottish national football team isn’t expected to play on the shinty pitch in Tighnabruaich to prove its value. But because of the popular values ascribed to opera –elitism, difficulty, formality, expense, and general posh ness, it’s choosing to challenge those perceptions by showing that opera can also be approachable, local, fun and informal. Scottish Opera is embarking on a hugely exciting phase in its life: they’ve had to re-examine their whole ethos and reason for being in order to create a plan which can make sense artistically, financially and in terms of public support. At the same time they’re having to repair the public image of the company. So how will they know when they’re succeeding? The obvious performance indicators will be ticket sales and income, levels of corporate support, and financial sustainability. But there are equally important, qualitative indicators too: buy-in from the internal stakeholders to the new model, maybe the First Minister of Scotland publicly backing the company – and a general feeling in the media and decision-making classes that Scottish Opera matters, and that it helps to define the nation of Scotland today – in

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much the same way that the nascent National Theatre of Scotland has done already in its short life. So what do we conclude from all this? Surely any organisation can benefit from going through the process of fundamental questioning of its role and purpose, its values and model of delivery. People can find change very challenging. And yet managed well, change can be really exciting. One of the easiest ways to ensure that people don’t get left behind is to create working teams from across the organisation to consider issues beyond their normal jobs. It helps build trust and understanding of a change programme, and can help tap into people’s creativity – not just yours or the curator’s or the artistic director’s, but the visitor services manager’s, the box office assistant’s and the café supervisor’s. And we need to make connections with our audiences, not just through direct marketing and an efficient service at the box office: ask yourself how you talk about audiences internally? Do you make it your business to get to know them – not just through market data but also personally, formally and informally? But perhaps the most exciting thing for me to emerge from these two case studies, is a rebuttal of the traditional view that our artistic programmes could be so much more exciting if they were unshackled from the tastes and needs of the audience. What Fierce and Scottish Opera show us is that in considering the audience in your thinking and planning, you don’t diminish the value or importance of the art. Quite the opposite in fact: inspirational artistic experiences actually benefit from putting audiences at the centre of everything you do.

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Keynotes in conversation Rufus Radcliffe (Channel 4) and Paul Kaynes (Audiences Central) Q. Rufus, do you think there’s a resource at Channel 4 that hasn’t been

explored or developed fully yet? RR Definitely. There are three pillars to our strategy, the core channel, the multi

channels (E4, More4, Film4) and there is also new media. On the latter, the BBC stole the march on us with their wonderful website and Channel 4 need to play catch up. The Ideas Factory website has worked very well but one of the problems is the name – it doesn’t tell you much. We need to work on it further.

Q. One of the problems we find in the arts is that while artists may be content

creative, they’re not marketers. Do you find similar tensions between marketing and programme makers?

RR There is always sensitivity in this area and sometimes you have to be like Kofi

Annan! Sometimes programme makers don’t like marketing campaigns but you have to think of them as clients and when you have a track record of success, it helps. Persuading Jamie Oliver, for example to not take himself too seriously did take some persuading.

It is about give and take. There was one campaign we were devising around a

US comedy show which came to a complete stalemate because the studio wouldn’t allow us access to the set. That’s life.

Q. I’ve been involved in a qualitative research project into longstanding

theatre goers and found they have a resistance to the proscenium arch. Is this reaction more widespread?

PK Both the organisations I mentioned in my talk have, in many ways moved way

beyond the proscenium arch. But it’s all about audience segmentation and discovering the market for different styles of space.

- There are many audiences that say ‘it isn’t a proper theatre unless they’re in that

type of environment … red velvet seats etc. It’s about treating audiences as individuals. There’s still a huge audience for traditional theatre, especially panto.

PK Is there a link between the audiences Scottish Opera have for their small/middle

scale venues and those for large-scale venues? Large-scale audiences? - Scottish Opera carried out research that showed that their audiences for different

scale venues depended largely on geographic issues. In rural areas, people would undertake a 90 minutes journey to get to a small community venue to see an event. But at the same time, research into their main scale attendances has shown that audiences feel comfortable attending opera in a traditional proscenium arch theatre – indeed the advance knowledge of how the theatre will look and feel reduces the level of risk felt by some first time attenders for opera.

- The focus groups I mentioned in my original question say that they prefer smaller

intimate theatres and festivals where unconventional spaces are used. They are very experienced theatre attenders and as such, are prepared to take risks.

- Welsh National Opera has found a crossover in audiences between their rural

and mainstream venues. The organisation has found that it’s easier to take

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programming risks outside traditional venues rather than the other way around - trying new ideas in traditional mainstream venues.

Q. A question for Paul. You mentioned that Fierce Theatre is worried about

becoming part of ‘The Establishment’. How does that effect what their trying to achieve?

PK In the current issue of Arts Professional magazine there’s an article about ‘The Art of Dying’ which talks about how we tend to cling on to companies and vehicles because they exist – not necessarily because they’re delivering dynamic, interesting and artistic programming. Fierce Theatre has done what it set out to do and I wonder how much longer it will exist.

It’s definitely become more main stream. Mark Ball, for example won a Young

Director of the Year award last year. I think, to a certain extent, the festival is getting to the point where it has done its work. Its mission originally was to cause trouble and undertake sensational work. Its work has not necessarily become less radical, it’s just become more accepted and people have become used to that kind of work in Birmingham.

- When I first arrived in Birmingham I didn’t identify with their target market

(gay/lesbian) but a colleague came into contact with them through a synchronised swimming project they undertook at my local swimming baths and like other people who attended the baths, we were persuaded to see their work. But it did make people feel uncomfortable – it wasn’t main stream.

Q Isn’t it a worry when an organisation finds it can’t continue to evolve and

adapt and still surprise and shock and change? PK No. If you find you can’t continue to do it, then it becomes the role of others to do

that it especially if your role is to surprise and shock. Perhaps Rufus could share how Channel 4 has changed in that nature over the

years. RR At Channel 4, there has to be a balance between pushing out the messages that

stir things up and the more populist material that attracts four million viewers. The marketing team then has to make decisions as to where to shine its light on this mix.

Q How does the editorial and PR work at Channel 4 marry up to the marketing

objectives? RR There is a marketing department and press and PR department. Functionally,

they are working alongside each other and synergy is important. The PR department has a far greater number of programmes that they have to push plus they also have to send out lot of facts and figures for corporate reasons. In contrast, the marketing department limits itself to just five-to-six major priorities each year for which we do on air advertising, as well as some off air marketing.

Q. At Channel 4 you must have individual audiences for each channel, but

also a degree of cross-over between them. How do you manage the tensions of internal competition?

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RR From a marketing point of view, we map out activity across all the channels to ensure that there are no clashes in the marketing campaigns across the channels. But there is a need for tons of sensitivity as people want to get your support around their particular programme. People have to be corporate citizens.

We try to view ourselves as a network and so retain audiences across each of

the channels. So for example, when Hollyoaks is followed by Channel 4 News (two very different audiences!) the Hollyoaks audience can switch over to E4 for the next episode – so they stay with the network.

Q In terms of advertising, how do you make decisions as to how to plan your

marketing on Channel 4? RR Our strategy is to do fewer things on a big scale rather than lots of little things

and I think this is all the more important if you are a small organisations. The back page ads we take out on magazines are expensive, but they have an

important role as they shine light on the public service aspect of Channel 4. Q Jamie’s School Dinners was fantastic in terms of lobbying. How much are

political objectives a driving force? RR A programme like this comes along very rarely and it attracted a lot of viewers

and advertisers. In 2005, we ran three stand-out campaigns and it was one of them – but we were marketing the programme not the political objectives.

Q. How much do you see your role in shaping society and in anticipating

changes in society? RR The great thing about working in TV is that the work you do gets talked about and

noticed and it has a role in shaping culture. But we would never be arrogant enough to pretend that that is what we’re about. Whatever, your marketing budget, the key thing is to get talked about.

Q. Did you anticipate how Jamie’s School Dinners would take off - the effect it would have and did you pro-actively fan the flames? RR The marketing was helpful and the advertising started the momentum, but it was

the press and PR that then took over. Q. How do you balance the core Channel 4 branding and the marketing of

individual shows? RR We rarely use off air-media for brand campaigns. Off-air brand campaigns can

feel quite indulgent. On-air airtime is the perfect opportunity to bring the brand to life creatively through activity such as our ident and faces work. Off-air activity is used to support key programme priorities, which should of course support the brand anyway.

We’re lucky because the people working in the commissioning department have

a fantastic understanding of Channel 4’s branding – they are instinctive marketers.So the programming of individual shows all contribute to the overall brand.

Q. Is there a conscious objective to direct audiences across all the channels?

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RR Channel 4 is a broad church with something for everyone. E4 is directed towards

youth, More 4 is more grown up. But none of the portfolio holds up ‘Keep Out’ signs. We like to think that you’ll move from channel to channel depending on your mood.

Q. Referring back to Paul Kayne’s mention of The Art of Dying article in Arts

Professional. Has Rufus any advice for the arts from his sector? Is TV better at saying, ‘that’s enough, it’s run its course’. Can we learn from this?

RR TV is littered with programmes that have outstayed their welcome and you have

to be ruthless. However, production companies can pitch new programmes after a previous one has come to an end so there’s plenty of opportunity for the same teams to try something new.

Q How would you decide when enough is enough? RR When nobody is watching! We have the tyranny of overnight stats – coming into

the office every morning to yesterday’s audience figures. It’s interesting because the West Wing has really small audiences but they’re all MPs and stakeholders, so when we moved it to More 4 there was uproar.

PK I don’t see enough organisations being prepared to re-invent themselves. They

continue to do the same old thing because the funding comes in for them to do it, rather than considering their organisational development.

- In the arts sector, when we have great audiences, it’s attributed to the quality of

the art and when we have poor audiences, it’s attributed to poor marketing. Q. I work for an organisation going through a great deal of change. Our

audience research has shown a gap in our audience of 25 to 44 year- olds. The board of trustees is elderly and set in the ways, unwilling to change e.g. they won’t accept that press advertising doesn’t work. How do we make the change?

RR There’s no set way. You have to be honest and up front with them and take them

on a journey, explaining your strategy and showing how it will contribute to success. Also, it’s about saying, ‘give me a chance to do things differently’. I hate the word, ‘historically’. When it’s used it’s in the context of reasons not to change - usually conclusive evidence of what isn’t working.

PK I would go back to Maddy Morton’s quote (see presentation). The Not for the

Likes of You programme equips organisation to engage with people that they aren’t currently managing to reach. Try and get on the programme – it would challenge everyone, including the board of trustees.

- The journey Scottish Opera has been on in recent years is an example of an

organisation that has had to change itself. Everything has been challenged. PK There are lots of case studies of organisations who have tried to change by

simply moving the furniture and it simply hasn’t worked. - But marketing can’t shape art. Organisations have social responsibilities and we

have to be cautious about the relationship between marketing and programming.

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PK I’m not advocating that we have marketing-led programming. But they need to

have equal validity within organisations. Organisations can achieve better art through marketing needs and meet the aspirations of their audiences e.g. Great Swallow. They didn’t do it because they knew there was a certain audience that might want to say but because they had a hunch that it might engage people in their work in a particular way.

- I have a problem with asking audiences what they think as this can result in

having to dumb down art. I think audiences tend to want bolder work, with more risks.

- Is there anyone who has experienced the opposite? - I was speaking to an audience member who really didn’t like one of our

productions - but at the same time they felt that although it wasn’t for them, it didn’t diminish their overall support of the company.

RR You have to treat research into audience needs with caution. People tend to

show off and make out that they have sophisticated tastes e.g. ‘I wish you had more foreign animation’ but in fact they don’t actually watch it.

- It’s a bit like the load of people who tick an interest in contemporary dance on

arts questionnaires when they actually never attend. Q Looking at research, I have found it very difficult to find any showing

attendances by people in their mid 20s to 30s. People I talked to with families didn’t have the money to the theatre but engaged through free events - outdoor festival, theatre in the park events. I wonder is it that they want to engage, but do so later in life?

- At the CBSO, we have looked at people in this age group and found that they are

bringing up children/forging careers. Time rather than money is the issue. We have devised rush hour concerts to meet this segment’s need and it’s been really successful, particularly in spreading the word in offices.

- A similar scheme is taking place in Belfast Q. How would you attract 25- to 40-year olds? Would you scrap Big Brother? PK Not yet, but that moment for reinvention may not be far off. It has had an

interesting but rapid product lifecycle but it might not be far off. RR It’s a really difficult question to answer. I’m not an expert in your world.

Marketers can hide behind research and be incredibly risk averse. Shaking things up and trying new stuff makes life more fun. I would like to ban the word ‘historical’. What you can do is run small projects to test the temperature of the water and take it from there.

Q. In the museums and galleries sector, we are faced with having to market on

the one had, individual exhibitions and on the other our core exhibitions. Would you use one of your big campaigns to market one of your core projects e.g. Channel 4 news?

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RR Yes, not because it might get more bums on seats but because it would celebrate the quality of a great programme. But there would need to be a new slant, a new spin to make it work, so we would talk about news in general and how Channel 4 news is followed by news at 8pm on More4 and push online news etc.

Q. Going back to the age issue. Why is it important to get 25- to 45-year olds

in your venue? I thought we’d gone beyond classifying people by age. It’s more about your interests and mood. You can still develop product where a 25 year old will feel comfortable in an audience of 50 year olds.

- To say audiences are dying is a red herring. People’s tastes and interests

change. - We’ve got to be doing something so that when they have the time and money

they will engage with us. - The issue is that there is so much more out there to capture their attention. - We need to target that age group because arts council funding insists on it. You

have to target bands of people in different ways, not necessarily age … a product like Trainspotting might attract a younger audience but also a 60 year old.

- As a 25-year old, I have to say that I don’t find visiting a theatre with older people

an issue. Age isn’t a barrier – time and money are the factors. - Shouldn’t we be doing more to pitch at 25- to 45-year olds - You can pitch at a 30 year old as though they were an 18-year old. You can’t

bracket people in terms of age. - The over 55s aren’t a homogenous group. PK There are lots of contradictory issues here. The behaviour of 55-year olds is

changing and it’s not helpful to think of people in terms of age. It’s more valuable to know their interests.

There is a concept about that going to the theatre is a white middle-class activity,

but people don’t won’t to think in those terms, to think of going to the theatre as an activity for ‘old’ people.

- In Liverpool, we’ve found that there is a real gap in awareness of the theatre

within the age group that was growing up during the period of major funding cuts in the arts.

- We need to look at what kind of theatre attender they are – regular, irregular?

Many of the regular attenders I have conducted research with first experienced the theatre at the age of 15.

- There is product out there that is suitable for younger audiences. It’s our job to

take out the stuffiness that surrounds the concept of going to the theatre. - At Scottish Opera, our head of education has said that the worst thing you can do

is to force a young person to watch an opera. There might come a moment in someone’s life when they discover something in opera for themselves – it might

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be at 18, it might be at 45. It’s not necessarily an age thing, it’s a life experience thing. Forcing 16 year olds into the auditorium is counter-productive.

- There is a lot of baggage surrounding opera and ballet in particular, and it starts

in the playground. There are so many negative stereotype images. PK It’s important to remember that we are not the market, we are so unlike it. About

48% of the population go to some sort of arts activity and that is a significant proportion – the arts audience is not a minority proportion and so we shouldn’t be beating ourselves up about it.

Q. Is there ever going to be a point, with the introduction of new technology,

programmes on demand etc, when we’ll be too time-starved to watch TV or go out?

RR Despite everything, human nature dictates that even when a time comes that we

can watch TV on our toaster or whatever, we are still going to want to sit on our sofa to watch telly, to go to the theatre, play games, go out for a pint etc – but undoubtedly this will be in a new, on-demand environment where the consumer is calling the shots.

PK People really want that live, collective experience and that will continue.

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Arts and tourism in Partnership Roger Johnson and Adrian Bevan, VisitBritain Go to: www.a-m-a.co.uk/images/downloads/AdrianBevanSEMINAR.pdf to download the Power Point presentation About VisitBritain Tourism today is an important part of our economy.

As you can see from these figures, we’ve had a bumper year internationally after a challenging time with 9/11, Foot and Mouth and BSE. We are recovering and there are a large number of Americans back in Britain. Domestically, also, tourism is doing very well. It’s becoming more important as an employer with increasing numbers going into the industry and seeing it as a serious career option. The government also recognises the contribution tourism makes to the economy. As a whole, we are talking about a huge amount of spend in tourism. Arts and culture is very much a part of that.

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Back in 2003, the British Tourist Authority and the English Tourism Council merged to become VisitBritain. We have two sides to the coin in our work – the domestic remit where we promote England to the rest of Britain and parts of Europe and also marketing Britain to the rest of the world. In terms of structure, we are a huge organisation, although not in terms of number of people. This gives you an overview of where we are internationally.

We are always looking as to how we can develop our visitor market overseas. In recent times that although from our traditional markets in Western Europe and America, although we are still getting strong numbers visiting Britain, we need to look wider a field and we are now developing a greater focus on new markets such as South Korea, Poland, Russia, India, China, Czech Republic and Hungary. There’s been quite a switch, as you can see in terms of where we’re actually moving.

These growth markets are very important and we are putting a lot of resources into them at the moment. More and more of our focus now is going online - developing relationships with actual and potential visitors through the internet. Our website, www.visitbritain.com is generating a larger margin of number of visitors every year.

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When you do produce a piece of literature, so often, no sooner have you produced it and it’s out of date. By focusing online and talking to our customers online, we are keeping our costs down but also we can be more creative, inventive and talk to them on a more regular basis, providing them with up to date information throughout the year. As well as the international market, we have a significant focus on England. With devolved governments, Scotland and Wales have their own tourist boards that focus on both international and domestic marketing. Our team is based in London with a focus on marketing England to the rest of Britain. Within that team, they’ve had a very successful campaign focussing on arts and culture.

They are currently in Phase Two of a City Culture Campaign, looking at arts opportunities. It has been one of their most popular campaigns to date. We have also developed a series of online shops, both domestically and internationally where we try to work with partners to sell products directly to the consumer.

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As we reach 7 million people, there are huge opportunities for partners to work with us and we are interested in looking at how we can link in with festivals and arts organisations to promote the sale of tickets at events. At the moment we have a product, The Great British Heritage Pass which comprises nearly 700 heritage sites – historic houses, castles and gardens – which has been very successful. We are also looking to forming further partnerships and these offer opportunities for you to find a vehicle to talk to a wider audience with both VisitBritain and our partners. Within Britain we work with the regional tourist boards, national tourist boards (our partners in Scotland and Wales) and also with local authorities. There’s a constant flow of information that comes from them to help us develop our campaigns and promote Britain as a whole. There have been a lot of changes in whose delivering tourism strategies and campaigns as a result of the development of the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) but tourism is in a strong position to help you. One of the key things we are always looking for is getting events information, and getting that information early enough. When you are talking about an international visitor in, for example, Hong Kong or America, they are planning a trip to Britain way in advance and need a lot of time to think about what they can do. The earlier you can get event information to our tourism partners, the better. We have a database that provides partners with an opportunity to feed in information. Many of our visitors internationally are looking to what events they can include in their programmes. Some specifically come over for cultural events and with so many access points that can be used to get into the country (not just London) both the international and domestic traveller has an excellent opportunity to get out and about throughout the country. Last year we produced a Cultural Tourism Guide with the idea of telling you about how tourism works in more detail and to pinpoint opportunities for you to look at e.g. working with group operators, targeting the media and one very important group that’s often overlooked, friends and relatives who are visiting the country. They are a group well worth thinking about targeting. One trait of cultural tourism that is developing is the concept of our visitors wanting to experience much, much more. They want to meet interesting people, have unusual experiences and we need to find out what those are. There’s a lot of talk about

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creative tourism, where you can go on a writing or painting holiday or spend time learning about a particular artist. A lot of our visitors actively want to be educated and encounter a rich, deep experience rather than a superficial one. The whole idea of learning about Britain, the people, the country, the culture is absolutely vital and we are feeding these opportunities through to our international marketing. Q & A: Q: What exactly do we actually mean by tourism? How do we distinguish between going out for the day and being a tourist? RJ: We don’t just talk about tourists. We talk about the visitor economy. A

businessman on his travels might go to an event or see a site so there’s not a strict definition of a tourist, its visitors. That’s usually defined as someone staying away overnight. We’re talking about somebody who has gone away to another location for another purpose – be it for leisure, business or study. All those people are encapsulated in that definition.

AB: The tourism society has this definition of tourism. ‘The temporary short term

movement of people to destinations outside places they normally live and work and their activities during their stay at these destinations’.

Q: In terms of the changing markets you talked about, if people are coming

from different places, are they wanting different things? Do you have any research on this?

AB: We do a lot of work in segmentation to understand who our audiences are,

where they’re coming from and what motivates them. We’re also doing a lot of research internationally on our visitors to try and understand what they are doing and what they are interested in doing.

RJ: We put a lot of resources into research. At the moment we’re looking at a new

group in Japan which include 50yrs + businessmen about to retire and aren’t going on family holidays but rather going around in groups with people of similar interests.

AB: On our website you will see a number of market profiles about the different

overseas markets, and that will give you a lot of useful information. Q: Do you have any plans to produce any case studies to evaluate the

effectiveness of partnerships in the cultural sector? AB: We’ve set up a website called www.visitbritain.com/sectorclubs and we have a

sector club in place and there is also a section devoted to sharing best practice. It’s updated three or four times’ a year. Recently we put a piece on it about the Brighton Arts Festival, for example and also pieces about short term promotions for domestic audiences. If you have good examples, we would love to put them on.

Q: How much of the research you are doing is relevant to those working

outside of England? Are you only asking people about visiting England? AB: It’s the whole of Britain. The vast majority of our officers abroad are focussing

on the whole of Britain.

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RJ: That’s where the segmentation is important because if you look at first timers – the Chinese market, for example, are going to come to London as part of a European tour. With repeat visitors that is where you will get a regional spread.

- I wonder if, for example you work in the regions, whether you should work with

your regional Tourist Board to get the bigger picture of the international markets, or with VisitBritain?

RJ: It’s usually best to plug into the relevant level. If you’re a local organisation,

plug into your local authority; if you’re a Welsh institution, then plug into the Wales Tourist Board and if you’re national, plug into us.

AB: I wanted to ask all of you a question about imagery. We have a library

called Britain on View and images are essential to our work as we host and advise thousands of journalists every year. Are any of you feeding your images through to your local tourist board, regional and national partners? We need a lot more images from the arts and culture sector.

- I worked in Cambridge for a number of years where one of the issues was that

the local tourist board only wanted to sell punting and colleges. In terms of the many other things going on, those images are important to get out to the wider world.

- We (Theatre Association of the Republic of Ireland) are working with our

national tourist board gathering together images for them. One of the issues, as you mentioned, is getting festivals to provide images in time. We worked quite closely to get a more contemporary image of Ireland in the general tourism material.

AB: If you are commissioning any new imagery, talk to your local tourist

board partner and they will be able to give you advice on the kind of images they (and we) are looking for. These days we are looking to convey the experience much more so that people feel they want to be there.

- Do you charge people to use these images once you have them in your library? AB: It’s a combination. There are some images on Britain on View that do

have a collaboration fee and in those cases they have been supplied by commercial photographers. There are others that aren’t. We would like to share imagery much more with the arts and culture sector as a whole. There are issues if an image goes into a commercial publication such as a book or a magazine or a brochure.

RJ: If they come to us free, they are passed on for free. There is only a fee when

an agreement is involved. Cultural Tourism and 2008

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VisitBritain is sponsored by the Department of Media, Culture and Sport, so there is an automatic culture connection in what we do. When we are promoting Britain internationally, there are three major underlying themes that we use and those are culture, heritage and countryside. We subscribe to the Anholt Nation Brand’s Index which looks at Britain compared to 35 other countries, not just from a tourism point of view but from a total perception of cultural, political, commercial and human assets and we’re doing quite well on it. You will see from the graph above that, when we break it down, in terms of the visitor aspects, museums and art galleries come up very highly. There is a lot of awareness of what Britain has to offer from a cultural and heritage perspective. When we talk about cultural tourism now, you can talk about it in a very broad way and say that culture is about the way we live our lives, the way we behave, but for the purposes of this session, we are using a much tighter definition which relates to the creative and visual arts.

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Our current campaigns are ‘So British’ (a luxury, up market version of Britain) and ‘Cities’ which is important in the context of more short-break holidays being taken. Both have strong connection cultural ingredients as many people actively seek to visit art galleries or see shows on their visit. We promote these campaigns through the whole marketing mix. Press and PR is a very important component as it has proved to be the most cost effective of reaching audiences. Increasingly, we use online communications, sending dedicated newsletters etc. This year we did a lot of work in connection with the release of The Da Vinci Code which generated a lot of press and public interest and subsequently led to tour operators putting together Da Vinci Code itineraries. We worked in partnership with Eurostar who were willing to paint a whole train in the Da Vinci brand. Important exhibitions are another catalyst for generating international attention and for getting partners to brand their offering with the product.

The Culture and Heritage Sector Club has been our attempt to listen to a representative of cross section of this sector. We have 23 members on the team, sharing information and working together on a local, regional and national level. In our 24 hour society, it is only appropriate that we have a 24 hour museum, and so we are working closely with this sector to make sure the cultural offering is representational. A lot of BBC programmes are screened internationally and so we work with them on Picture of Britain. This is an example of how a small partner can piggy back a much larger promotion or campaign if what you are doing is relevant. There’s no way we have the budget of the BBC but by working together we put together a better end product.

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Liverpool 08 will see a fantastic programme of events on offer. They will be launched nationally and internationally in November. Also in 2008, we will have the beginning of the cultural Olympiad – as they will start at the closing of the 2009 games. This will be a four year marathon leading up to 2012.

With these two events happening in 2008, it’s definitively an opportunity to focus on culture that year and we have made the decision to ‘turn up the volume’ and focus on culture in all our international marketing. This is going to be an opportunity for you. We have commissioned a scoping and mapping exercise to find out about all the things going on that will happen anyway. These can then be categorised, split into themes, grouped according to time of year etc so that we can build the events into bite size chunks to keep people engaged. Everyone contacted in this research were very positive - even if they didn’t have their plans for 2008 ready – and felt it would be a good platform for them to use. As this filters down, VisitBritain will be collecting this information and if there are any significant events going on, then we’ll be using them in our marketing messages.

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The 2008 campaign will be broken down into themes and seasons so we can keep the momentum going. There are three themes that have been identified and cross over into the Olympic Games:

• Youth We have to think ahead here and if we look ahead to the end of this decade the opportunities are in China, India, South East Asia and Russia and look at them in the context of youth markets.

• Diversity and World Culture This area will look at how Britain has influenced other cultures and vice versa.

• Britishness What is it these days to be British? From a cultural point of view, are there things we can pinpoint and focus on to include in our marketing messages? If you look at the Complete Shakespeare season in Stratford at the moment, it is interesting to note how they have asked other nationalities to stage a number of the productions. This allows us to see how other nations perceive and interpret Shakespeare.

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If we look at a broader definition of culture, the research does support people’s wish to get under the skin of Britain. Visitors want to know how we go about living our lives but finding opportunities to do this can be problematic. We want to give them a steer and guidance as to how they can interact with ordinary people in Britain. We want you to be involved in our plans for 2008 and these are the ways you can help us.

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Yesterday we were thinking how we could improve our online shop. We were imagining an international visitor coming to our site, keying in the dates of their visit and up would come a list of events around those dates or a list of attractions around the place they would be visiting and then they would be able to link through and buy their tickets in advance. Earlier, Henrietta Hopkins was talking about finding out which market is most relevant to what you’re offering and we can help you. Anything that makes you distinctive is important and again, we can use that information. We would like to hear from you and particularly what you are doing in 2008. We are trying to get out and visit people and find out how we can work more closely with the culture sector. You can also work with your local and regional tourist partners where there are culture specialists and finding out what they can offer you. The Sector Club is another way. The World Travel Market in November and British Travel Trade Fair in Birmingham in March every year are great opportunities to meet people in the travel industry particular group travel organisers who are handling large numbers of people both domestically and internationally. If you do a Google search on UK Inbound, you can find out about what specialist tourist operators do and the kinds of programmes they are developing. These are people well worth talking to. www.grouptravelorganiser are a potentially important partner.

Q & A Q: Regarding the Cultural Olympiad. Are there are any plans to inspire

people locally to act as champions during this period rather than purely relying on advertising campaigns?

RJ: There will be a big volunteer programme and so local people will be able to sign

up to that. AB: If you go on the London 2012 website, they do have a facility to allow you to

register as a volunteer. We know how important volunteers are to the programme. They act as ambassadors and were used in Sydney, Barcelona and Athens.

RJ: If you have a language to offer, that will be particularly welcome.

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Q: VisitBritain and arts organisations appear to work along two separate

timelines – you can’t believe that we don’t have our programmes planned a year in advance so that people can get their tickets in advance and this is a problem. I can see how the tourism industry in Ireland totally got behind the idea of festivals but it’s harder for rest of the arts sector. Unless they are one of the big national groups, have less ways of linking into the tourism world either because what they are doing is particularly locally distinctive or because tourism agencies can’t get to grips with their programme. They seem to be able to grasp the concept of a festival but found it difficult to relate to the programme of a regional arts centre. The timeline factor made this particularly hard. The sports sector has the resources to link into the tourism sector, but the arts sector doesn’t. I think you need to recognise these realities.

AB: A lot of the regional and national tourist boards work with us internationally and

you can go under their wing. We organise media events overseas and these are another opportunity to work with a tourist partner to get your message across. Journalists are always on the look out for new ideas, new trends, new themes and trends. We’re trying to tap into the programmes and ideas that you’re organising and seeing how we can use them. International tourists are coming over and finding these small events, perhaps because they have been through a Tourist Information Centre or because a family member has told them about it. The main thing is trying to think about how arts and culture organisations can work with the tourist industry when it is in the process of business planning. Regular dialogue is very important and this is going on at the moment, for example in Birmingham.

One of the things we’ve done with the 2008 project is to talk to the people

involved in the urban cultural programme – people from those cities that didn’t succeed in beating Liverpool. We’ve been looking at working with those cities.

RJ: Liverpool is planning to have a national conference of all the cultural and

tourism officers to get them to talk together. It is true that very often there is gulf between them. But there are ways of hooking into people to help get your programmes known at another level – be it your local hotels or taxi firms.

2012 – The Olympic Games

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The Olympic Games are not very far away and already we are beginning to focus on the opportunities they offer. The World Cup in Germany has had a big impact on the ways people view Germany and its people. It’s these kinds of events that offer such fantastic opportunities. Recently I attended an event in Bristol to discuss the opportunities that will be offered by the Games to the South West Region. It was very encouraging to see these regions setting up partnerships and working together in order to link information into the organising committee of the Games.

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You can see from these figures the kind of impact the Games have had on the cities involved.

There will huge economic benefits and hopefully, for many years to come. I think it is after the Games have taken place that we’ll have a major increase in visitors to the country, so we’re also looking at the years after 2012. We’ve talked about the importance of the youth of the day as they are going to be a major part of that growth and those new markets we mentioned earlier. There are going to be two areas in Olympic tourism:

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London is going to be the centre of the Games but as a body we are looking as to how we can engage with the rest of the country to ensure there are benefits nationwide:

We will be looking at new standards of accommodation and attractions and how this can be integrated into the work we are doing.

Image will be critical and the Games will present us with an opportunity to change our image and attract new audiences into the country. We have brand research going on all the time and one of the key things we are doing is seeing how we can promote a more contemporary image of Britain on the back of the Games and reduce our dependency on the traditional markets of Western Europe.

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Media will again, present us with a massive opportunity and what we need are good stories, good ideas and to make sure we can feed these to the media now and in the future. In Sydney, there were 20,000 non accredited journalists and they were just as important as the accredited ones. We are also looking to TV opportunities.

It is interesting that Yorkshire has recently been writing up a new strategy on events and culture is going to be an important part of this. We’re also working with sports organisations (e.g. UK Sports) and had success in bringing new sporting events to the country after the Games, in 2013, 2014 and 2015. We do have a lot of good partners who are able work with us to offer package opportunities off the back of the Olympics and bring people over. Internationally we work with major operators around the world who are well positioned to bring in groups and promote major programmes on the back of the Olympics.

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It will be very important that we offer quality accommodation and we have launched a new quality assurance standard this year to ensure that it is of good quality. We will be moving on to look at attractions.

We want to ensure that tourism is firmly on the national agenda working with yourselves and the culture sector.

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It is important that we learn as much as we can from previous Games. We’re also talking to the Chinese at the moment to see what we can learn from their experiences. All of these are important so we can build them into our plans and use them effectively.

Plans are taking shape as we talk now and a lot of planning with our partners in the Olympic family.

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Another thing we have to look to with 2012 is what we can do after the Games.

The Olympic and Paralympic Games take place over a very short period of time – just a few weeks. Once they have finished, the Olympic family moves on to the next Games, so for us it is important to think about what we can take forward.

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Managing expectations is important. London is going to be the centre of the Games but a lot of people of people elsewhere are asking how they can benefit and whether people will visit their areas. People will need to understand that London will be the main beneficiary but that events such as the Torch Relay, the training camps etc then there will be opportunities for others to take advantage of the Games. But we will need to manage expectations and ensure we don’t oversell the opportunity.

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At the meeting in Bristol I mentioned earlier, there was a debate about how much culture is going to benefit from the Games and how much sport will benefit. I think there is an opportunity for both.

We have produced a consultation document for 2012 available from www.culture.gov.uk/about_us/tourismleisure/tsc_aboutus.htm and this makes mention of the tourism strategy which will be launched at the end of the year.

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The cultural opportunities are massive, starting with a four-year programme running from 2004 - 2012.

VisitBritain has a place on the DCMW 2012 Culture and Creativity Forum.

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There’s a lot to do behind the scenes but I hope that has given you an overview of what we will be doing. Culture will feature in our tourism strategy for the event and there is an opportunity for all of you to feed into it by visiting the DCMS website. Q & A AB: Have any of you been to any of the Regional Road shows, and how did it

go? A: It was quite some time ago and I haven’t heard anything since so I feel things

have been left a little bit up in the air. It was good to hear Jude Kelly and Seb Coe but it would be nice to have it picked up again. One of the interesting things that arose was looking at how cultural organisations could look at their programming during the time and whether it could be in some ways, sport related.

Q: Are the right people being invited to these events? AB: I think the message is gradually filtering out. I met the 2012 regional director for

the first time in Bristol and I thought it was quite a good gathering and I’m sure more and more people will be involved.

Q: How can Audiences London get involved? AB: VisitLondon will be a key link. I’m not quite sure who would be the key point of

contact but they are certainly the main partner to be talking to. Q: I work for the British Library and have been involved with a number of

groups around 2012. My impression that there are so many different organisations involved, it’s very hard to keep track of everything and it can be slightly confusing working out where to go to get information. Is there going to be a central website with all the key links?

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AB: The London 2012 website (www.london2012.org) is the key website. Through VisitBritain, we’ll be putting more information on our Sector Club website so cultural organisations can come through there as well. But going out and talking to regional partners and regional cultural consortia is also important as they are going to play a large role in helping deliver 2012 and culture.

A big challenge is the coordinating of all the projects. It is quite confusing as

people look to which committee or group they can get onto. What was reassuring in the South West was that they have already got their team in place and the organisations are starting to talk and move forward. But there is still a lot to be done.

Q: Undoubtedly there is huge potential for culture and tourism to work

together but my experience at local level has been frustrating. I work for a local authority and in my workplace the arts and culture and tourism departments fight like cat and dog. I think there’s a lack of respect from tourism and everything comes down to a numbers game. They don’t seem to take into consideration the quality of events and so end up putting on their own rather than supporting what we are doing.

AB: Partnership is critical and if that’s not working then there is definitely wrong that

needs to be rectified. If you’ve got an arts department and a tourism department in the same building and you’re not talking together, you need to sit down and talk about how you can work together – ensuring that you’re not duplicating things and that where is an area of expertise, that that is recognised – and then you can pool your resources.

- Personally I don’t think the Tourism Department should be in the business of

putting events on. It should be supporting the people who have the expertise in this area.

AB: You are right. There are experts and experts. Q: When the whole festival thing has moved on (e.g. Liverpool 08) what tips

do you have for sustaining tourism? AB: Again, this is all about partnerships, about working together. With any kind of

destination, an events strategy can be so important, but most of all that you are talking together and seeing how you can pool resources. More and more events strategies are being pulled together – Cardiff has one, Wales has one. It’s not just about sport but about culture as well and the relevant people who have the expertise are talking to the RDA and regional tourism partnership to ensure they are co-operating with clearly defined roles. A strategy provides you with a framework.

RJ: As far as 2012 is concerned, the opportunity is that the eyes of the world will be

on Britain and so that’s why we think the greater benefit will be after 2012. If we don’t somehow grasp the opportunity of showing what an innovative, dynamic place Britain is, then we’re going to lose out. We are going to have to be incredibly careful with our brand, the imagery we use and the events that take place. It is an opportunity to be daring and to get people’s attention.

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- My worry with that issue is that there’s been a lot of good talk about diversity etc, but will that talk form into practice or will there be a temptation to fall back into traditional ‘castles and Beefeaters’ image closer to the time?

RJ: From a tourism point of view, you cannot ignore those icons. Research shows

that people coming to Britain want to see the icons. You cannot let go of them but you have to present them in a modern, contemporary, up to date way, mixing them with the attraction of club-going etc.

Q: You mention the huge developing markets in India and China and I

wonder if Britain has the capacity to meet them and at the same time give visitors a good experience?

RJ: If you look at tourism trends around the world, people are taking shorter

holidays but more of them. The numbers are going up but it could be the same people coming back a couple of times. If the world is shrinking then we do have the capacity because people aren’t taking a three week holiday and filling up a hotel over that period. Instead of one person filling up a hotel over a three week period, you’ve probably got ten people filling it up. From that point of view, we have the capacity.

The other aspect of your question is about sustainability and not ruining the

things that people come to see e.g. eroding coastal footpaths etc. That is an issue most regions and destinations are taking seriously. It’s about visitor management. Cambridge, for example, doesn’t want to be featured in any of our work because they have too many visitors. So, we won’t promote Cambridge itself, but might promote the surrounding region.

AB: A lot of the regional tourism boards are looking to how they can market

destinations in the off-season, away from the summer time and the things they can offer them – be it adventure, luxury or food and drink. All this is being done so that they can grow visitor numbers but spread them through the year. It is a challenge. We are a small country.

RJ: Our objective is not to increase visitor numbers but to increase the value to the

economy.

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Audience focus from the top Madeline Hutchins (Consultant, trainer and board member of Always Learning) In my career I’ve seen the inside of around 400 arts organisations in terms of their boards; I’ve been a board member and employee for around eight organisations, but in my work as a consultant and trainer, either on organisational reviews or on one-day away days, it has been for around 400 organisations. One of the first boards I was on was for Battersea Arts Centre when Jude Kelly was there as director, and it was a fascinating time then in the early 1980s. What I hope I can bring to this session is a lot of experiences of how others have chosen to do what I think is still such a difficult thing to do, making the board part of the organisation, part of the team and to make sure they are addressing the right issues and in a way that feels comfortable with the ethos of our organisation. What we are going to be looking at during this session is the vehicle, or the vessel of the board as part of our structure into which we can pour the marketing issues. This is what we are going to cover in this session; our goal is an effective arts board with good board and staff relationships, and in order to get that, I am going to get you to:

• picture your board • check out the vehicle we are in • look at some maps and models • examine different ways of seeing, check out about role and context • look at some guiding principles • look at the practical aspect of meetings and how they actually work and can

work better Just to check first, let’s check the vehicle you are all in, or aspire to be in. Are most of you in companies limited by guarantee? What other structures have we got in the room? Charities? Other structures:

• Charities – (a charity in itself isn’t a legal structure, but it is an overlay onto another structure)

• Local authority • Sole Trader • Scottish Arts Council – charter

The focus for all of you is very similar. You might have trustees, directors, council committees etc, but what we are going to talk about today will be applicable. We are looking beyond all the legal ‘have to do things’ that your structure brings with it today; there are plenty of other resources that will give you that type of information. We can influence how we do things in our organisations, and how effective our boards are. One of the speakers yesterday quoted Peter Drucker ‘giving attention to the right things’ – this is how we make boards more effective. I want you to picture your board, either in your current board, or project yourself forward to a future board meeting, either current or ideal. I want you to be imagining or

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remembering that moment when you are putting together the papers for a board meeting. You have to decide the information, how to present it, how does it feel when you are compiling it? What expectations do you have? What are your thoughts about this? Let’s fast forward to the meeting itself: how many people are there? What time of day is it? What space is the meeting held in? What experience, skill and knowledge have the board brought to the table? What are they going to think about your reports? Is it all going to meet your expectations of the meeting? What is the quality of the discussion and decision-making going on? How in touch are the board members and what are the outcomes of the meeting going to be? How are you going to feel about those outcomes? Your board: dysfunctional or effective? I wonder if some of you might be able to tell me what type of board you have? Are they dysfunctional or effective, or somewhere in-between? I have two colleagues who work for major arts organisations; the first said that he will be pacing up and down his kitchen at 2am in the morning trying to get rid of the feelings of frustration and anger after his board meetings – what a waste! My other colleague says she always comes home singing after board meetings! She feels energised and inspired by the quality of the discussion and she finds the process of putting the papers together and presenting them gives her a rhythm of working throughout the year. Q Don’t you think it depends on how big your organisation is? If you have a small

board and little formality, lead by its founder, unpaid staff and lots of volunteers isn’t it going to be more effective?

MH That’s a particularly special case isn’t it? The founder is the ‘f word’ of governance, when an organisation is founder-artist lead, there are a particular set of circumstances there.

Q One board I was involved in was very hands-on, and in another organisation I

just went in and delivered a report and went out again. I think the state an organisation is in can determine how effective the board is.

MH What I find is that a dysfunctional board can pull an organisation down

unnecessarily, and I find it a bit odd that we haven’t sorted this out. I also think a consultant will also have a more jaded view of boards as they will have seen more of them when they are dysfunctional as opposed to when they are being effective.

Understanding the vehicle we are in: the charitable company limited by guarantee The structure most of us are in has an inherent complexity in it because of where it comes from. Charitable status goes back to 1601 and the legal structure of limited company goes back to the 19th century, post South Sea Bubble, in order to protect money being invested in the railways and it hasn’t changed much since. So, here we are in the 21st century in this bolt-together vehicle of a steam engine and a half timbered war ship. It isn’t ideal; it’s very complex, because of this logic of ‘disinterested management’, e.g. that the organisation is best protected if the board members are not staff members. Is that the situation for most of you? It is particularly strange and complex situation. In most cases, our board members are off-site, unpaid, part-time and usually from a different business to the arts organisation itself. This doesn’t sound like a formula for success, does it?

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There is a lot of choice relating to whom we have as board members, how many we have. We can change our mem and arts, but we often don’t and we need to review more often that our board and our legal structure fit for what we are trying to do. Maybe we should review it systematically, e.g. at the end of a business planning cycle? We need to have fitness for purpose, form following function. We are stuck with the form, but how we tune it, how we describe the role of the board members, and what we expect from them, can be tailored to our own organisations. Some interesting models GMO – Governance, Management and Operation The Carver Model of Governance www.carvergovernance.com

This is a model developed by John Carver in the USA. What he says is that boards should do less and achieve more and the only bit of this picture they should be concerned with is governance, the big picture stuff, eg setting aims and objectives, appointing CEO, monitoring etc. I think we have a much more hands-on approach in the UK and our boards tend to be a lot smaller. Boards in arts organisations in the USA tend to have around 60-70 members and the real work is carried out in sub-committees. But I think it can very useful to look at a set of board papers and ask ourselves, ‘how much of this stuff we are asking our board to look at is big picture stuff?’ Are they looking at high level marketing strategies, alongside the other big issues and policies? Is your board mired down in discussing operational issues, and if so, does this distract them from the bigger picture issues and discussions. UK voluntary sector model I think this is a more relevant model for us to look at that is seeing some distinct things the board does, and some distinct things the senior staff do, but saying that there is a huge amount of overlap. My guess is that you would feel deeply uncomfortable in a way in which the chief executive didn’t agree. You would want to go back round that and get some consensus between board and CEO on major decisions, and not just rely on voting power.

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Within this scenario the board need to trust the CEO and they need to respect the role and responsibilities of the board. Getting that quality of a relationship working is essential and if that relationship breaks down that’s when the board starts to become dysfunctional. Radical one – if we turn it sideways

What if we say, there is a strong interdependence here, and neither side can do their job without the other. What I like about this model is that it leads neatly into this one by Carol Taylor. She says there is a danger of seeing the board on the other side of the fence – them and us – what is important is being on the same side of the net, as your partner in doubles tennis. What I like about the tennis analogy is that it recognises that you can play singles tennis, where you can make decisions on your own, and that you can play doubles where you make decisions together. Sometimes the picture you carry in your head can be really important in how a board operates. We are caught up in the language of seeing the board as on the outside; yes, they do provide an external perspective, but we must see them as on the inside and on our side. MH Do you think of your boards as insiders or outsiders?

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A I work for an audience development agency and our board is made up of representatives from our members. They are inside but those board members have that external perspective and that is why they are there. However, I am on the board of a dance company and I feel very much on the inside there, and responsible for the strategic things. I think, because of the different natures of the organisations, and nature of the board director’s the boards have different roles.

MH This really demonstrates that if you are involving your users or audiences

in your structure this will cause a duality of interest.

Yes, because we are a charity as well, there are some issues with the Charity Commission as well, in relation to the ‘disbursement of the bounty of the charity’; this means that the people on the board, who are potentially clients, cannot be seen to operate in the interest of themselves and their organisations and they cannot restrict the benefit of the charity to their organisations.

MH That problem also existed in the old structure of The Pre-Schools Playgroup Association, where only the parents of the children at the playgroup could be on the management committee. Therefore, by the rules of the charity, they could never set the rates for the playgroup as they all had a vested interest; this structure obviously did not work.

I think, as board members, we need to be more aware of the roles we are taking on and how many hats we have on (our potential conflicts of interest). Once, when I was doing some training, we asked somebody how many boards they were on, and they said 27! I don’t think you can act in the best interests of this many organisations. This relates to all your dealings with this charity. It’s interesting that local authorities have now mostly decided that their councillors cannot be directors of organisations they fund, and they tend to have different relationships with boards of organisations.

The role of critical friend There has been real sharpening of the role of School Governors and they use this key role of ‘critical friend’. This means you want to nurture, be friendly etc, but you also can give critical feedback, either positive or negative. One thing we need to remember is that the board have taken on the final legal responsibility for the company and the ltd company frame doesn’t protect directors 100% - they can still be liable financially if and when things go wrong. Do you see your board as a gain or a drain? I often ask organisations this question, and linking to this is the question why have a board? What do you think about this? Why do you think people join boards? The latter links to why people give blood – it’s because they are asked, and a neighbour often asks them. When the motivation is wrong, the board will not work. I’ve been given some wonderful reasons by people as to why they have joined boards: ‘to meet Judi Dench’, ‘to balance my portfolio of interests before the election’, ‘get me out of the house, so that I can talk to grown-ups’. Motivations for joining boards One of the key issues is that if you have board dominated by people from a certain demographic – rich, middle class, white – this does not reflect what your organisation is about. It makes it very difficult if you are trying to sell new marketing ideas to your

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board, and it is also way outside our equal opportunities and diversity policies. In this situation, let these people work on a fundraising group and don’t make them directors of the company. A core thread about successful boards is that they have a number of other ways of creating leads and getting connections to other potential board members; they have other ways of moving people into the organisation. Volunteers becoming board members Moving active volunteers into positions as board members can cause some problems. For example,

The volunteers who are tearing tickets one day, come in as management committees members the next day. It’s about respecting roles and understanding their responsibilities. Do you think audience members make good board members? There is a lot to be said for people who know the geography, know the area etc and I think as boards have got professionalised, we’ve forgotten how valuable people with these skills can be. Why have a board? What are we looking to get from this board?

• Free skills • Objectivity – they walk in other worlds • Mentor to the organisation, not just to the CEO • Our eyes and ears – other life experiences • Keeping a focus or frame • Your social network – marketers • Ambassador role • Diversity – this is a group, not an individual

Role and context I feel that very skilled and knowledgeable board members are rendered incompetent if they do not understand the role or context they are in

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This is a model developed by Boyzatis, and he is looking at three interrelated areas that have to fit together well in order to get superior performance that fits in the middle. The top one is individual skills, what the person brings, and then it is up to us to do the other bits properly: role design, eg we need to be clear about what this person does, and then the other bit is having the resources and also understanding the environment and the context – this is the bit we really need to make clear to new board members, and they need to respect the culture of our organisations. When board members are not given enough of these frames, then they cannot act effectively. We can help by sorting out these frames. Guiding principles – the hour glass approach

This is a classic hourglass model, where all communication between staff and board members is through the chief executive; there is no direct communication between paid staff and board members – it is all filtered through this closed neck. The logic is to open up this neck and open up the communications between particular staff and particular members of the boards and this could happen through sub-committees. A model I have been finding works well in arts organisations is where

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there are deliberate relationships, say between the marketing person the staff and marketing expert on the board, e.g. it can be a mentoring relationship. This does bring with it a lot of complexity, it has to be planned and managed and it only works well if there is a lot of trust, particularly on the part of the chief executive. There needs to be a lot of communication, and if you can make it work it makes best use of human resources. If this type of communication and relationships happens without any structure then it can be a disaster. You need some rules and boundaries written down. One of those rules is about collective responsibility. The board makes joint decisions, so the board member and the member of staff cannot make decisions on things through their own working relationship and their discussions. I have an example of a small arts organisation in Plymouth, and they were running first aid training for their staff, and the board suggested that they ran such a session just for them. It was a really positive bonding session – it was non-threatening, hierarchical training and the positive effects of running it lasted for around two years. Skills for board members It is important that the board members skills enable them to engage properly with the organisation’s mission, aims, and values. You would be surprised, but I have worked with organisations where some board members are opposed to public funding. Often, I think tension in an organisation comes through a lack of fit with the organisational values, and this shows up when board members were perhaps brought in because of their money etc. Board members also need to have enough time to get through the business properly. Look at board membership and the skills you need across the lifetime of the current business plan and don’t expect them to be around indefinitely. There is a terrible danger in this in that all your board members might be retired, e.g. they have got the time. You can manoeuvre around this, for example, when you hold your board meetings matters. If you hold them in the evening, you open them up to different types of people. Whether or not you pay board members’ expenses is a really important thing as well; care and attendance allowance, loss of earnings allowance. There are huge equal opportunities issues here. If you, as an organisation, don’t actively promote the fact that these are on offer, you are not going to widen the types of people joining your boards. The key skills, for me are, being able to:

• Listen • Question • Challenge

Other stuff follows on; then you should look for professional and life skills, avoid cloning, and you need to look for motivation – why do people want to join your board, what is their motivation for doing so? Processes for meetings I wanted to go through some techniques for meetings, which might help you get marketing focus in the meetings. These are some quotes that come from a book called Volunteers on Management Committees: ‘I don’t have to be doing this you know, I could be playing badminton’ ‘I get a forest of papers for each meeting, but not the information I need’

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We have to be careful with our relationship with board members. Perhaps after an AGM, or their first board meeting, you could ask them where are they on their energies and enthusiasms, and where do their interests lie? What would you like to engage in within our organisation? The idea of a year plan of meetings and agendas also helps keep focus.

This is like a clock face; what I like about the circle is that you can see it continues. On the inside you can plan all those things you have to do – when you submit your accounts, when you need to hold your AGM by, when your funding applications need to be in. On the outside, you log what is going to be on the agenda for each meeting, otherwise you could choose to put things on the agenda during slack times. The more frequent meetings (one a month) enabled this organisation to have different types of meetings and agendas. This is where you could have major reviews of areas including marketing. There is a huge value in getting this sense of flow on the agenda and at the strategic level.

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This also links to this idea of creativity and strength. There is something about that formality of board meetings which means that a lot of our creativity goes out of the meeting, and many of them are particular boring. We could be using Powerpoint, stickies on paper etc, playing videos etc. As long as the business of the meeting is minuted, that is fine. You could have a particular speaker in, widen the debate, bring in a new idea; this should increase your shared understanding of a particular issue and improve the quality of the decision-making. I’ve been involved in devising a publication with All Ways Learning and it’s called ‘Working Together’ and we looked at the care and attention of planning which goes into board retreats. The same level of attention to detail should be given to board meeting planning, e.g. location, time, tea/coffee, how should we shape the agenda, flag the papers in advance, put questions into the papers, give people a way in. We have a huge toolkit of creativity and if we bring some of this into board meetings we will energise them. Planning meetings We need to look at board meetings as markers in a journey, within a continuum. This comes from a publication called ‘Meeting Together’ and it talks about the meeting continuum. In terms of the time and effort, you need to put 40% in before, 20% during and 20% afterwards (if you are a staff member). Looking at it this way, makes the meeting work better, and the quality of the discussion in the meeting will depend on the quality of the planning. If you look at it as if you have a year’s worth of board, then you look at how you plan the whole year, how you get specific issues on the agenda, for example, marketing and audience development. Another model to look at is the dashboard; look at it as if it’s the dashboard on a car, with lots of instruments on it and if you know what your performance indicators are you devise a way of doing that visually on an A4 sheet with diagrams, and graphics etc. This is how you report to the board and provide the information in the way your organisation wants to present it.

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Audience focus throughout Dilwyn Davies (Theatr Mwldan, Cardigan) Go to www.a-m-a.co.uk/Images/downloads/DilwynDaviesSEMINAR.pdf to download the Power Point presentation This session is aimed at venue managers, or middle managers, not just in theatres but also in similar arts organisations. I’ve been doing this job for the last 10 ½ years; it has been a wonderful experience full of highs and lows; sometimes it’s the best job in the world and sometimes you do wonder why you’re doing it! Reading through the notes last night for the conference there was a phrase about how we deliver big ideas that are at an interesting level to think about issues, visionary and inspiring ideas and ways of working. As most people know who live in the real world, those big ideas are often delivered in small packages, and it’s really important to harmonise the two. So you’ve got the big creative stuff but the practicalities of how you do those. Breakout sessions are designed to explore the elements that make up a balanced and healthy arts organisations and a vibrant sector. I’m sure that you will all want to achieve that and for this particular seminar I was asked to talk about how to ensure that there was an audience focus throughout the whole of your organisation. It’s something that at Mwldan we’ve been trying to do for the past few years and I’d like to communicate to you both the big ideas and how this is delivered on a practical level. I hope this session helps you to:

• Learn some of techniques that Mwldan has developed to ensure customer focus throughout the organisation.

• Learn to identify the obstacles and opportunities that may exist in your own organisations.

• To generate practical ideas to put into practice when you go back. Theatr Mwldan is located in Cardigan a small rural market town on the border between Mid and South West Wales. It’s 2-3 miles from the sea, and has a population of 5,000 people and an approximate rural, low-density catchment area of around 25,000 people. The venue was set up about 20 years ago as a community initiative and came up from grass roots and community arts scene; its roots are why it is so special – it wasn’t a local authority initiative or university initiative – it was, and still remains a very real local arts centre serving its community. In the beginning, the venue was very poorly funded, with few staff and volunteers, but over the years there has been a steady growth in audience programming, and employment. In 1992 Theatr Mwldan became a company limited by guarantee and it is now a charity. I joined in 1996, inheriting a growing programme but with only four full-time members of staff who used to work between 70 and 80 hours a week to deliver the activity. The first good thing was to secure European grant money for four new posts; this was a critical point allowing us to enlarge the programme, develop more activity and increase the turnover and every year since we’ve been able to plough back the small

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surpluses we’ve had. We’ve enlarged the staff team, making conditions of work better for everybody. We also realised that we needed to expand our facilities. There’s a very long story but the short story is we managed to pull together £7m of funding from ACW, EU Objective 1, National Assembly of Wales, and The Welsh Development Agency for a major capital project. The project began in 2002 and finished in 2004 – now we have a new venue which has been completely refurbished. We now have:

• Two auditoria: a 250 seat theatre with a mid scale stage but also takes cinema and a smaller one that has 146 seats primarily cinema but also takes live shows

• A gallery • Café space • Front of house space • Adjoining Media Centre –hub for creative industry owned and managed by us,

with space leased to mainly IT based companies We’ve been through a huge period of rapid expansion particularly in the last few years.

• We attracted 40,000 visits a year before the redevelopment and now achieve 88,000 visits a year.

• We present around 100 live shows – a mixture between professional and community.

• We present 1,700-film screenings of which 30% are specialist and 70% mainstream; we are the town’s only cinema

• Our staff numbers have grown from 4 to 24 in the past 10 years, and including the tenants in the Media Centre, it’s around 40.

• Our turnover has also increased from £350,000 to approaching £1m this year. The Arts Council of Wales as a regional performing arts centre has just designated us. We are one of the four venues that have been awarded producing status under the new Arts Outside Cardiff initiative – this provided us with additional money for us to develop our programming. We’ve toured eight productions in the last 16 months. From the start we’ve tried to have a company philosophy of being very open; we have an open door philosophy where every one in the organisation is made to feel valued. The principles are based on personal development, personal responsibility and empowerment of the staff team, so they can reach their full potential. We’ve got a flat management team structure. I’m the head of the team but we’ve got eight key members of the management team from marketing, financial management, front-of-house, and technical. Three or four years ago we sat down and decided to adopt a flat management structure; everyone on the management team gets the same salary and we decided the most appropriate thing to do as no one could say that they valued themselves more or less as one of their colleagues that was doing a job of similar responsibility but different skills. This was one quite a profound decision taken by that team collectively about their approach to the organisation and it starts to lead into the issues about customer focus in a bigger sense – about this big structural focus that drives the organisation as well as the small ways in which the ideas are delivered. Just before I start talking in detail, here are a few shots of venue:

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Café; a gallery on the ground floor, which is a mixture of touring exhibitions and groups of community based and professional artists:

This is the small auditorium, which is cinema one (146 seats):

That’s Johnny Depp with Lindy who works front-of-house:

One of the interesting things is that we feel front-of-house is not just box office but our people are also trained up to be fully-fledged duty mangers. So Lindy, who joined us as box office sales person, is now trained to undertake a duty management role. Each team member will undertake a more responsible role, not every day, but the responsibilities are shared on a rotating basis This is William, our Technical Manager. He left for a year and came back as a Duty Manager, but also works in the box office.

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The point here is that members of the technical team will work in a front-of-house role as well. He also works behind the bar helping small children with their popcorn, and is an usher Customer focus and audience focus We took the view some time ago that there was an overarching relationship, a circle that connected marketing and audience development and programming. Instead of the linear conveyor belt approach where the programmer puts it on one end and passes through a wall in to the next office and the things shoots off the other end to the marketing department, we have a more holistic view of it so that there was a critical strategic link that ran through this whole circle. It seems obvious but I know it doesn’t work like that in every arts organisation. It is also about establishing a commonly held idea/ownership of where we’re going and why. Where all those things fit together, what you programme, which audiences you target, how you use those methods, it all fits together. It’s about establishing some clear ideas that are commonly shared and well understood through the organisation. If you are talking about customer focus then it’s not just about customer care and the end delivery, but it’s about a higher strategic idea of what it takes to serve those people and to develop as an organisation. Once we’d talked about this idea internally we developed a clear marketing and programming plan, written about four years ago by my Marketing Manager and myself. We based the plan on data research did internally split by art form, so we focused the kind of events we’d been promoting. We took a view over three, four and five years about whether that art form was worth outing first. That discussion directly informed the way programming was going to go. We came up with strategies for each art form, so for contemporary dance we will do this, and for drama we will do that and that informed the programming and in turn the data capture that resulted from that focused our strategy then led to further targeted programming and marketing. We were very specific about which direction we were taking and what kind of product or performance we were prioritising to achieve that, and as we delivered and captured audience data, we were expanding audience based on the activity we had undertaken. At some point you drive down into that data and you can cross-fertilise those audiences. Programming decisions are informed by what people have already done. And then broaden the type of product you programme and the audience you’re trying to hit. We also decided you can’t do everything particularly as you programmers here

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know you typically get requests for some 30 to 40 companies each day and we decided early on we couldn’t do everything. I inherited a programme that was trying to achieve too much, with very few and irregular live events. The audiences were low, and the level of spend on each particular show was low so the quality not good. This was a never-ending downward spiral, so we stopped that and focused the programme. This means getting very good at saying no to people, spending a bit more money on each show, and really giving it the effort it deserves. The number of events we did produce reduced slightly not hugely, but the impact in terms of audience numbers and the effort we could put in to do them justice started to produce better results, which is kind of the foundation we’ve built on. There’s a critical relationship between a venue director and the marketing staff. We’ve got 1.3 full time equivalent of marketing staff. We work in the same space and we share a lot of daily interaction. Our marketing manager is part of the management team and a lot of the structural/intellectual development that goes on is directly linked from where they’re coming from as well as where I’m coming from. I think that what has happened over a period of time from trying to link this circle of audience development, marketing and programming is that it starts to be quite an innate understanding in the marketing team as to why things are as they are. Why certain events are selected and presented and gets to the point got to the point instead of me having to explain there’s a natural understanding of things, instantly understand why this event is on, why its there who its targeted at, what previous events have fed into that and what the target audiences are for it. This makes for a much better working relationship in terms of efficiency and how you can get on and start to sell that show We took the view that the front-of-house sales team was an intrinsic part of the marketing function and that we think of the whole back room marketing team and the front line sales and computer staff as one big sales marketing team and everyone is made to understand that this is what their role is. All other staff volunteers, duty managers are all aware of that ethos which again is communicated through the organisation a fundamental principle. All front-of-house staff are trained as duty managers so consequently they’re paid at a higher rate than the standard box office rate. This pushes the staff bill up but we’ve taken the view that the service provided is better as a consequence. This means that people can answer 3 out of 10 questions but not 9 out of 10. I think the interesting thing is that it empowers these people through training these people and giving them more responsibility and putting them in a position where they see the complexity of the whole organisation, it empowers their own self confidence to interact with public and customers and give a much better service. Much more able to answer customer questions in an informed way. We have a house manager as part of the management team and she leads the front-of-house sales team when the venue is in operation. On any particular day a member of the front-of-house team can be a designated duty manager who leads the team, it won’t necessarily by the house manager, they may be on duty but could be Lindy is duty manager and lead for that day and the house manager will take instructions and guidance from that person.

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Which means that the front-of-house manager sees how someone else manages and deals with the situations and the other way around – the less experienced duty manager will have a chance to lead the team and learn from that, whilst obviously the house manager is still there. After a while we learn that duty managers can carry out their duties alone, are happy doing it and confident and well equipped. This has led to a high level of development and confidence in the foh team as well. A lot of the marketing and programming thinking, is an effort to share that thinking with our foh sales team – explain why things happen and don’t and what the strategy is – in order to inform them and empower them. There are regular meetings between myself and the marketing staff where we’ll discuss specific events, strategies for particular shows, general marketing strategies, projects, tools, workload, proportionally work, whose doing what, progress and successes known from events gone past. The marketing team will then draw up specific campaigns for each event and the filter them down to the FOH team by regular meetings once every three months and go through the whole programme for the next few months. We explain why they’re there, the key elements of them, and the house manager takes an active role in these as well. As well as being very customer focused, she’s very product focused and in a good position to tie those critical things together there. So some other techniques we use with front-of-house team/marketing team besides regular meetings is we get as much visual material as we can get, DVDs, they could be performance shows DVDs, shown excerpts from performances, plays from recorded material or music or whatever to listen to. We produce compilations by each future visiting artist and circulate them for them to take home and listen to at their own leisure. Inevitably, these include tracks from artists they’ve not heard and it won’t be to their taste necessarily, so it’s a new experience. Before they try and sell to public or selling tickets for it they can try and get an understanding of it so they can talk about it in an informed way. We also encourage staff to go and see performances in the venue itself, not ones they would normally go and see – we’d encourage them to go to something else, for example, if they hadn’t seen opera, or Arabic music and some might go and do that – they can choose what they go and see. After that there’ll be a discussion session, say what they thought about and their experience, and what they learnt. It’s a really interesting experience. Also if some of us are going to other venues to see work there particularly since we’ve been touring things over last twelve months, we’ve often taken other staff to see the work at other venues. So they’ve seen performances we’ve had, and seen it in other venues to see how an audience will react in a different place and whatever. Also, when we go to another venue and see how that operates, on a show night, customer interaction, it has been incredibly interesting when staff come back and share their experiences, we’ve all been surprised at the level at which they intuitively pick up when things are right and when things are wrong, and incredibly surprised about their ability to articulate not only problems and relate to their own working environments but also solutions to those problems that they can see. It could be phone response times, or bar service or time it takes to serve someone a whole range of stuff. They also found their solutions, so they’ve taken quite a load off the management team – they have the ability and authority to solve problems themselves. We have a multi-tasking team of duty managers; front-of-house staff will be cleaning auditoriums, serving from the bar, cleaning the toilets, cleaning up some unfortunate messes, and with, rotating duty manager responsibility they will all do various functions

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on different days and different shifts. It’s important for building team spirit and mutual support environment. Front-of house staff have a box office file usually taken from marketing plans or marketing packs from visiting companies; that includes things like key audience, key selling points, show running time. But we’ve asked the front-of-house team to pick two or three shows each within the next three or four months of programming and produce these sheets themselves, which has involved an element of research from web or files that already exist. But they’ve had to think about that show, and pull together that information and material into a standard format, that is there as a reference for every one else. That’s been very interesting, we’ve tried to make it things that they don’t have a relationship with and we’ve found that they’ve got quite inspired and enthusiastic. It’s been a very useful tool for enthusing response and attitude about the show and they’ve talked together about it and shared facts and information. The management team also works on front-of-house and box office sometimes, the finance manager or the technical manager as I’ve said will cover staff box office lunch times and will also go out and work behind the bar or front-of-house in busy periods. The example of William there with a technical team of three will work around four hours a week on front-of-house. Especially when the venue is open they will leave their projection and operate a second ticket station if it’s busy, or bar, or whatever needs doing. CRM is another critical technique that we’re developing in front-of-house to develop customer focused activity. It’s the development of the customer relationship by a variety of delivery methods – in person, on the web, emailing, direct mail, press to ensure a consistency of signal and presentation. We’ve been talking about following up first-time attenders with telephone calls. One critical issue here is about limiting this to what’s achievable rather than placing another pressure on the staff team. They deal with a lot of envelope stuffing with direct mail as well, but what we have is a kind of job sheet of what is happening on what day so that they know on Tuesday they have 300 envelopes to stuff for this 500 on Thursday, if have time on Wednesday follow up waiting list for that event. We are careful not to go down the CRM route, as we are conscious it might take a lot of time to operate. It is an important part of customer relationship that we want to develop. We’re currently going through Investors in People. We did investigate it five or six years ago quite soon after we decided to have this flat management structure, which was quite a radical decision for the management to value each one of them equally, and started talking about job reviews and assessments and soon started to see the IIP might lead to job evaluation and appeal process, people arguing if someone’s job role was more important that the other and at this point we stopped the process and did it by mutual consent and decided it wasn’t for us. But recently we’ve gone back in the programme and now five years on it’s been very positive and useful. Over 5-6 months we’ve had eight sessions that involved all of the management team. It’s looking at all aspects of training and development of the company. It’s given us, as a management team, the opportunity to step back and to look at company philosophy in a new light having gone through the experiences of the last five years.

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The interesting thing is that that team has tried to step back from the process and run with it and they have recognised that I’ve gone into a position of a lead person responsible for artistic management, programming and general management – balancing these roles is really difficult. What’s happened with us is that the management team has concluded that they need to take on more responsibility for the general management role, hopefully to free my time for creative activity. It’s very supportive to have that feedback from that team and for the team as well its meant that they’ve had to grab hold of this opportunity to take on increased responsibility and learning how to develop their own jobs to include some of the areas that I was dealing with before. That, again is a process of empowerment and enablement that I suppose is one of the key issues of how our organisation, again right through to front-of-house has encouraged a development of ownership of the company ethos as well. Having established these things that we felt have been commonly held it has enabled those ideas to be discussed and developed further. I suppose we’re viewing whether they’re still appropriate and meaningful and yes they are. Those ideas are renewed and passed through the organisation in a fresh way. How you communicate ideas is really important. We were not always communicating our ideas, our vision throughout the whole company. So that’s made us focus a lot more about the big things to whole staff team, as well as the small things as well. That helps to set the whole kind of climate where this development can take place. Obviously as part of the IIP we’re undertaking a training needs assessment and that’s raised lots of issues, again; a lot of the front-of-house team have come up with ideas and solutions to do their job better without us having to suggest what they want. We’ve just run a customer care course, and some members of the management team went on it as well. They’ve also identified critical elements of training they need, which we’re sourcing at the moment. The other thing we try to emphasise in customer care is that customers are not just those who buy a ticket to sit down in a seat, it’s also about artists and visiting companies and the standard of care that goes into those people, makes all the difference between a show going smoothly and being successful. It shows in a higher standard of performance and comfort with artists and companies and that shows on stage that produces a benefit to audiences who hopefully will have a good time and go away and come back again. It’s that whole kind of circle. And also in terms of customers there’s this whole thing about your colleagues and responsibility to your colleague as well as well as external customers, these being internal customers. Recently, we’ve recruited a lot on new people in a short period of time and a couple of instances and have not been up to standard we’ve set and instead of disappearing or tread water and not show it becomes very obvious very quickly there’s a problem and resulting tensions arise because of the failure for whatever reason come to the surface straight away. In some ways this is good, as it forces you to do something about it. For the management team, in some cases, it’s been the first time that they’ve had to deal with letting employees go and trying to deal with that. We try and be as flexible as we can within staff team. The marketing team is a good example; between three employees there are five children under eight-years old and it has meant that we’ve had to be very creative with working arrangements, but we’ve found from investing in that more supportive approach that we’ve had back an

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improved level of commitment, and dedication quality of care and quality of communication in the organisation. So something that could be seen as a threat or problem has been proved to be really beneficial. Also with The Arts Outside Cardiff project, we’ve been doing some things that even two years ago we would never have thought of doing which has been very challenging, but the pay off for everybody has been immense. The thrill and discovery of new areas of activity we’ve pulled off successfully has been extremely beneficial for every one in the organisation. It has given them new opportunities to develop their own working lives and what they get out of their jobs and you can see people moving hugely and growing in confidence. There’s an excitement in the organisation as well which wasn’t there before. We’ve managed to create a climate of getting the right people together in the right place in the right time but in the right framework. Where this development can happen and hopefully empowering them to be able to move forward in their job their careers and in their workplace. I suppose one of the key elements is the obstacles that stand in people’s way to be able to achieve change within an organisation in order to move things forward. There are all sorts of institutional obstacles: there’s the fear of change, the historical difficulties in the organisation and there’s a climate that might exist for whatever reason that stops that change or that progress happening. I’m not saying that this model is right for everybody at all, but there are elements of it that are applicable. What we’ve done works for us and in terms of creating a climate where customer focus is a priority, has really paid off. So we’ve got mutual support, individual responsibility, responsibility for the health of the company, responsibility for the health of the customers and general understanding of the reliance of each person on their fellow colleagues and audience and customer base that keeps us in jobs at the end of the day. Q & A Q How far in advance do you plan your programming? DD Programming from between six to twelve months. The live programmes go in

long time in advance most of it fixed eight months Q As you were saying you have priority for different art forms e.g. modern

dance would you then ring up a company up and say can we pencil you in for say a year’s time.

DD Yes we try to have a more proactive approach. I think there's a big difference between proactive and reactive programming, is time; you need time to do it. I’ve been consciously trying to be less reactive. I’ve heard of colleagues who at the last minute scrabble around with brochure about to go to press we need another two things that will do, and put it in, we’ve really tried to stop doing that. So it’s much more focused and strategic. But again there are other people that have formulas say that in every four month period you have two pieces of contemporary dance and one piece of German puppetry but if there isn’t the right thing out there we won’t do it. It’s not painting by numbers. If there isn’t anything out there that we feel is right for the next six months we won’t do it. Then people say you haven’t got much drama on have you, no because but it you look at it over a longer period there’s more of a balance. There are issues there about supply to the sector, which certainly in Wales we’re talking about a

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lot more and the venues are becoming more proactive in trying to track down suitable programme. And then the film programme is much tighter and goes in two – three months in advance.

Q When you talk about FOH staff producing briefing notes and other work

do you give them extra time other than when they are working? DD No they tend to slot it in their normal working shifts. It’s quite a good ‘in the

evening’ job, we don’t have live shows every night obviously and on other nights there may be film screenings, so in the down time between the shows going in and coming down. We supply those type of tasks with a window so that it can be a job that can be done as and when.

Q So within that rotating thing would you expect to go and work FOH

sometimes or does the marketing manager go in the box office? DD I haven’t done much FOH house in the last twelve months, but every other

member of staff does it. I think they all saw that it wasn’t very sensible for me to do it any more.

Q But as a principle everyone has a go? DD Yes and if it came to it I would. Q We are trying to find a way of developing the services staff to build in

research time, so that they can learn more about production. Obviously because they are working it is not quite the same as sitting behind a desk. We are trying to find the time to build in an hour a week for each member of staff to do research. Either we find money for it or alternatively every other member of staff: the curatorial staff, marketing and finance all do an hour in the gallery – but I’m not sure how this would go down.

DD We had this customer care training three weeks ago a 10am to 5pm event and every single member on box office went on it and William covered this as his contribution to enabling them to do the training day. Where we bring the whole of the FOH and marketing team together for these 2/3 monthly meetings before the new brochure gets sent out, this will be rotated in. They will be brought in between 10am to 12pm on everyone’s work rota and that period will be covered on box office by a member of the management team not involved in that meeting. There are formal slots and there is a cost as your taking, in that example, eight x two hours out of the budget but we took the view that it was a worthwhile thing to do once you get over the reticence of that, ‘oh look at all that money wasted’, we’re very challenged for money, we generate a lot of money relative to the funding levels we get but at some point you have to be brave and bold and just have to do that. Then you start to see the benefit of it.

Q I’m interested in the research by your staff and whether this had any

changes to your marketing, or copy or what you put out? DD I think mostly the copy is written by the marketing manager or myself because

when getting the brochure together it’s more efficient like that. But where it has paid off is the informed way, which staff can talk to customers on the front line on the phone or in person about the nature of the show that’s coming in. For example we toured three Palestinian lute players through Wales, and some of the people had been to see the performance elsewhere or a similar performance in the past. So while way off mainstream really they could articulate what it was like, what to expect and their own personal feeling about it. It is difficult to find the professional stand of that’s what it says against your own personal reaction but we’ve never adhered to the script a 100%.

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Q In relation to the last question I was just wondering whether your

discussions with your staff team ever influence your programming decisions?

DD Yes it can do. There are some things we try not to have a wide debate about because that becomes programming by committee and that doesn’t work. Some things are very obvious and I’ll just drop them and that’s that. There are some things that we’ll kick around within a small group of people, marketing probably, and maybe one or two members of the management team, not in a formal way. Would you pay so much for this, do you think there’s an audience for that? No programmer is going to know every section of their audience because it’s about getting different social groups of your catchment whatever. So we’ve got people who are stereotypical representatives of sections of the community that all work in the same place. They’ll have a much better idea or much better feel of, for example, what a traditional welsh language audience will react to rather than someone of ‘a hippy’ tendency. So do informal discussions but don’t to make it a laboured process as it has to be pretty quick – and not by committee.

Q Do you use any audience data when you’re making those programming

decisions? Do you use research of audience and ask them questions? DD We do some audience research but not every time. We use some

questionnaires on some shows that are very useful in informing theatre strategies. For some projects we’ll do some data box extraction, for example art form cross over rates for every single art form, jazz, world music we were getting 25 -50% for other art forms. It would be really interesting to do every time but we can’t afford the time. Sometimes it’s a gut feeling. Post each traditional direct mail we’ll do an analysis of strike rate.

Q So you build up a better idea of what’s working and what’s not? DD Yes and over a period of time you develop an innate feel of what techniques

you need to use for each show. Often we say we may need to do this we may need to do that but let’s look six weeks before the show and we may not need to do anything. Another two weeks go by and if conditions are not going well then we may need to do direct mail and how wide you go on that and were you take the target audience from.

Q I’m fascinated by those audience figures of yours. You’re saying that you

have a population of 5,000 and a main catchment area of 25,0000 but 88,000 attendances. It that about people coming more often or is that about people coming from further as well? Or just a lot more?

DD A lot more first time attenders and repeat attenders that are travelling further because the quality of experience is so much better than it was before. And scale of events moving up a notch. So it’s a combination of things really. Out of 88,000 some of them are mainstream film-goers but personally I don’t mind what they come to as long as they’re coming. We also track data for mainstream attendances as well and deliberately cross over targeting film attenders with other performances that have been successful, particularly with family audiences.

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Targets, Tactics, Messages – the art of effective and creative marketing implementation Debbie Richards, (Baker Richards Consulting)

Go to www.a-m-a.co.uk/images/downloads/DebbieRichardsSEMINAR.PDF to download the Power Point presentation During today’s session, we will be working to develop a one-page marketing implementation plan when we break for some work in pairs during the session. We will be looking at the following areas: • Segmentation

- Targets and messages (engaging in a meaningful way) - Targeting to deliver appropriate value to meet segment needs

• Communicating that value effectively through copy and images • Tactics • The one page marketing implementation plan

I think it’s also important to go through what we won’t be covering today, as this sets the scene for the rest of the session. For today’s session, we will be assuming that you have: • Assessed your market • Carried out a Situational Analysis (including analysis of your existing audience if you

have one) • Come up with your strategy and objectives We are going to look at the targets and tactics today, and of course, I’ll assume that you will all evaluate and monitor everything you do

Sources of information I want to share with you some sources of information you might use in order to understand your market, as people don’t always know where to go to find this information. Obviously it helps if you have a box office system, but in some situations you have no sales data at all. This was the situation we had when we worked for one of the organisations I wanted to talk about today – The Broadway in Barking, which was a brand new venue.

Market data • Area Profile Reports, ONS, other secondary research e.g. local authority • Sales analysis, or data from the finance department

Customer behaviour • Geography, frequency, retention, cross-over, 15/35/50

Competition • Other venues…. And not just other venues (eg restaurants etc)

Other research • Generic secondary research • Primary research

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Let me take you through some of the sources of information we used in our marketing strategy work for The Broadway in Barking. This all comes from the Office of National Statistic’s website. I sat down with the people at the venue to discuss where they thought attenders would come from; it was quite clear in this case because it was determined by rail, bus and road links.

Catchment: Core catchment is mainly wards in the eastern half of the Borough, extending slightly into Newham to the East. We then sat down and looked at the Office for National Statistics website and we determined the following key facts:

1 Total Population

The total population within this catchment area is 104,668 (adult population 78,078)

2 Age

30% of the population under 20 (compared with 25%)

3 Ethnicity

25% of the catchment population is non-white, consistent with London but wide variance within the catchment

4 Household composition and accommodation

18% lone parents (significantly higher than the London average of 13%); 22% couples with dependents

31% one person only households; 26% couples

Then we got to the less exciting figures that related to Social Grade and educational attainments. These are key indicators for propensity to attend the arts, and within the catchment we had low representation of both, and therefore there appeared to be less propensity for people to consume the arts.

5 Social grade

Low representation of social grades AB (13%, compared to 26% in the whole of London); C2DE significantly higher.

6 Educational attainment

39.5% have no qualifications (24% for London)

10% are qualified to degree level or above (less than half the average for London)

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The catchment map below is for The Broadway when one year’s worth of data was available – and shows the core and extended catchment areas – which was pretty much as we had expected and had predicted.

www.baker-richards.com

Catchment Map

IG11

RM9

RM10

RM8

Following is an example of sales analysis, and this is from the Theatre by the Lake in the Lake District. This is five years’ data and it shows the picture by genre across this time span and at a glance you can see the trends, look at changes and shifts as it is moving across the years.

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www.baker-richards.com

Sales analysis: example of ticket sales by volume

Here is a very quick example of customer data and an example of current market definition, again relating to The Theatre by the Lake, their core catchment and then their extended catchment. We identified that there were 18,000 bookers resulting in around 50,000 attenders:

- 34% bookers - 64% tickets - 59% value

Loyal ‘core’ (four or more times in two or more seasons) = 5,890 Generally high levels of crossover between the genres The theatre was achieving 29% penetration of their core catchment, which is a very successful organisation indeed So, all of that sets the context for what we are going to discuss in the rest of the session. Positioning Before we go on, let’s touch on positioning, which is quite a tricky concept. I think that we often think about this in terms of organisational positioning, and as arts organisations I think we don’t think about it at all because we automatically position around product and we just want to be known for the product we produce.

It is possible to position around four things:

- Product - Service - Price/Promotion

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- Market It is easy to explain this in terms of supermarkets. If you think about the recent Marks and Spencer’s TV advertising campaign, it’s positioned on product – M and S food. Tesco is positioned around service – ‘every little helps’, the promises to open more checkouts etc. Somerfield is a good example of price promotion, as they focus on ‘buy one get one free’ and Asda is focused on the market, the family market, with the emphasis on mums. Here are a couple of examples of arts organisations that have a different approach towards positioning. The first is the Queen’s Theatre in Hornchurch and they are positioned around the promotion of their jump the queue subscription campaign. It is not saying come to see this show, it’s saying come because it’s a fantastic bargain, and this is very appropriate for their target market, who are bargain hunters. The second is from The Broadway in Barking, and this is supposed to look like a Butlins’ brochure because they identified what their audience was interested in. This is targeted around the wider product type offer, looking at the ambience etc.

www.baker-richards.com

Positioning

Here is another example from the Theatre by the Lake, and here are Tony and Margaret, two of the theatre’s stalwart volunteers – I’m going to talk about them some more a bit later on. The theatre is positioned around market that it is for, and also the product, e.g. the theatre and the scenery within which it is situated. They also adapted this image and featured younger people on the cover – not so young as to alienate other potential customers, but also a bit aspirational.

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www.baker-richards.com

Positioning

Segmentation Segmentation or grouping the database enables us to communicate different benefits to meet the needs of different groups of people by identifying:

• What do we need to offer them (product)? • How do we need to position it to deliver appropriate value to meet their

needs? • What messages will communicate that value and persuade them to

attend? • Which medium is the best way of communicating with them?

What we are talking about in terms of segmentation is:

Dividing existing and potential audiences into groupings with similar characteristics so you can target your communications more effectively

How do you do this? It depends on your customer base but needs to refer to their behaviour or attributes in relation to your product, for example:

• Geography (Domestic/Visitor) • Frequency (Core, Pick ‘n’ choose, Occasional) – something we do instinctively • Genre/Product • MoGos – motivations for going out for a social/special occasion • Age – can be particularly important if you are marketing to young people • Time of booking – eg subscribers or last minute booker • Party size

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What makes a segment effective?

• Good analysis of the market – who your current and future customers are • Easily and accurately identified – this is really important • Actionable – different products, benefits, messages, media to be used

(otherwise there’s no point!) Here is a segmentation example, again from the Theatre by the Lake, and this focuses on their current attenders. We segmented their audience in terms of frequency, geography and product choice.

www.baker-richards.com

Segmentation example

Below is another example from The Broadway, and it’s primarily based on genre. As the venue has only been open for a year it’s difficult to segment on anything else and we don’t have any trends to look at:

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www.baker-richards.com

Segmentation example

Mums with pre-school kids; playgroups; Sure Start

Early Years

Men from slightly further afield e.g. Essex. ‘Collectors’ of artists/music.

R&B/Names

Local menHometown Heroes

Mums/Grannies with kids aged 3-8 (plus friends of the kids)

Kids Club

People seeking something “safe” – Under 16s, Full Price bookers & Seniors.

Family fun

Daughters aged 65+ bringing elderly mothers or people attending through institutions like day centres, lunch clubs.

Sunday Matinees

Working people aged 30-40 – public sector, single sex, work outings or working people aged 40-50 with partner. Plus families with teenagers.

Comedy Club

Local couples aged 35-70. Kids in teens or left home.

Core Bookers/Bill & Lana/Big Night Out

Exercise to be done in pairs: Download the sheet on which to do the exercise here: www.a-m-a.co.uk/images/downloads/OnePageMarketingPlan.pdf

1. Pick one of the three product options described at the top of the sheet. 2. Pick three segments – give each one a name in the first box and then describe

them in the second box. Creating value for your market segments in terms of meeting their needs

I was recently working on a citywide project in Edinburgh and we had a debate with a group of visual arts and crafts organisations about what is the value of woodcarving. After just about ten minutes, we came up with the following benefits for wood-carving; it’s not just about the wood-carving, these are all the other things customers are looking for:

• Escape the routine • Getting away from the kids • Specialist tutors • Engagement with artists • Socialising with like-minded people • Something to talk about (that isn’t work) • Self-validation • Learning a skill • Expressing creativity • Making something • And maybe selling it!

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We need to understand what drives value, what customers are looking for and we need to understand that the motivations are different at different times. So, for example, there is a restaurant I have visited in Cambridge three times but for different reasons: I’ve been there for a romantic meal, I’ve been there for a business meeting, and I’ve been there with the extended family, and I was making a different purchase every time. We also need to realise that people are not making purchases for specific performances, but for lots of people they might be making a purchase for a special occasion or one of those other reasons. So, to give you an example, relating to the MoGos segment I identified earlier: Motivations for going out (MoGos) • Seasonal • Birthdays • Anniversaries • Dating • Friends visiting • Relationship maintenance • Big night out • Meeting people • Catching up / keeping up • Escape/ relax • Self-development • Keeping active • Keeping up with the Jones’s • Things to do before you’re 30, 40, 50 etc • Family day out • Keeping the kids out of trouble • Sunday dads • Educating the kids • Cultural currency / the latest thing • For the art ... • Cultural all-bran Targeting So, targeting that segment is about changing elements of the marketing mix to address those different market segments with different value that meets their needs:

• Product – not just what is on stage, but everything else • Price – of the whole night out • Place – distribution channels • Promotion • Physical Evidence – packaging, furniture, etc • Process – in-house, or process the customer goes through in arranging the

whole night • People – the people who provide the service

One of criticisms of targeting is that it excludes people by only communicating with particular groups, but my contention is that it is inclusive because it is about meeting needs of particular groups. Quite often I see straplines that are ‘trying to be all things to all people’, and here is an example from The Biggar Festival which I passed the other day which promises ‘something for everyone’. This just means that you don’t stand for anything and it’s a classic example of trying to speak from ‘our’ point of view

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instead of thinking about the customer. Would such a wide range of people be satisfied at such an event? The chances are that they won’t come back again as you may have reached some of their needs but not all of them.

Developing a proposition

We need to develop a targeted proposition that it is a clear and specific expression of the tangible benefits for each market segment.

Propositions should be: • Short • The one reason (not a long list of 29 reasons) • Unique • Why you rather than your competitors? • Relevant • Who are you talking to? (stand in the customer’s shoes) • Clear and understandable • Honest • Motivating • Emphasise benefits rather than features (explaining products in ways that meet

market needs rather than the features the industry is interested in….) This is an example from a show I produced a while ago and the first is a piece of copy we could have written, but didn’t, and it’s based on features …

‘Christmas Day, 1843. A time of celebration for everyone except the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge. But the visitation of three spirits means this Christmas promises to be a bit different. Creation Theatre Company’s new production of Dickens’ classic tale A Christmas Carol holds a mirror up to the life of Scrooge in the historic and unique Mirror Tent. The play is directed by Abigail Anderson, following her popular production of Romeo and Juliet in our 2004 summer season, and Matthew Hendrickson (Reduced Shakespeare Company) returns to Creation as Scrooge after his hilarious portrayal of the Nurse.’ What does this mean to a customer who is not ‘in the know’?

- Here is another version of the copy based on the key benefits we identified: Christmas/seasonal treat, social celebration, feel-good

‘Unless you’re Ebenezer Scrooge, Christmas just isn’t Christmas without a festive treat or two! So, we would like to offer you the ideal way to celebrate with family or friends. Enter the Mirror Tent, with its cabaret style seating, for a captivating production of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Heartfelt and funny, this show is full of surprises, songs and seasonal spirit. Plus, French chef Michel Sadones will serve crepes, mince pies, mulled wine and more.’ The key point is if you have identified that the needs of the segment is a seasonal one and then if you can’t communicate any seasonal benefits, you need to go back a stage and look at how you are going to create the appropriate seasonal value the customer is looking for.

Sometimes features are also benefits as well for particular audiences, and we have been lead into this, primarily writing feature-led copy for our current attenders who are ‘in the know’, and there’s an example of this in the ‘cabaret style seating’, and this is

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where we might need to check ourselves as marketers and think again about what we are writing.

So, to recap, when thinking about the message we need to be looking at the benefits

of the whole experience, including the following: • Performance • Venue • Ambience • Who are we talking to?

We then tailored A Christmas Carol for schools, and used different terminology and emphasised a different set of benefits, e.g. cheap, easy and appropriate; we are emphasising the ease of booking and getting there as that is important for schools, and at the end of the copy there is an endorsement, a kind of guarantee in the form of a quote from another teacher: ‘Don’t be without the perfect end of term trip! A Christmas Carol Exclusive schools performances – exclusive schools prices! Tickets are just £9.50 each for students (with a free teacher/adult ticket for every 10 children booked) Bringing your school has never been easier. The Spiegeltent is easily accessible from the Oxford Ring Road, with plenty of free coach parking, and the children can even eat their packed lunch at the venue before or after watching the performance. A number of schools have already reserved tickets for this year’s exclusive schools performances. Don’t miss out on tickets for your school. ‘The children all had a thoroughly enjoyable time at the Christmas school last year and are very excited about returning.’ (Mrs Woolley, ** school)’ How not to do it… It is sometimes useful to learn from things that people have done wrong, but often people do not want to share these types of things! Just take a look at this e-mail that came around to us (I’ve removed the name of the organisation):

“Subject: **Poor sales** [Organisation. Event. Venue.] 22 April

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Dear attender,

Despite a brief rapid spate, we have sold under a couple of dozen tickets for the next [event] on Friday 22 April. These are great players, and it serves them ill to meet such a small audience in [town]...not to mention the financial difficulties this imposes on us.

Please make it if you can, support live music and [organisation]; we depend on you, the audience, but if we don't get reasonable attendances, we cannot continue. It would be a great shame to miss this opportunity....

We have had some awful reports about the difficulties of getting tickets through the [box office], so for this event, tickets will be ON SALE AT THE DOOR.

Over the next few months, they are visiting much of Europe, USA, Asia and South America in that order. [Town] get to hear them before this hectic schedule. Make sure you do not miss this rare opportunity!

Doors 7pm/start 7.30pm

Price £16/£13

Box Office:” This is a prime example of not standing in the customer’s shoes; you can see that it reveals all the problems it will cause the organisation rather than focusing on the benefits for the customer. So, I always think it’s worth doing some kind of reality check and ask yourself:

- Having comprehended the value the segment is seeking, are you delivering appropriate value or do you need to create it?

Creating value – The Broadway Here is another example from The Broadway; I don’t know if you remember Bill and Lana from earlier? We focused on them and tried to think about their needs and what were their motivations for going out.

- Bill and Lana: Local couples aged 35-70. Kids in teens or left home

What are the MoGos? What are the needs they are seeking to meet? • Big Night Out • Relationship maintenance, ‘special’ occasion, break from the kids or routine

So what is the value – the key benefits/messages to promote? • Drink, dress-up; special/jolly; images of couples • Premium service: Cabaret seating – Not only will you be closer to the

performance, you will be greeted by a host, shown to your table, where snacks are provided, and throughout the evening you will have full waiter service for all your drink requirements.’

And just to show that The Broadway got it right – Barking is a very price sensitive market, and even though they charge a £2 premium for sitting in these types of seats, they always sell out first.

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Creating value – The Broadway

- Mum and grannies with kids aged 3-8 (plus friends of the kids)

What are the MoGos? What are the needs they are seeking to meet? • Something for school holidays; occasional treat/birthday parties • Value for money

So what is the value – the key benefits/messages to promote? • Birthday parties • ‘Club’ message; socialising with other children/interaction • Added value: Barker the Bear; kids club pack; Winter Wonderland

www.baker-richards.com

Creating Value – The Broadway

Working in the same pairs, spend ten minutes completing step two of the plan:

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1. What are the needs the segments are seeking to meet? What are the MoGos?

2. What are the key messages or key benefits that you promote (thinking about the whole product and wider marketing mix)

www.baker-richards.com

10 Minute Exercise: Step 2 of the 1 page marketing plan

• What are the needs the segments are seeking to meet? What are the MoGos?

• What are the key messages or key benefits that you promote (thinking about the whole product and wider marketing mix)

Key Messages or Benefits

Needs/MoGosDescriptionSegment

Tactics – communicating value effectively Moving on to think about communicating effectively with the market segments you have identified. It’s true that a picture is worth 10,000 words; here is Robert at the Edinburgh Print Makers’ Workshop, and you can see it really conveys the pleasure he is having during this experience. You couldn’t communicate this with words.

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www.baker-richards.com

A picture is worth 10,000 words in conveying the experience

Again, here are some photographs from the Regents’ Park Open Air Theatre, and they are really focusing on the experience and trying to convey what it will be like. If they had just posted photographs of the artists, this would not have achieved the same

result.

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www.baker-richards.com

A picture is worth 10,000 words in conveying the experience

Signposting and stranding Edinburgh International Film Festival use the tactic of signposting – ‘If you liked that, you’ll like this’. This is really good if you are dealing with people who are not regular attenders, therefore you are directing them to things they might like. They have a brilliant search facility on their website – you can look up films you like – and it will give you recommendations of other films you might like. Stranding is a way of signposting events by grouping them together. Once people have made their first choice it’s easier then to group together other events in order to make an offer. Finding the appropriate medium The Children’s International Arts Festival – Festival of Arts for Children and Young People have really thought about their target market and created a brochure that has stickers for each event, with a festival planner. This means that a family can plan what they want to attend, put the stickers on etc, and you see loads of people using this during the festival. It also means that people are engaged with the product even before they arrive at the events. When planning the appropriate medium you need to think about:

- what’s most likely to be seen or heard by your segment - what is going to reach the largest number of them - how much persuasion is going to be needed - time and money - ease of response

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‘Whizzy’ Tactics I’m just going to list some whizzy tactics now, and there’s nothing mind-blowingly original about them. I think that as arts marketing has become more professionalized, then we have become desk bound, devising sophisticated and clever direct mail campaigns etc, when we could be thinking about using some of these (some free of charge): • Direct mail gimmicks (eg Jack and the Beanstalk mailing with free jelly beans) • Station drops – anybody can do these, and it raises awareness • Car / bus wrapping is easy to get sponsored and can generate lots of press

coverage, and you can distribute print at the same time • Toilet doors • Banners/poster boards • Street leafleting • Phone people – e.g. our box office people have dead time when they could be

calling people • Mascot to events • Shopping centre stands • Talks to groups – doesn’t cost you anything • T-shirts, beer mats Going back to your marketing plan:

How you will you get your message across?

www.baker-richards.com

5 Minute Exercise: Step 3 of the 1 page marketing plan

• How you will you get your message across?

Needs/MoGos

Key Messages or Benefits

TacticsDescriptionSegment

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Intangible Value I’ve got another example of how not to do it! I want to talk about intangible value in the context of service:

The Guarantee Here’s an example of where a theatre tried to create added value for a production by offering a guarantee and underwriting difficult work.

‘Go on try it, we know you’ll like it!

There may be companies or productions in this brochure that you’ve never heard of, but if you see this logo against any event we guarantee the quality of the show. So, try it and you may discover something new that you like. You’ve nothing to lose – if you do try it and if you really don’t like it, we’ll give you theatre vouchers to the value if your ticket so you can try something else.’ This does beg the question, what about the shows without the logo? You need to think about the sub-text of the messages you are sending out. Service through the box office Quite often you find box office staff are really used to dealing with regular customers, and although typically 20% of your customers buy 80% of your tickets, it means that there are a huge number of less frequent attenders and we need to think about how we speak to them: • Think about what you say – are your questions appropriate or assuming prior

knowledge? • ‘Where would you like to sit?’ – don’t assume somebody knows the answer to this! • ‘Have you been before?’ may be a more appropriate question

Language: beware terminology/jargon I did some work for the Festival Hall and they used to have a seating area called the front terrace, and people who hadn’t been there before simply didn’t know where it was – they thought it was outside. So they are going to rename that seating area with a more appropriate name.

Beware shorthand We also need to be aware of using shorthand. It may be fine using this for regular attenders, but not for those who attend less frequently: • ‘We’ve got seats in the 2nd circle back’ – what does this mean?

But may need to differentiate for regulars… • ‘The auditorium is split into four sections. Each one gets higher up and further

away from the stage. We have a range of prices from £x to £y according to different views and acoustics. I have two fantastic seats at £x which are two of our best seats because they are in the stalls, close to the stage with an excellent view…’

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Service We need to think about the following: • Does tone of people match tone of copy – professional or friendly? First or third

person? • Customer service is crucial to the feel of the Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh for

regulars, they always say things like – ‘I’ll get Jane to help’ (not ‘Front of House Manager’), but this might not be appropriate for new attenders

• Being overly honest/helpful can be a mistake – ‘Yes we have quite a lot of tickets available’

• Feeling able to recommend – the customer does not always know best! • Can people affect how the work works – is responsibility delegated to the front line

and do people take it? • What about the bar? – Stuart the barman from The Broadway can be relied on to

get everybody up and dancing in a conga line – he creates the added value for the venue

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Speaker biographies’ Adrian Bevan joined VisitBritain in 1984 as a graduate trainee and has worked overseas in USA, Germany and the Middle East and Indian Sub-Continent. In early 2000 Adrian returned to London and helped establish the Sports Tourism Department. In late 2001 he was appointed as international product development manager and in this role has carried out major reviews of food and drink in Britain as well as VisitBritain heritage product. More recently he has taken on responsibility for the development of VisitBritain international focus on culture and gardens as well as continuing to work on the promotion of food and drink in Britain. Dilwyn Davies graduated from University College London with a Geography degree in 1982, and first became a sales office manager for a diamond tool company in Crawley before leaving the south-east of England in 1988 to run a whole food shop in West Wales. Pursuing twin passions for the environment and the arts led him to be appointed as director of Theatr Mwldan, Cardigan in 1995. During his time at Mwldan, Dilwyn has managed the venue’s transformation from a small rural venue into one of the leading presenting theatres in Wales. Mwldan’s ambitious £7 million capital development scheme was completed in 2004 and has become a flagship project for the arts in Wales. Theatr Mwldan has also evolved into a hub for the creative industries, and although Cardigan’s population is slightly under 5,000 people, the theatre is now attracting 85,000 admissions a year. Theatr Mwldan has recently been designated a regional performing arts centre by The Arts Council of Wales, and has been given a producing role under the arts outside Cardiff initiative, originating and co-producing tours in a number of artforms across Wales, the UK and internationally. Dilwyn is a board member of Creu Cymru, the touring agency for Wales, and is currently chair of the circuit, a consortium of eight presenting venues in mid Wales. Madeline Hutchins has been chief executive of arts organisations on their boards, including in the role of chair, and acts as a facilitator, trainer and consultant working with boards and senior management teams. She has researched and written about boards and governance and has studied management and organisational development. Her background is in small-scale theatre management and she was director of the Independent Theatre Council (ITC) from 1983 – 1998. Madeline has developed and run board development programmes for the ITC, the Arts Council, Interchange, Victim Support and Solor Housing Association. Recent consultancy work on legal structure, management and governance issues includes; StopGAP dance company, Akram Khan and Candoco. Madeline is currently a board member for Theatre Exchange and All Ways Learning. Research with All Ways Learning includes new organisational models; relationships between boards and staff, maps and models of arts management, and understanding learning. Madeline has a Master’s degree in people and organisational development. She runs SAM’s Books, the specialist books source for arts management. She is core tutor on the MA in arts and cultural management at Sussex University. Some of Madeline’s material is included in David Fishel’s book Boards that work published by the directory of social change. Paul Kaynes has been, in twenty years of working in arts marketing, an Arts Council England marketing trainee, worked for mac (Midlands Arts Centre), Warwick Arts Centre at the University of Warwick in Coventry, and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has been chief executive of Audiences Central, the West Midlands' regional audience development agency, since 1997. He co-founded and was co-director for seven years of the UK’s largest audience development event, ArtsFest. He's also an experienced trainer, undertaking training for the TMA, arts organisations in Portugal, and the British Council. For two years he was chair of Network, the UK

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association for arts marketing and audience development agencies, and is now chair of Motionhouse Dance Theatre's board. He is chair of the West Midlands’ regional development agency’s task forces on festivals and events, chair of the steering group for Cultural Research in the West Midlands, and a member of Visit Britain’s Culture and Heritage Sector Club, the West Midlands Regional Cultural Forum and the TMA’s Marketing Advisory Committee. Paul’s specialisms include strategic arts marketing and audience development planning, arts marketing research, cultural tourism, audience development policy and audiences for dance. Rufus Radcliffe started his career in advertising at McCann–Erickson.Thrown in at the deep end as a trainee account manager, Rufus worked on some of the agency’s biggest clients including Nescafé coffee and L’Oreal shampoo. This was followed by a stint at J. Walter Thompson, where he worked on clients as diverse as Kellogg cereals, handbag.com and Gulf Air. The impending launch of E4, Channel 4’s entertainment channel aimed at young audiences, was enough to tempt him into the world of broadcasting in 2000. He was a key part of the team that produced one of the most high profile channel launches of the digital era. 2005 saw Rufus lead the marketing launch of More4, Channel 4’s up market factual channel. Offering entertainment for Channel 4’s key ABC1 demographic, More4 promised viewers Channel 4’s own version of adult entertainment – news, documentaries and quality drama. Now head of marketing for Channel 4, Rufus oversees all the on and off air brand and programme marketing for the main terrestrial channel. The next few years promise to be a roller coaster ride as the country heads towards analogue switch-off, more and more viewers watch their favourite shows on demand and the video cassette recorder is replaced with the personal video recorder (PVR). Debbie Richards is a director of Baker Richards Consulting. The company helps cultural organisations maximise their earned income through marketing, pricing, data mining, business and sales strategies. Its evaluated pricing work alone has delivered £1.3 million in additional box office income for arts organisations. Debbie has been a consultant since 2002 and specialises in marketing and strategy projects, as well as researching and developing sales techniques. Recent marketing projects include strategies and implementation support for Theatre by the Lake and The Broadway – a new venue in East London. Following a degree in English Language and Literature at Oxford University, Debbie began her career working for the Know How Fund and in touring theatre for Hayden Searle Productions. She worked as marketing manager for Trinity in Tunbridge Wells, and as marketing manager and then administrative director, for Creation Theatre Company in Oxford. As a speaker and trainer, Debbie has presented seminars for a wide range of organisations including Du Store Verden in Norway, Europe Talks Tickets, Federation of Scottish Theatre, Forum for Local Government and the Arts, Glasgow Grows Audiences, INTIX (US) and Intercult in Sweden. Debbie also served on the board of the AMA for four years.

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Once we’ve thoroughly understood the market and designed appropriate strategies for success, we start the challenge of engaging with audiences in ways that mean as much to them as they do for us. Keynote speech: Prof. Jonathan Drori (Chief Executive, Centre for New Media Literacy) .. 2 Henrietta Hopkins (Partner, Hopkins van Mil)………………………… 12 Seminars: Keynotes in conversation …………………………………………………….. 19 Building diverse audiences – Tracy-Ann Smith ………………………… 25 Networks and marketing – Mel Larsen ……………………………………... 35 Speaker biographies’ ………………………………………………………… 49

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Keynote speech: Jonathan Drori (Centre for New Media Literacy) Henrietta Hopkins (Hopkins van Mil)

Jonathan Drori (Centre for New Media Literacy) Something appealing, something appalling – making interaction work for real audiences Go to www.a-m-a.co.uk/images/downloads/JonDroriKEYNOTE.pdf to download the Power Point presentation During this session I plan to talk about: • Technology • Interactivity – why bother? • Designing new interactive services • Golden Rules • Compelling Experiences • When you glaze over (because it won’t all be new) …

There will be times, I’m sure when you will glaze over – either because I’m boring or you’ve heard it before. During those moments I would like you to think about some of the compelling experiences you’ve had in life, some of the things you want to do again and again (or avoid!) and tell people about. In general, what we want to do is create experiences that people will tell others about, that they’ll come back to. And then, at the end of this speech, I’ll pick on people to make sure you’ve done that. Technology – themes

• Computing, networks, storage – Smaller, faster, better – Location aware, pervasive – Wireless – Cheap, cheap, cheap

It’s well known that technology now is smaller, faster, better and cheaper and it’s well understood that everything is connected and pervasive. I suggest that the way to communicate this to those you need to persuade, is to demonstrate how cheap things are nowadays. This is perhaps best done, not with the usual Moore’s Law but with the example of how long the average worker has to work to earn the average price of something. A postage stamp in 1965 cost approx 1.6 minutes’ work for the average worker and that’s about the same now. So, postage stamps haven’t really gone up or down in price in ‘real’ terms. A Mars bar cost about five minutes’ work and is about four minutes’ work now, so pretty much the same. One megabyte of RAM costs about 20 seconds’ work now. One megabyte of RAM for my father in 1965 cost 228 years’ of work! Techonology – application themes

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Here are some of the themes we’re seeing in current technology: • Collaborative filtering When you go to Amazon.com, it offers you recommendations based on what you’ve bought before. The way it does this is to tell you how other people, who have bought the same items as yourself have also bought other items. It’s the way we often recommend things ourselves and it’s a very powerful way of offering people services. Services like TiVo, the television service, will begin to operate more in this way. • Mass customisation We’re used to the fact (I don’t know if you’re aware of this) that the advertising ring around football matches is inserted for different audiences in different countries, so not everyone sees what people see in the stadium. It’s done electronically and it doesn’t matter if there are players passing in front of the ads. A similar thing can be carried out with sails in a yacht race. The technology is now sophisticated enough to make the advertising on each sail different in live motion on something as complicated as a sail moving. It takes quite a lot of processing it but it’s something, in principle that you can narrow down not only to a country but to a home-by-home basis. When you put it together with the collaborative filtering that TiVo allows, then it will soon be possible to customise adverts embedded in TV programmes and so get around the issue of people ‘zapping’ through the conventional ad slots.

• Audio video search At the moment we’re used to using text searches and there are increasingly better techniques for doing audio video search.

• Location aware On my personal visual assistant I can see where I am located and around my location on the screen, the green dots are my workmates and the red dots are my other friends. I can see who they are as a little tag with their name comes up next to them and so it’s possible for me to send them a message – very much like instant messaging but geographically based.

• P2P social networking Friends Reunited (www.friendsreunited.co.uk) is the archetype. Most of the content is put there by the public rather than by the organisation. LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) is another service that allows people to get in touch with others like them, this time on the basis of recommendations and it is those recommendations that important in services like this. YouTube (www.youtube.com) is an example of people posting and sharing their own videos. It’s interesting and worthwhile exploring this site to see strong cultural differences across the world. Flickr (www.flickr.com) is well known as an example of photograph sharing. What makes it special is the tagging and meta-tagging – the information people put around the photographs so that you can find them and use them in new ways.

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Tabblo (www.tabblo.com) is a new service you might not be familiar with. It allows you to do much the same as Flickr but is much better at enabling you to put a commentary around your pictures and make a show out of it. It’s a very nice piece of software. There are bands launching themselves on MySpace (www.myspace.com) and there’s a whole world out there that it’s pretty important for arts marketing organisations to understand and embrace. • Virtual worlds This is the world of Second Life (www.secondlife.com). I was amazed to discover that the UK government’s National Physical Laboratory has just launched a whole science centre in the virtual world (www.npl.co.uk/thelearningroom/) where they allow people to do experiments and even change the laws of physics. So if the National Physical Laboratory is embracing this kind of technology, you can imagine there will be many opportunities for others. • Integrated services There are a lot of services that are becoming integrated with different elements put together that make them work and provide real services e.g. the Picasa service that sits alongside the photographs on your machine and you can order photos as you want to in the post. Then, there’s the Blackberry which so seamlessly enables you to get e-mail wherever you are and the likes of itunes etc.

Algal blooms and the Burgess Shale • New services flourish very quickly when conditions are right • Economic thresholds

Like the bloom on the lake, or the pre-Cambrian Burgess Shale, when the conditions are right, when the economic threshold reaches a certain point, then something can flourish in the market. This is particularly so when there is a network effect and something becomes more and more valuable the more people have it.

Fragmentation (SDH) The other feature we are seeing at the moment is that there is a huge fragmentation in the location of audiences – are they on the sofa, at the desktop, or on the hoof?

Interactivity – why bother? One of the cases you will need to make to the boards of your organisations is, why bother with interactivity. A lot of board members are pretty old and may not have grown up with these new technologies, so they need persuading.

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Richness of communication

Generally there is a trade-off between the richness of a communication experience and the number of people you reach. So if you imagine you’re about to share chocolate cake with a prospective lover on a Friday night, there may be a very rich conversation taking place but you’re not reaching too many people – perhaps one or maybe a couple! At the other end of the spectrum, there’s broadcasting where you reach masses of people but it’s not a sophisticated two way conversation. The opportunity of interactive applications is to jump out of that curve and to create things that are more valuable the more people use them. So Amazon gets more valuable as more people leave critiques of books or, in just one click, say whether something was helpful to them or not. One of the challenges I put to you in your website design is; can you make your website a little bit more valuable for every subsequent visitor on the basis of what each visitor does? So, like a coral reef, every visitor adds a little bit of value for all the subsequent visitors. Chain of behaviours There’s a chain of behaviours we try to take people through. The language will be different according to whether you come from education, commerce or marketing but at one end you want to stimulate interest and at the other end you want people to create or do something – to change their behaviour in some way. In between, you need to do these standard things: • engage people (perhaps in an argument or debate) • guide them to resources • enable people to communicate

The joy of new technology is you can lower the barriers between these stages as more people can participate and you can create virtual circles of content. I think this is one of the most important elements for marketers. Mad for arts A television programme called Mad for Arts (www.madforarts.org/films_first.html ) came about through a website we commissioned in collaboration with a number of mental health

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charities. The idea behind the project was that people who are in and out of the mental health system would become critics of visual art, architecture and music – mostly visual art. They were invited to galleries and given help in using the necessary technology and this allowed them to upload their critiques of paintings etc on the website. Then visitors to the website could comment on them. Out of the website, the best material was versioned into short films for the Community Channel and then the best of these were shown on Channel Five, reaching about 1.5 million people. The joy of the project for the television channel was that they got cheap and very good content and at the same time it fulfilled their public service obligations. The joy for the public was that they saw some great programmes and the joy for the participants was that they saw their critiques being valued. In addition, there was a lot of good publicity around it e.g. full page pieces in the Guardian newspaper. The project didn’t use Channel 5 as a PR partner – they were integral to the project itself. So, the point I want to make is that you can create tools that people use to create something themselves. Their creation then appears somewhere else and this encourages more people to enter and go around the loop. It sounds like common sense, but so few people do it. What could you do with a local newspaper if you had them as a partner? What would you be able to do with a local football club or a stadium if you used them in that way rather than just asking for PR? Consumer needs When you think about new services, there’s always the standard problem of how do you ask people what they want when they don’t know what they want. This was a problem encountered by General Motors (GM), for example.

They knew that people wanted a certain speed or colour of car, a cup holder etc and they could meet those needs because they knew them. They also met safety needs which people may not have known or cared about but the law required it. However, as an organisation they also wanted to create something that differentiated them in the market place but they didn’t know what to produce and they couldn’t ask people. So they sent ethnographers out to spend time living in the back of people’s cars. After a few weeks they came back and swapped notes, to discover some very interesting things that they would not have found out without undertaking the exercise:

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• people were forever ordering flowers in and around their cars • people were very afraid of breaking down in a ‘bad’ area • people lost their cars in very large car parks • people lost their keys and were unable to get into their cars

Out of that knowledge was born OnStar which has been enormously successful in the US and is now available in Europe. It’s a service that tackles these issues e.g. if you are locked out of your car you can call up a number with a password and a signal is sent via satellite that unlocks the door. No doubt you can order flowers as well! This service would not have come about without people observing and living with others. I remember when was at the BBC, and we planned to run a social action campaign devoted to literacy and numeracy, we were advised by the agencies with expertise in this area that the way to get to those people was to highlight the embarrassment they faced or the inconvenience in their lives. This seemed reasonable until the ad company we employed to do the spots suggested that we went and lived with some of those families to see what it was actually like. We did this (it was quite a humbling experience for us) and discovered that it was nothing like we had been told by the agencies. The issue wasn’t embarrassment, it was guilt, guilt, guilt at not being able to read to your kids at night – this was the overwhelming feeling. And so we built a campaign around that which was very successful. Getting to know your users As marketers, you will know all about defining segments and developing archetypes.

Who are they, where do you want to take them? Define segments, research, validate Define needs as basically as you can and try to find gaps Workshops to develop characters Find out everything you can about them (e.g. the GM ethnographers)

After segmentation, you can develop archetypes, customer profiles that you can pin up on a wall and show other people (not just the marketing department) who it is you’re aiming for. This is an example from the United States. Two segregated audiences have been identified ….

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‘Customers have been segmented into two distinct groups’

… and then the motivations and the goals of each individual has been analysed

Having done this, you can develop user-journeys and storyboard them. The storyboards are important not just in defining the user journey but in conveying to the team that’s going to deliver the project (and this might involve separate organisations) how it’s all going to work.

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In this example, the important thing is to ensure that all the interactions between people or between people and systems (e.g. someone does something on the web) are listed and drawn out as a cartoon strip. It’s a very good exercise to do. New service tests (VOD/VCR, DText/Ceefax, Amazon/W.H.Smiths, Open on Sky) So, you’ve segmented the audience and tested the service to make sure it’s relevant, cheap and easy-to-use and now you need to think if there’s a behaviour change that is required by: • the consumers – the people who are going to use it • the producers – the people who are going to make it • the gatekeepers – the people who stand between you and the people who will end up

using it e.g. teachers/parents in the case of an audience of six year olds; broadcasters in case of television

Video On Demand (VOD), for example, was an easy thing to sell people because everyone has VCRs and it doesn’t require huge changes of behaviour to adopt the system. Similarly Amazon was like a WH Smith bookshop, only you got the books delivered in the post. However, Open on Sky was a problem because at the time, the idea of shopping in the living room hadn’t cottoned on. It was a departure for the consumers and also a huge change for producers and gatekeepers who had to run a whole new service in new ways and create a

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different kind of programming. And when you try and do battle on all three fronts at the same time, things tends to fall apart. One of the most common errors about interactive projects is that technology companies lead and try and sell you ‘solutions’ and these may not be right for what you need. Make sure you have technology expertise within your organisation or on hand, but that it’s someone on your side whom you can trust. Avoid ten common mistakes

Understand users and their modes intimately Never indulge vanity publishing (supplier/audience driven) Make navigation clear and consistent Enable users to add value for other users

Remember peer-to-peer communication Understand and integrate content, technology, design, audiences, PM Pick the right measures of success and support them Manage and integrate nerds, luvvies and suits well Rights. Understand them. Own them. Cope with organisational problems

New processes and competitors Management and production structures Blurred roles

Partner those who own audiences Picking the right measures of success (point 6 above) is particularly important. When I was at the BBC I had a job as Director of Online and someone came up with the bright idea of linking a component of my salary to the number of pages viewed on the BBC website. So the next thing I did was to make all the pages a little bit smaller so people had to click through more of them in order to have their experience! The point is, page views etc, don’t measure audience satisfaction or audience enjoyment, so they may not be the best thing to measure. Compelling experiences Could you call out your examples of compelling experiences? Audience feedback: Surfing for the first time Giving birth Singing on stage Skydiving

The point I would like to make is that all those compelling experiences have elements in common that you can apply to new services and new interactive services.

Defined Can you name it? Describe it? Say what it does and what it is?

Fresh Does it feel new? Is there a twist?

Accessible Can you find it? Do it? Work it? Does it do what you want? Can you get what you

want? Immersive

Can you lose yourself in it?

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Significant Does it matter? Do you want to tell others? Do you connect with others or develop?

Transformative Something you’re left with? Have you changed? Would others think you have?

This is just a useful little checklist to use and I can guarantee, pretty much, that if you have something that doesn’t hit at least three of those pretty hard, it will fail. If you hit something with all of them, it will probably succeed. Take for example, the Millennium Dome and the Millennium Wheel (the London Eye). Well, on the first point alone the Dome fails while the Eye is very well defined. Think about McDonalds: Defined? Extremely so Fresh? Not very novel Accessible? Very much so Immersive? Depends on your scientific, nutritional view of the effect of fat on the human

body! But for those who like McDonalds, it is quite an immersive experience Significant? Does it matter? Does it heck! Transformative? Perhaps for a kid having a toy to take away and if you’re not hungry any

more. It’s interesting that the points on which they’re really weak, (freshness and significance) was what they tackled in their TV advertising campaign. The ad starts with a man upstairs with his son having a great Dad/son moment, so much so they don’t really want to go downstairs to Sunday lunch. So Dad takes son to McDonalds instead. It’s hugely significant – all about connecting with another human being. And then when they get to McDonalds, there are all these new things they’ve just launched. I happen to know that McDonalds actually went through that checklist list prior to producing that ad. My final plea Be curious. Fiddle with stuff. It’s too easy to be theoretical. It’s by playing and picking up stuff and trying to make it do new things that you find ideas about how to use stuff.

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The Big Apple and beyond: connecting with global audiences

Henrietta Hopkins, Hokins van Mil – connecting museums with their audiences Go to www.a-m-a.co.uk/images/downloads/HenriettaHopkinsKEYNOTE.pdf to download the Power Point presentation In 2001, the Museums and Libraries Archive (MLA) commissioned some research into why English museums, libraries and archives interacted internationally and what they were doing.

Collection related activities

Collaborative research

Professional advice and consulting

International standards and guidelines

International professional networks

Institutional links and exchanges

International conferences

Continuous professional development

National

Regional

Institutional

Individual

You will see that yellow denotes a low level of activity and this is the dominant colour on the graph. The highest level of working in this field was from national institutions and their staffs going to international conferences, so it’s quite a limited scope of what people are doing. And you’ll notice that nowhere in the research did it emerge that people were going after international audiences in a big way. More recently, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has done a very informal map of international activity, using the 50 institutions that are supported by government funding at a national level. This found that most international work is done in Europe and North America but there are a growing and significant number of institutions working in China, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and south-east Asia. Institutions are also

High Moderate Low

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very active in European and international organisations such as UNESCO, so at a pan international level. The most prevalent activity was tours of exhibitions and productions, loans of objects abroad (for museums) and providing advice and consultancy. But again, we don’t see much attention, if any, on audience development at an international level. The MLA 2001 research tried to look at what was holding people back, stopping them from engaging internationally. These were the constraints identified:

Lack of policy or strategic focus Organisational opposition – no one could see the value or benefit Lack of recognition for those staff engaging internationally Problem of sustainability Lack of time and other resources Bureaucracy Low level of language skills

Institutional drivers However, it was not all doom and gloom. There are some reasons why organisations were working internationally:

• Political • International culture • Collections / specialist areas • Funding / commercial opportunities • Improved ICT • Regional Agendas • Multicultural Communities • Professional Development

One of them was political. At the moment we’re seeing particularly strong relationships with China. Yesterday the Government, in partnership with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the British Council launched Culture Connections which is about using cultural diplomacy to forge good relationships with China.

If your organisation has an international culture, you will be engaging in that way, particularly if collections or specialist areas of activity lead naturally to you having an interaction. If there are funding and commercial opportunities, and with improved ICT, you can engage very easily with colleagues around the world and audiences around the world without ever even leaving your desk. Tate Online has really worked hard to develop its website so that it is appealing to international audiences. We (Hopkins Van Mil) recently wrote an article for the Journal of Arts Marketing (JAM) and we spoke to Anna Jobson, the Head of Policy and Planning at Tate. She said, ‘Operating abroad is part of Tate’s core business.If we are going to develop new activities on the world stage, the main drivers are no different from our usual considerations – to increase reach, reputation and revenue. Tate considers its key marketing tool to be its website which attracts one million unique users per month.

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Snapshots in ten different languages, including emerging markets are also included’. Tate is currently running an online survey, using those languages, and asking users what they need to make the site work better for them. If the regional agenda provokes international working, this is another driver. We live in multicultural communities and the Theatre Royal, Stratford East is a good example here. Kerry Michael, artistic director emphasises the importance of the multicultural environment. ‘Our international work,’ he says, ‘is driven by our artistic wish to understand who we are and how over 120 languages connect to each other in London’. Professional development is also an important driver, but is often because of personal interest rather than institutional awareness. Policy frameworks British Council

Help build and develop relationships between UK and other countries in order to foster: partnerships mutual understanding tolerance

Challenge stereotypes and attempt to change out-of-date perceptions of the UK Promote contemporary UK creativity and innovation Present the UK in all its diversity and multi-culturalism

The Arts Council of Wales Wales Arts International is a partnership between The Arts Council of Wales and the British Council in Wales.

• Help develop and support collaborative international opportunities for artists; • Encourage international programming in Wales; • Ensure Wales has a high profile within the British Council • Enhance involvement by practitioners in Wales in international networks and

activities They have been involved in a project with the British Council in the Czech Republic recently where they have encouraged visual arts exhibitions by contemporary Welsh artists plus theatre and music performances, a publication in Czech by Welsh writers, visits by writers to events and screenings of Welsh films. They’ve been able to do an exciting programme of work. Scottish Arts Council

• Continue to be recognised as a centre of excellence for the arts; • To know and compare attitudes towards and practice in the arts in different countries; • To build an international network of partnerships; • To promote and develop the work of Scottish artists and arts organisations; To offer opportunities for Scottish audiences to enjoy the work of international performers

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They had a fantastic exchange programme with The Netherlands in 2004 when five men from the East Glasgow Youth Theatre went to Amsterdam to work with young people from Afghanistan, Indonesia, Jamaica and Sweden who now live in the Netherlands. The project was based on street culture and they shared experiences of acrobatics, street dance, martial arts, rap, beat bop and DJs’ love-of-live music. Arts Council England

Empower the arts community to work internationally; Contribute to internationalising the UK at a wider and deeper level; Enable us to develop or own international knowledge and capacity

In England we have a relatively new international arts policy, published in 2005 and this has enable Arts Council England to develop its fellowship programme and supports projects like the Triangle Arts Trust, facilitating international networks of artists around the world. Arts Council Northern Ireland

Increase opportunities for creative participation in the arts Develop new audiences for the arts and build on existing ones Extend opportunities for artists to develop their work and practice Strengthen the capacity of arts organisations to deliver quality experiences of the arts

This was the first organisation I came across that specifically mentioned developing new audiences in its international programme, which was quite exciting! MLA The MLA, like so many organisations, is going through a massive review and is in the process of change.

Context for international work Continued collaboration with the British Council Opportunities for the future

They are supporting a post within the British Council that aims to explore new markets for their work in other countries and they have also developed a fellowship programme for those on leadership programmes in the sector. DCMS

• Promote British arts and culture overseas • Secure national interests in cultural organisations • Share experiences and policies on the arts with other countries

Within our beloved AMA, we now have the Audiences Europe Network (www.a-m-a.co.uk/AEN.asp), which is managed by the AMA. This is a fantastic resource:

• rich virtual library: • case studies • research

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• reports • resources

• networking events: • Conferences • Master classes • training

• exchanges, placements and a network of contacts These informal exchanges can lead to quite life-changing events. It was through a networking event organised by the Network of European Museum Organisations that I met Anita Van Mil and this led to us starting Hopkins Van Mil, our business. And if I hadn’t attended a marketing and public relations event in Slovenia in 2003, I wouldn’t now be collaborating on a book with a colleague and friend at the University of Palermo. Types of tasting There are different ways of engaging internationally:

• Colleagues from around the world • International audiences attracted to the UK • Showcasing the UK overseas • UK audiences seeing international work in the UK

Is it tasty?

• Seizing opportunities • Professional exchange • Promoting our work overseas • Developing knowledge and skills

It’s the first two of these I’m concentrating on today. Is it tasty, is it worth doing? Obviously, I would say it is. As arts marketers you know the importance of these opportunities. Just think how interesting and challenging this can be on an international basis. Where is the user focus?

• how to plan for it • how to pay for it • why we’re doing it

Communication is key But where is the user focus? I’m going to end on a practical note – with thanks to Heather Maitland and the Marketing Manual. We’re building a strategy where communication is key. These steps are the same with international work as with any other activity:

• Analysis – where are we now / how did we get here? • Objectives – where do we want to be? • Strategy – how will we get there? • Resources – what will we need to get there? • Implementation – what tactics will we employ? • Monitoring and evaluation – how will we know if we’ve arrived?

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When you are at the analysis phase, there are a huge amount of valuable reports and data available and we can do desk research to build quite an effective strategy. The tourist boards have information about who’s travelling to the UK, what they want to see when they come here and why they are doing it, i.e. their motivation. Much of this information is available online. You can pick and chose as it seems relevant to your organisation.

Did you know?

• Over 50% of prospective visitors refer to the iunternet when deciding on a destination • There will be 1.35 billion internet users worldwide by 2008 • India could be one of Britain’s top-ten inbound markets by value by 2009 • Chinese people are expected to make 100 million overseas trips in 2020 • Over 300 languages are spoken in Britain • Every country that competes in the 2012 Olympic Games already has a host

community in London Sources: Visit Britain / Commission for Racial Equality / LOCOG Top tasting tips General:

• Understand and talk to your audiences • Small but perfectly formed. It’s not about global domination. It’s about thinking very

small – choosing countries and people that are appropriate to your audiences in the UK and are appropriate to what you are trying to achieve in the UK.

• Build on what you do well already • Work in partnership • Work within a support network • Be clear about how the work will be managed • Be realistic

Overseas audiences:

• Ensure you have the right product for your target market • Do you already attract overseas audiences? • Target people once they are in the country • Work with incoming tour operators • PR campaigns – new / existing • Meet the needs of the travel trade • Don’t do it on your own

Call to action • Use the opportunities available

• Olympics • Emerging markets (China / India) • New European culture programme

• Examine your core business – if it fits – do it! • Share with / learn from colleagues

Taste it and believe

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This is my main message. Try a small bit and see what happens. You may find it something that really develops your organisation. At a policy level we tend to separate out international policies, audience development and international marketing. My question is, why? Why can’t they all be embedded across and through our organisation?

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Keynotes in conversation Henrietta Hopkins and Jonathan Drori Q. Jonathan, is it really as simple as sex drugs and rock ‘n’ roll? JD No, but it’s as simple as thinking about drivers of what people want. It’s easy to lapse

into supplier driven thinking and not thinking as a consumer. There’s a danger that people who commission projects don’t consider what real users want and do. They don’t go out and ask, or observe real users and this heads to a huge waste of money.

- That reflects the point Peter Fisk made about taking M&S staff to Ikea Q. I would like to ask Henrietta about the MLA research survey that she mentioned.

I was wondering when in 2001 it was undertaken because after 9/11, a lot of museums had to shift their strategy to the domestic market because many organisations were reluctant to invest overseas because of the risk of terrorist attacks.

HH It was done before 9/11. There are a number of national institutions targeting

Americans and working internationally in a sustained way. But smaller organisations may want to attract international audiences as well. The immediate impact of 7/7 was enormous but there is a huge will to plough on. It’s about being flexible and also about not necessarily looking to the states, but to countries such as Germany and France.

- It can be difficult to do this on your own, but you can work in partnerships, on a

regional level and this can be effective. Q. When you look at the likes of big record labels, they will have whole

departments devoted solely to new media. I wonder where you think this fits in the not-for-profit sector?

JD New media people tend to have programme making ability. It’s all very well to design new applications, but you need to ask whether you organise yourself around the medium, the audience or the subject? There is no answer to this - you have to be agile.

Universities and colleges provide new media courses as there’s a demand for it. But I

think new technology should be part of an arts degree. You must not lose sight of your audience and the journey you’re going on. New media is only a small part of this – things will go on before and after the new media bit of the journey.

I think, eventually, ‘new media’ will go the way of ‘cabriolet’ and ‘turbo’ – it will be part

of an era. Q. The RLPO (Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra) are looking to store a vast

archive of material and wondering what they should do with it. Does your (JD) organisation do this sort of work?

JD Yes. What you need to ask yourself is: who owns the archive and what actually is yours? You can then open it up to the industry and ask them what they can do with it.

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They may be able to make something that is profitable, or do something in the sense of providing a public service.

Q. Where do you find good new media people JD You have to be sure of which skills you want within the money you are paying. Some

people will have very good technical skills but lack management wisdom. It might not be practical to have specialists but employ people with a broader range of skills. How you phrase the job ad and where you advertise can be an influence. Look at what others are doing and copy what you like.

HH I’ve been commissioned to develop an online resource for museums, libraries,

archives, artist dealers etc. It’s a huge monster and I’ve been working with a designer who is part of the team and thinking about how you present this material to the general public as well as the specialists. How can you ensure that both will really value and know about the resource?

This takes us back to traditional marketing practices and so we’ve undertaken a huge

amount of consultation with people to find out who will use it and why. It’s not about starting with the technology.

Q. How do you go about raising awareness of a website? I currently work for

Culture Northern Ireland. JD I was involved in this project when it was set up and it was quite an Orwellian concept

with the idea that everyone would go to a single portal to discover the culture of Northern Ireland. It wasn’t realistic.

I felt that time and money should be given to four exemplar projects that could then be

copied, each showing how to get to a particular target audience. Each project has its own existence already and it owns an audience already, so it would be easier for them to direct traffic to the Culture Northern Ireland website rather than starting from scratch.

As part of Culture Online, we set up a project that was about the use of plants in

South Asia which was designed to get Asian grannies to come online with their children. We worked with lots of Asian outreach groups, put them together and took them to Kew Gardens. Kew Gardens also ran pages about the project on their website as they already had an audience, so it reached them audience as well – which broadened it further. It’s important to remember that the partner who owns the audience, may not be the people who understand the audience. In this case, Kew owned the audience, but it was the outreach groups that brought knowledge of the audience.

- A lot of this is going back to really basic marketing techniques JD Human beings don’t change as fast as technology. One of the really hard things for

publicly funded organisations to say is, ‘these are the people we’re not going to go for’. You have to be firm and decide how you’re going to rank people.

- The problem is that you can be dictated to by your funding organisation. They

might give you performance targets and it’s then really difficult for the marketing department to know the best way of getting those audiences.

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JD I experienced that at the DCMS and it came down to telling them what is and isn’t

practical. I made it clear what I could deliver and what I couldn’t and based my decisions on rank, cost per person and geographical spread.

HH I think this is an enormous problem and it’s a dialogue mediated between the DCMS,

arts councils, regions etc. Collectively, everyone agrees it doesn’t work. Performance indicators are the same across all these organisations.

JD Does that mean you’re set up to fail? - That depends where you are e.g. In Colchester reaching BME will be given as

a priority but there’s a very small BME population in the area. - It’s a burning issue HH There is some room for manoeuvre but it’s a challenge - It’s also a budgetary challenge because you start having to spread yourself too

thinly. - It’s the job of education and outreach to turn people into audiences. This isn’t a

marketing thing. HH I would challenge the idea that it’s not a marketing thing – it should be. - But it doesn’t happen in the same channelled way as marketing. - It should. It should fit in with your overall strategy. It might be a learning and

outreach issue, but marketing is how you take people on a journey to engage with your organisation.

- I am involved in undertaking marketing for our education and outreach

department at LSO. We’ve found that the participatory work that takes place with children is very effective. But it takes place at St Luke’s, not the Barbican and getting those people to move from St Luke’s to the Barbican is another thing altogether. It’s probably something that will happen about 15 years from now.

HH It is a long term investment and it can be a very long journey. Another bugbear of

mine is the idea of running one-off projects for a year but not sustaining it. We need sustainable things. Taking the long term view is important.

- It’s also about having an integrated strategy across the organisation, crossing

all departments. Internal communication is important. JD There’s a balance to be struck when you have limited funds. You have to decide

which audiences you want to get and interactivity is simply another tool you can use. But you may want to ask if it’s enough to have people interacting with you in a virtual environment.

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- The trick is to ask yourself why you are giving people the experience - what is it for? What are you for? This is something we particularly find in the museum sector where curators often have a split-personality which can lead to tensions. On the one hand they are involved in making things available for public view, on the other, they are conservators.

JD I’ve found that one of things a lot of curators want is to get things published (their

research etc) and this is something new technology can do for them. Q. When you connect with people interactively, can you still promote your brand

or are you in danger of losing control of it? JD There isn’t a right answer to this. You can go down the Waitrose or the BBC route.

When they developed their delivery service, Waitrose worked in partnership with Ocado and so lost some control over the Waitrose branding in the promotion of this service.

The BBC, however see it as a priority to maintain credit when it comes to interactivity

with their audiences. And this means they have editorial control over the feedback areas of their site and people get upset about it, feeling it’s a form of censorship. As a result the BBC carry out a lot of market research to find out what they can allow, depending on the different audiences.

If you’re an institution funded by public money, there are things you need to do to

ensure the interactivity is safe and right. If you want to try something new, it might be worth working in partnership to reduce the risk.

HH There’s a lot you can do that can affect your brand image internationally. In promoting

your brand you have to take care that you don’t do it in a way that might risk offending people from other cultures. Research and consultation on what will work in different markets is essential.

JD If you do something that is strong in life, there will inevitably be people who love it and

others who hate it. This is why government is so bland – always treading the middle ground.

You have to gauge how much you are pissing people off. Take the Tate website – it

has areas which virtually exclude some religious groups. They upset one group to please another. They key is to label things in such a way that people are warned of what is coming and can chose not to press the button. You can also look to set up micro sites for some of this material.

Q. Do you have good examples of interactivity by a cultural organisation? JD The Tate does a pretty good job. The San Francisco Exploratorium is another – not

beautiful to look at but full of interactive things to do. Q. I was interested in your concept of adding value (see presentation) to website JD The Online project, Every Object Tells a Story is an example of this. It’s a pilot, using

storytelling skills to get people to talk about meanings and histories behind objects. One of the things we’ve found is that it’s quite difficult to have stories submitted that other people are actually interested in reading.

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You can look at the Amazon example. Some people will write whole critiques about books, but it’s also designed for the majority of people who only want to contribute using one or two clicks – so they have the voting system and star rating which makes this possible.

Another way of adding value is to tag items, so you ask people to select an

appropriate adjective to describe something. Q. I’m involved in a festival. How do you keep people engaged when you’re not

doing anything? We’ve started a ‘myspace’ area to reach young people, but what will be the next cool thing?

JD MySpace is a brand that will come and go. But what underlies it – people creating and

sharing their own material – is a human characteristic that will continue in other guises.

I would ask why you want to engage with people throughout the year? One possible

way may be to link up with BBC Northern Ireland and a group of cinemas and run a short film competition throughout the year, culminating in them being shown at the festival. They could also be shown on the website and the BBC could provide PR (perhaps devote a programme to the project) and run links from their website. Given that you can send film from mobile phones now, you could also contact mobile phone companies to see if they’re interested. Try to use other companies, not just for PR but as an integral part of the project.

Q. Often chat rooms don’t feel very meaningful. With the evolution of these

spaces, will you be able to see who’s listening to you in the future? JD At the moment they are very unemotional – like talking on stage this morning. There’s

a lot of work going on as to how to give people. The problem at the moment is that it’s not instantaneous. The joy for the Amazon contributor is the feedback he/she gets from other readers (when they ask you if the review was helpful?) so this is something that can be developed.

Q. In terms of setting up/encouraging blogs, I was wondering how we can manage

these as organisations as there is a potential for a loss of our authentic voice. If you give legitimacy to all your audience but some are competing with your organisation, aren’t you creating a tension?

JD People want that voice and you don’t have to label everything on your site in the same way. Arts organisations should have a voice and they certainly shouldn’t be dictated to by a blog etc.

Look at the Guardian – there are all sorts of voices – letter’s page, editorial, notes and

queries, individual columnists, but all under the one banner of a single newspaper. You can do the same with a website.

HH The museums sector is testing this out in many ways, with curators involving

communities in putting together collections etc. I was recently at a new gallery in Estonia which as done a lot of work in this. The result is that the collection includes some very strong works of propaganda at its heart – but it reflects the community.

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Q With the growth of interactivity, do we have to move from dealing with a passive to an active audience?

JD There is an opportunity for audiences to be more active, but you need to have scope. Some people may still want a lean-back experience. One of the reasons why voting is so important to the Channel 4 ‘reality’ show Big Brother is that it gives them an emotional investment in the programme. One of the most difficult things to inject into web experiences is emotion. TV does it well, the web, until now has done it badly.

People crave emotional contact and it’s the emotional components that are important. - At the Birmingham Hippodrome we ran a vote on our website as to whether

visitors thought we should stage Jerry Springer (even though we would regardless of the result).

JD The problem with that is that the output wasn’t interesting because I guess most

people knew it was a foregone conclusion. What might have been more interesting is running a vote on why people objected to the work – was the swearing, the blasphemy etc or asking which swear words people found most offensive. Those sorts of questions would have produced an interesting output.

Q. I think it should be pointed out that Tate did get between £3 - 5 million in

sponsorship from BT for their website JD That’s true, but there are lots of opportunities which arts organisations haven’t yet

explored. The public feel a huge amount of warmth towards the arts event if they don’t attend, and the same with businesses.

There are businesses where you will be able to open windows whereby you have

access to their technology, instead of or as well as their money e.g. IBM. A good place to start is at the back of the Financial Times where you’ll find a long list of technology companies. The trick is managing the relationship.

- While I can see the possibility of a technology company being involved in

providing a high profile online resource for a large archive such as the RLPO that was mentioned earlier, I wonder what an organisation such as ours (Scottish Dance Theatre) has to offer?

HH You have a great product. Go to Arts and Business for advice. You have to look at

what your unique selling points are and how they can be sold to a sponsor. JD Look at the genre of modern films (e.g. work of Pixar). They rely on a lot of motion

capture and the companies that develop the equipment to produce this are rich (wealthy). They are really interested in people who know how to move – so they may well be interested in working with a dance company.

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Building diverse audiences Tracy-Ann Smith Go to www.a-m-a.co.uk/images/downloads/TracyAnnSmithSEMINAR.pdf to download the Power Point presentation.

Overview of session Strategic aims Looking at barriers – brainstorm Getting started Discussing current outputs – pros and cons Sharing successes and challenges Looking at personal qualities – discussion Discussing the role of marketing and press – discussion General discussion topics

The museum context It’s important that when you are doing any diversity and inclusion project that it is working towards the corporate goals of your organisation. Visionary strands of Natural History Museum (NHM) • Engaging with a larger and diverse audience • Build upon our ability to generate knowledge and understanding about the natural world • Strengthen our positions as one of the UK’s top visitor attractions • Values • Diversity – ‘the perspectives of people who work at and visit the museum’ But words alone such as these don’t do the job. It’s the actions that you hang upon the words that get it done. However having the words there, helps point you in the right direction. The learning strategy In 2004, there was a big restructuring of the learning department and the new audience’s team was born and you can see from the learning team’s strategic aims and principles below where we fitted into that team and how the key principles map in very well with diversity and inclusion best practice. Strategic aim The museum will provide access to its resources and expertise for learning to existing and new audiences. Key principles Adopt the learners’ perspective Apply best practice in all learning activity Develop a culture of consultation Develop sustained partnerships Develop innovative ways of broadening access We’re talking about diversity and inclusion and diversity embraces, culture, faith, sexual orientation. It can cover multiple identities of which many of us can have a number at the

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same time. The focus of our team is black and minority ethnic audiences from C2DE backgrounds. Jargon busting •Black and minority ethnic (BME) is used to refer to people who define themselves as ‘non-white’. This term has become widely accepted since the 2001 census •C2DE socio-economic groups – skilled, semi and unskilled manual workers, state pensioners, un-waged. Why ‘new’ audiences In the Natural History Museum, we wanted to re-dress the under-representation of this group in the museum profile. If you look at the profile of London, it is a very multicultural city with 28% of the population (and rising) is BME but the museum’s visitor profile was 14% BME. We also wanted to hit a second strand – that is BME communities from C2DE backgrounds. We wanted to have a local focus, reaching people living in the local area and we wanted to establish long term relationships so that people came back and then came back again with their families etc. The team has been together for eighteen months. After six months, we sat down and decided where we wanted to go – our strategy for three and five years. New audiences strategic aims

To develop strong relationships with community groups and establish sustainable, mutually beneficial, partnerships

To support the development of a one-team internal culture that embraces the needs of diverse audiences and staff

To deliver excellent learning opportunities that encourage the development of knowledge, understanding and enjoyment of the natural world and science

To make a measurable (quantitative) and meaningful (qualitative) impact on the diversity of the museum’s audience profile

To be known for our high quality and sustainable work with new audiences within the community sectors locally as well as the museum/cultural sectors nationally

To support the museum in encouraging black and minority ethnic people to pursue a career in science (through formal and family learning programmes)

Adopting the perspective of your audience is very important and this activity starts you thinking in this way.

Exercise Working in small groups, think about the barriers that prevent people BME and or C2DE backgrounds attending your organisation.

Use these titles to for inspiration: •Institutional •Intellectual •Physical/environmental •Personal and social •Attitudinal/perceptual •Financial •Cultural

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Feedback: •Perception of organisation of being dull •Memory of a bad experience •Fear of whether you will be allowed in •Car parking •Expense. Even if your venue is free there is the cost of travel and refreshments •Perception of personnel. In an institutional building it can be intimidating - lots of white faces

Here are a few that I’ve put together and it’s not exhaustive. And some of these barriers map across all groups and it can map into your core audience. But it does give us a framework of where to work: Barriers

Institutional barriers: availability of service, rules, times, staff attitude, lack of adapted facilities, not relevant.

Intellectual barriers: languages, assuming prior knowledge, range of educational backgrounds not taken into consideration, people with learning disabilities not catered for.

Physical/environmental: buildings – some are intimidating, collections or events not welcoming/accessible. Intimidating, hard to find or get to.

Personal and social barriers: basic skills, level of social contact, self esteem, low income or bad memories of previous visits can be barriers to visiting linked to… attitudinal/perceptual barriers: admission charges, boring, irrelevant, waste of time. Not aware of services or subject matter thought of as high brow.

Financial barriers: transport, refreshments, entrance fee (real or perceived), Cultural barriers: lack of role models in workforce or stories presented in museums. Not

from museum going backgrounds may not feel immediately comfortable about going. Getting started 1. Community profiling We had a look at the area we were going to work in and using demographic data from the council, we identified the deprived wards in our catchment area and a number of community groups within those wards that we wanted to work with. 2. Community consultation This was so important and through it we discovered some of the barriers we were dealing with

- Name Some people though we were the National History Museum and we were about antiques, art and kings and queens. So there are people on our very doorstep that we haven’t got our brand to and that is our issue. - Cost

A lot of people thought we were very expensive and yet we’re free. Another message we’ve failed to get through.

- Building - Warm welcome - Language support

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During our consultation offsite and onsite, we used translators and interpreters and that was really appreciated

- My culture and other cultures We found that people were very interested in finding out about their cultures, but also interested in knowing about other cultures as well.

- Types of activities (IT, Arts) - Interestingly, IT, art, music and came out strongly – but we’re a science organisation.

So we have started programming through the arts – using the arts as a vehicle to get the science through.

Activities These are the streams of work we deliver:

- Discreet projects - Public programme - Advising on mainstream developments – internal work - Supported visits - Partnership (hosting)

Projects Here are four projects we have done:

- The Real Bling: based on a diamond exhibition which was used to inspire poetry, pictures, raps etc.

- Banner project: involving young people who designed banners taking inspiration from all the galleries that were then sent out to India to be embroidered and are coming back for an exhibition

- Community trails: we documented people’s trails around collections and responses to the collections. Using digital photography and printmaking workshops with young people we looked at the science of the ape exhibition.

- Face to Face

Discussion groups Working in groups, think of some of the pros of developing a project with a community and then consider some of the limitations

Feedback: •Labour intensive •Gives a sense of ownership •Arts people can bring to projects their perceptions of what needs to be done and this doesn’t match up to what communities want (we need to train our funders about this issue) •Need clear set of objectives that are shared with the recipients •If people have helped designed a project, they are less likely to drop out •One off projects don’t necessarily change people perception of an organisation •Project teams can have a great deal of knowledge and experience but this not always shared with others after a project is over … staff training is required to keep information flowing •Projects are good for word of mouth and this can get you respect in a community

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Public programme The Natural History’s public programme is called Diverse City Season and includes black history month and China in London. It consists of: Live talks Workshops Performances Family activities The audience embraces Current visitors and community groups

Discussion groups Working again in groups, I’d like you to consider how these types of programmes can help build diverse audiences and again, the pros and cons Feedback:

- They can have an impact on your core audience – both negative (they feel alienated) or positive (they widen people’s perceptions)

- Cultural events are part of the diet of white middle class audiences. The Natural History Museum found that putting on cultural events provided them with evidence that such events do not alienate white audiences – everyone enjoyed it together

- Buying into a high profile campaigns is expensive - These projects need to be built into the organisation’s overall vision – not just buying

into the opportunities offered by the likes of black history month - You need to build projects that look at different aspects of cultural diversity in your

particular community. It may not cover BME if they don’t form a large part of your demographic population. It can cover other areas e.g. Eastern European communities

- It’s important to remember that communities move in and move on – you need to keep up to date with the demographic profiles of communities

- There is a risk that if you put on events around a particular culture that you expect that particular community to come in their hoards. This is not necessarily the case. You need to put on events simply to signify you value different cultures – try not to pigeon-hole groups. Keep your options wide.

Facilitated visits We help people plan their visits. We’re a very big organisation and people’s first visits can be very disappointing – hot, tiring, trying to squeeze in too much. We want to ensure that people’s first visits are well supported, enjoyed – leaving people confident, enthusiastic and looking forward to returning on their own. There are various things you can do to support a first visit e.g. coming in the correct entrance, knowing where the toilets are, not planning too much so that get what they want from the day. So, we meet groups, give them a warm welcome. Sometimes we’ll leave them and then come back, sometimes we stay with them the whole time – it depends on the group.

Discussion groups

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Think about some of the pros and cons of undertaking facilitated visits. Feedback:

- You can introduce people to all your spaces e.g. the café - There is increased engagement so people stay longer - The success relies heavily on personnel – and they can let you down - These tours rely on the venue – for touring venues, this is an extra barrier between

them and the audience - It doesn’t have to fall on the shoulders of one team to do these – you can use multi-

personnel teams to share the load - Community leaders are very busy people, working voluntarily as well as full time. So

getting them along can be difficult. The Science Museum in London invite a few people from a group (anyone who’s interested) to come on an advance visit where they can orientate themselves. Then when the main group visit takes place, these people (not necessarily the community leader) can act as leader for that particular group on the day and they facilitate the whole visit. This works very well.

- People fear returning alone. You have to imbue confidence in people so they don’t feel they have to have their hands held. Getting the balance right is important.

Partnership We have a partnership with a refugee support charity who hook-up a mentor and refugee to meet twice a month, and they have to meet in public places. The NHM is a public place so we talked to the charity and found that we had mutual goals. We made a formal arrangement and now we give them information about the museum, coffee vouchers – encouraging people to spend that time at the museum. The charity has events throughout the year – nothing to do with natural history or science – but we hosted that event for them and so all the mentors and mentees brought their families along. It met the aims of both organisations. Partnerships must be mutually beneficial and equitable if they are to succeed.

Discussion groups Think about some of challenges we face in building partnerships Feedback:

They can resource heavy in the short term - although in the long term they can be cost effective

They can lead to more creative thinking Their a way into networks – and far more powerful than any leaflet you can come up

with Long term sustained partnerships can influence lots of aspects of your organisation’s

activities They can take a long time to form and grow Community groups can have lots of demands on their time. Some are very

vulnerable (e.g. insecure funding) and they break down so you lose them. But if you’re a bigger organisation, you might help draw down funding for them that would be a great help.

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Well established groups with well oiled wheels may be more like yours. We have to learn how communities work and their ways of learning You might not be the right organisation for a community group – you may not be

able to meet their needs In the pipeline This is what we have coming up in the pipeline

- 2007: bi-centenary of the parliamentary abolition of the slave trade. - Outreach workshop – African Hair - Summer play scheme offer (Dino Jaws) – a great way to get to know the children and

their families. We work with the same groups every year. - Community meet the scientist session

How we do it

- Go out and find out - Have a physical presence in the community – get out from behind the desk. Get your

face known – network. - Fill community agenda where we can - Contact same people - Establish relationships - Provide resources (space, transport) - Consult, evaluate and ask for honest feedback - Develop things together and from the feedback find out what you’re doing wrong. - Keep good records - We gather together a lot of paperwork recording people’s responses. - Seize training opportunities – best practice - There are a lot of reports that you can access. We have data from the community and

from these reports and so can move forward strategically. There needs to be flexibility within the framework but you need to have a clear idea of where you’re going.

- Network Advising on the mainstream This is more internal work, looking to the long term future of the organisation.

- Be approachable – solutions based - Advise on mainstream - Take colleagues to training days - Disseminate from training - Collects concerns/comments - We keep notes on issues that are worrying and keep an eye on people’s concerns and

try to allay them - Feed in good practice from sector – reference - Consult for special projects - Provide help and support but encourage others to put together their own projects as

this is will help in the long term - Sit on project/steering groups

Successes

- Impact and breadth in eighteen months - 3453 learning contacts

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- Good feedback helps motivate the team and we usually get very good comments - ‘We had such a great time at the Natural History Museum’. Many parents have said they

will bring their children again - Relationships (invites, groups returning) - Beginning to be known Challenges - Doing too much

As you can see we’ve done a broad range of work in various streams but this is hard to keep up. Now we need to plan, to have a focus on what we do and to embed what we have done in other areas of the museum.

- Desk bound – time to get out As I mentioned earlier, it’s so important to be out from behind the desk and in the community so we have allocated time in our resource timetable to get out and about.

- Balance activities to target audience and to all audiences A lot of time has been spent on the Diverse City Season but time and resources have to be balanced so we are looking at how to do this more effectively. We need to take a strategic approach and consider the balance of investment in time vs. impact

- Realising limitations - Streamline processes (contacts etc …)

We have now collected a lot of data on our communities and we need to get our systems up to date in order to store and access this data and knowledge efficiently

- Getting buy-in to change The work we’ve done has been very well received in the museum but it is still a challenge to get some people to buy into the scheme and we need to find out how these people tick to persuade them of the benefits of what we’re doing.

Future plans So, here are our future plans: - Consolidate our current offer - Strengthen our relationships - New projects (looked after children and plants in Islam) - Resources for tutors teaching English to new comers - Support formal learning team

Discussion point: What personal qualities do you need to have to engage with communities? Flexibility Natural communicator (all levels) Genuine interest and enthusiasm for product Sensitive Tenacious Attention to detail Thick skin!

Marketing – discussion points • Whose job is it to build audiences? If both the marketing and learning outreach

team, what could be the remit of each (in my organisation)?

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Feedback - Marketing and learning are often completely isolated in organisations and their two

programmes don’t meld. Organisations have to take responsibility for ensuring everyone is involved in building audiences,

- At NHM, New Audiences originally developed its own strategy but it is now working towards the development of an umbrella strategy for the whole organisation.

- Organisations need to know what they want to do and how they are reflecting the needs of new audiences in order to break down old structures.

- Organisations are beginning to come together and this offers a great opportunity to learn from others and see how organizations work differently.

- Knowledge and experience of marketing can be very valuable in developing education and outreach projects

Marketing This was the approach NHM took to the marketing of the Diverse City Season

• Cross cultural leaflet: libraries venues • Key messages and languages

We initially produced diversity leaflets that included our key messages. However, we aren’t sure how well it worked so now we are taking a different approach by targeting particular products to particular communities.

Press There are two strands to our press campaigns: Diverse City Season and China in London 06. This was our approach: • Building new contacts and following up success • Inclusive policy of promoting New Audience events to the general media (Time Out,

Independent info etc …) • Also targeting ethnic media publications • Next steps: feature local press? Key messages

• Warm welcome • Something for everyone, this is a place for you. • Free • Community resource • Bring a picnic

Q&A Q. Are there any key tools you use to measure success? What frameworks do you

have in place? TAS It’s important that you set clear aims and objectives at the outset so that you can

measure your activities against them. We are meticulous about recording feedback – a lot of which is received informally and which we can then present formally.

Q. How do you identify a community to work with and then how do you start work

with them?

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TAS We decided that we were going to focus on the Borough in which NHM is based. We got data from the council and identified deprived wards and then got information, again from the council, on community groups working in those wards. Then we went out and talked to them. It was important to ring them up first to speak to them and when we did go out we made sure that we didn’t take up too much of people’s time.

Q. Is there any specific thing that you can use to help get organisational buy-in? TAS You need to put together a case that outlines the legal, ethical and intellectual

arguments that are going to press the right buttons. A report such as Not for the Likes of You [Morton Smyth] has lots of examples. Make sure that you frame your arguments in a way that tackles the areas of resistance.

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Networks and marketing Mel Larsen Go to www.a-m-a.co.uk/images/downloads/MelLarsenSEMINAR.pdf to download the Power Point presentation. Overview What is a ‘network’? I looked it up to see what the received wisdom was and the Oxford English Dictionary describes it as a chain of inter-connected persons or operations. I found a different definition online which was – ‘an interconnected systems of things or people’ which I actually prefer because the idea of a system is for me a little more open whereas a chain sets up a certain way of thinking about a network which makes it sound more logical in a way than it might be. So, I will share some of thoughts on what I think about networks, what other people think about them and why I feel quite passionate about this work and this way of working. Networks – some thoughts Memes The first thing I want to talk about is memes. It was a term coined by Richard Dawkins who wrote the book, The Selfish Gene. This is his definition: ‘Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catchphrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or building arches just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which in the broad sense can be called imitation. If a scientist hears or reads about a good idea he passes it on to his colleagues or students; he mentions it in his articles, in his lectures (or her lectures). If the idea catches on it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain as my colleague N K Humphrey neatly summed up, memes should be summed up as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitise my brain, turning it into a vehicle for memes propagation in just the way a virus may parasitise the genetic the host cell’. Basically what he is saying is that ideas are passed on like viruses and there are a whole set of theories – it is a fascinating area. The reason I’m sharing about memes is that I’m looking at some of the building blocks of networks. The Tipping Point [Malcolm Gladwell], is, if you like, an exploration of memes and how ideas are passed on and what makes them sticky and what kind of people are good at passing on ideas and information. Six degrees of separation The ‘six degrees of separation’ theory is basically saying we’re all connected and we’re probably more connected than we think. There’s a game The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (the actor) and tracing who in Hollywood is connected to Kevin Bacon and by how many steps. When I tested this out and I found I could get to Oprah Winfrey in two steps which is pretty amazing. My point is, we’re all connected and even more so nowadays because of all the things our keynote speakers talked about – the technological advances that make it so easy for us to be connected globally.

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Social capital Another building block of a network is the idea of social capital which I always call, ‘if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ and again there are very complex theories around it but it’s the idea of community building and the idea of give and take and why people do that. Noticing networks I’d like to look at the idea of noticing networks. A lot of the time when talking about using networks in the arts people are thinking about creating new networks but sometimes its just a case of noticing what’s already there – sometimes, people are not aware that they actually belong to a network, for example. So noticing networks is a really powerful thing to do as well as creating them. Meta-networks The final notion I’d like talk about is that of meta-networks – networks that put networks together, an example of which is an online support network for networks called like The Community of Information Networks that is for people working with networks in the community. These are very powerful tools because when you get connected to a network that connects networks, your message and your meme gets spread very, very quickly. And on a micro scale, when you find somebody who is a super connector, who has access to a lot of networks or meta-networks, they get your message out very, very quickly. So, it’s quite a fun game to play. My talk is called Networks and Marketing because there are so many different ideas about what network marketing is and there are some negative connotations with it which is why I wanted to chose a slightly different title. So, I’m not going to be talking about multi-level marketing e.g. the Tupperware phenomenon where people are distributing this product and there’s a pyramid effect where people are paid according to the sales they’ve made which can be very exploitative. Networks and the arts Network marketing has been defined in its most basic sense as when somebody endorses your product and they sell if for you. There are elements of that the arts have taken on very successfully. The meme thing is ultimately about great communication and spreading our memes, our great ideas. Spreading an aspect of culture is what we all strive for in marketing – it’s the perfect situation when our message is received, understood and acted on, preferably again and again. I am going to look briefly at: • Online communities – they are a part of our world and there’s a lot we can learn from

them • Ambassadors – which is working with ambassadors, helping people set up

ambassador groups and also evaluating schemes and training people to be ambassadors

• Community Networks – how those can help people develop audiences or develop arts experiences.

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I’m going to launch with a quote from a book called Funky Business [Kjell Nordstrom, Jonas Ridderstrale] which looks at the changing face of business – globalisation, technological advances. One quote in this book reveals how networks have always been part of our lives, and how the sophistication of networking is just accelerating faster and faster: ‘In 1960, the average manager had to learn 25 names throughout their entire career. Today we must learn 25 new names every single month. Tomorrow, it may be 25 new names every single week and half of those are likely to be names from different languages’. We’re living in rapidly changing times and that has an impact on how we are using networks and how networks grow. Networks – people So let’s start off with the components of a network – people. One of the things that people often get stuck on when they want to start a network is, ‘where do I start?’ A starting point is to look at who you know and not to underestimate the number of people you know. Exercise I’d like you to get into partners and calculate how many people you know in your day to day circle. Over the course of a month, how many people do you come into contact with whom you can say ‘hello’? Responses from audience members • 10 – 15 people an hour • 300 a month There’s a perceived wisdom that 300 is the average. Some of you may be thinking you don’t know 300 people, some of you may be thinking that’s nothing. But when you consider it might include a shop you go into, your dentist, friends, extended family, it really adds up. If you suppose that you at least have access to their 300 people, you can then start to see that your secondary network can be around 90,000 people plus, and that’s pretty powerful. And yes, the relationships are going to be different. Some can be deeper than others and it’s up to you how far you manage the depth of that relationship but it something that’s open to you. I wanted to start off with that point because sometimes when you’re starting a network or you want to expand an existing one, it can be easy to get stuck and think where on earth should we start, especially when moving into areas that are new territory to you e.g. new audiences, parts of town you don’t know or new groups. But if you really look at who you already know you can discover that there are quite unexpected connections. Online communities What I find interesting about online communities is that they expose what’s already happening offline, but it’s easier to track the movements. • Blogs These are online diaries where people talk about their experiences. Some are more

sophisticated, some quite basic.

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• Forums These are a very interesting development. Social media is the term used where

customers band together and start using forums to talk about certain products –another example where the internet has given power back to the customer. There are pros and cons as a provider in relationships to this kind of activity. The opportunities are interesting because companies can track and monitor customer responses to the services and experiences they’re getting so it’s a fantastic opportunity for research on one level.

• Communities www.freecycle.org is an example. It’s a big exchange network online. There are local

groups and you can swap items or ask someone to just take it off your hands. www.myspace.com is another example of an online community and involving the whole notion of having friends and building up a community as well as being a shop window of what your are offering. Another area is community TV and www.YouTube.com where you can watch clips and then send them to your friends. It’s a great opportunity for creative people.

It’s worth checking out these websites to see how people are creating these

communities online. A video clip is a meme because people start spreading it, and my tip is to watch the clip on www.YouTube.com called ‘The Five Second Rule’ which is one of the top rated and it’s hilarious!

I think there’s a lot to learn about how people use these kinds of sites and there’s obviously the potential, as arts providers, to use some of the online methods to augment some of the network schemes we set up. You can have images on your website, which you invite people to pass on; you can invite people to upload their own images that other people can pick and start to see what people are interested in and start to talk about; you can offer free blog space, a forum, that kind of thing so you start to build an opportunity for people to network and talk to each other online. The six principles of viral marketing The reason I want to share these is because when I go on to talk about offline activity, I think the same principles apply. 1. Give Away Products or Services 2. Provide for Effortless Transfer to Others

It’s got to be easy. It could be a short message or a simple piece of information to pass on verbally or a very simple piece of print

3. It Scales Easily from Small to Large – If your network is very successful it can be alarming if it takes off very quickly so take this into account

4. Exploit Common Motivations and Behaviours Basically, utilise common human behaviour one of which might be that special moment,

enthusiasm, passing on feelings – the meme feeling, if you like. 5. Utilise Existing Networks

You don’t have to start something new. It might be that you have to put existing networks together in a new way

6. Take Advantage of Others Resources

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This is about working in partnership and those resources may be other people’s websites or newsletters or even the press

Wadsworth Atheneum Here is an example of an arts organisation that created a viral campaign in quite a creative way. It’s a museum called Wadsworth Atheneum in Conneticut, USA (www.wadsworthatheneum.org). Last year in September they created a page on their website to coincide with an exhibition of Surrealist art, where you could create your own piece of surrealist art using a tool they had created whereby you could click on elements and create your own surreal picture. It was incredibly simple and fun to use and you could really individualise and personalise your piece of work. A five year old could use it but also an artist would probably find it quite inventive. They promoted it through online arts publications to drive traffic to the site and the company that created the page told their friends about it and everyone who worked at the museum told their friends about it and together, that drove a surprising amount of traffic to the site. Before the tool was added, the site attracted about 500 visitors a day. Once they added this tool, it went up to about 1,000 a day with people actively engaging with the site. Research showed that about 50% of this increase could be attributed to this too. It also had an impact on regular visitors to the museum itself, with average weekend visitor numbers rising from 208 to 577. As well as creating your work of art on the museum’s site, you could have it shown on the gallery page – so you became part of the community whether you were an artist or not. And in order for you to submit your work, you had to give your email address, so the museum were building up their mailing list and building a relationship with you at the same time. So, quite a simple idea, but it’s effective and fun. Offline, there are many schemes and initiatives that mimic some of things that are happening online. I’m going to talk about a couple of initiatives I personally have been involved with and I’m going to refer to my experience of helping to set up ambassador schemes and supporting community networks. Waterloo Arts and Events Network The Waterloo Arts and Events Network is a project managed by the South Bank Employers Group who develop work, career, leisure and living opportunities in the Waterloo area, all within the regeneration context. It took about a year to set up and build and it has been in operation for about a year. The need for a network has been clearly identified as its membership has kept growing and growing. The network is coordinated by a programme manager, Sarah Cretch who works with about 50 (and counting) members from all different parts of the community. There are business members and large companies taking part, education members, community members and arts organisation – of course you’ve got these huge organisations all along the South Bank – and you’ve also got really small groups and individual artists. What this network does is pull them altogether with the common purpose of developing access to the arts and developing a sense of community, cohesion and pride. Sarah basically

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brokers partnerships and puts different organisations together and she’s got pretty much free reign as to how she does this. One of the ways she works is to respond to requests from the community – there is no set agenda. She’ll respond to what different organisations might come to her and say e.g. ‘We want to do this’ or ‘We would like the community to come in and visit our business space’ or ‘We want to target this kind of audience’. And then she’ll think about which partners she can put together to facilitate the request. Sometimes it’s about simple e-mail bulletins saying ‘Here’s a particular ticket offer’ – nothing particularly new about that except that what the network creates is a very powerful context in which the message is welcomed and considered because she’s created relationships that work e.g. she puts people together for social meetings so that people know each other. One of the reasons it works is because it’s a well defined geographical area. I’m not sure you could do it regionally or nationally. And she’s not just sending out email bulletins. There’s a real relationship between the different parts of the community, between sectors that would not normally mix. She creates multi partner projects e.g. she created a community carnival that involved a local business, school, an elders’ project and people from the local community and put them together. There’s a members’ website; she offers consultation and advice and, as I said, brokers partnerships. I was really surprised when I went to a conference recently organised by Audiences London which was all about cross-sector working to discover that this Waterloo network was quite an unusual thing. I’d be really interested to hear if other people here are involved in anything like that because it seemed to be what people actually wanted but was quite a rare thing. This is an area, in terms of provision and geographic position that could actually be really competitive, those involved have decided to make use of different organisations and people working together to maximise attendance. In its last year’s operation, it generated 2,000 new attendances and a lot of those were from hard to reach communities who just never ever went into, for example, the South Bank Centre because they felt it wasn’t for them. But once they had someone they trusted saying, ‘It’s great for you’ and arranging a tailored experience they started to feel they could own that space. And arts organisations involved in the network say that they don’t know what they would do without it. It speeds things up for them, they understand the community dynamics faster because everyone knows Sarah. They phone her up when they need information – basically she’s a super connector, a meta-connector. Waterloo Arts and Events Network – ethos Some of the learning that has come from this network is the way in which it works. One of the ways to approach networking is to look at some of the groups you are working with and asking yourself, are we approaching it in this way? • Holistic: Everyone gets involved and there are very few barriers. • Dialogue

The project does not lead from the top down, for example saying, ‘We’re going to go from A to Z and this is how we’re going to do it’. It’s much more open ended and saying, ‘I wonder what would happen if we put these three different partners together … let’s see what that looks like’.

• Cross Sector

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It brings together different sectors together to work towards a common aim • Lateral

It’s constantly looking for new ways of doing things. It’s not doing the same things all the time – it’s constantly morphing which means that the person in the middle has to be a really flexible and creative person who’s fantastic at communication.

• Catalystic, Organic, Dynamic It’s evolving all the time, starting things that could go off in different directions, it’s

dynamic. It really is a living thing and I think that is one of the things that characterise great networks – you never quite know where it’s going and it’s alive.

• Creative, Innovative Speeding up connections This way of community networking speeds up connections. We all naturally network. If you work in the arts you are already talking to educational departments or local business etc but with this way of working there is someone who is spearheading this kind of venture. It really speeds it up and things you think you’ll get around to doing at some point, actually get done. It increases awareness of what’s available, opportunities, resources and resource sharing. The equity of engagement means that people start to feel real ownership of it no matter who they are. One person described it as something that cuts through the complex ecology of the community. In my mind I imagine this big pile of spaghetti and someone creating the highway that goes straight through it and gets everyone to the common goal. Arts Ambassadors and Streatham Festival I’m now going to talk about Arts Ambassadors and I’ll use a number of different examples, one of which is the Streatham Festival. I live in Streatham, South London. I founded a festival there five years as an experiment. It’s an organisation but also a network of organisations and it’s a pretty organic type of entity. Definition of arts ambassador Firstly I’ll define arts ambassadors. You’ve probably heard this term bandied about and heard of different schemes. Basically an arts ambassador has been defined as a community net-worker. They’re also known as influencers, connectors, opinion formers, brand managers, street teams – there’s lots of different names for them. They are basically people who endorse what you have to offer and talk about it enthusiastically and they engage people in engaging with your product or at the very least raise awareness that the product’s on offer …so they spread the word. They also build relationships. It’s not just a bums on seats kind of thing (it can be) but a lot of the more interesting schemes are about where long term relationships are built. They tend to be part of the target community – students targeting other students, south Asian families targeting other south Asian families. If they are not part of that community, they do tend to be known and respected and welcomed within the community. They can be paid or voluntary. So what do they do? Well the Streatham Festival ambassadors talk about events, so we have people from different parts of the community (young, old, black, Asian) who go out to their part of the community and say ‘Hey, have you heard about this event?’ and sometimes if an event isn’t selling well or the date has changed, they get the word out quickly. Again it’s

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a very defined geographical area so it’s fairly easy to manage. Ambassador schemes don’t have to be in a small defined area, but I think they are more powerful when they are. They wear the festival hat and T-shirt so people can stop them in the street and ask questions and it gives them a certain amount of authority (although all ambassadors don’t have to be badged up – they can simply be known in the community they’re targeting). They distribute flyers e.g. we had twelve information zones in local bars and cafes where we have branded leaflet racks and they fill them up. Not only that, they create a relationship with the café/bar staff and them about the things their customers might be interested in. They volunteer at events – this was something we didn’t ask them to do, but they were enthusiastic and wanted to get more and more involved and ultimately they create their own communities. Every year we create a new team of volunteers and some of the old volunteers continue. One woman, Jen, wanted to set up an ambassadors scheme because she was an American, new to the area and didn’t know many people so she thought it would be a good way to get to know people. Because she was literally starting from scratch, she had to have a lot of conversations to build a team of 8 to 10 people. At one point she wanted to give up but gradually she managed to find people and they’re from all backgrounds. One of the interesting things about working with this kind of team (promoters, if you like) is that you can get some very unexpected outcomes e.g. one of our team wanted to start a radio station so suddenly we had a festival radio station and that has become an online community because it’s an online radio station, and people can phone in and we can profile their stories, play music relating to particular events – that kind of thing. One of the ambassadors heard about a women’s empowerment event I was organising and offered to invite Valerie Shorecross, a London Assembly Member to attend. She made a phone call, Valerie came along and it was a great photo opportunity and really easy for me. Another ambassador is an ex-Council member who has a lot of connections in the youth service so he can promote stuff really quickly through the youth networks. Why do people become ambassadors? There are lots of different reasons. People want to get connected, to become a part of the community. They want experience, training, something to put on the CV and some people, particular those who are retired, just want to contribute something to their community. They want free tickets, they want to meet people back stage … there are lots and lots of things that can be offered so you don’t have to have a lot of money to set up an ambassadors scheme. Why do they pass the word on? It’s critical that they’re really enthusiastic about what you’re offering – you can’t fake it otherwise it becomes like a sales team. They love what you’re doing heart and soul and really want to pass it on and that just shines through. And it’s part of their character. They’re very social, naturally enthusiastic, people who like to know things and to pass that information on. Some ambassador schemes have up to 300 ambassadors. Some schemes are not just one organisation but a number of different organisations working together and they have a group of people who talk up events they are putting on and a lot of the evidence shows they can be very, very successful in many different ways. What I really like about ambassadors is the wild card aspect of what they offer – they plug you in to so many different opportunities.

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Arts Ambassadors – challenges But there are challenges. As those of you who have set up schemes might want to share later on, you are effectively setting up a new department, a new team and it doesn’t work to have them at arm’s length. It is about relationships and you have to be clear about your boundaries – what you will and won’t do as an organisation. But part of fun of it is allowing them to inspire you and bring new ways of thinking but that can take a lot of time particularly if they are really enthusiastic. Sometimes people have a small ambassador team and that can be really hard work and also people move on – they don’t want to do it all the time or they get burnt out. Occasionally they get it wrong – they feel under pressure that they’ve got to sell and sometimes they’re just not very good and you have to ask them to do something else and that can be difficult, which is why it’s important to have a really solid agreement at the beginning which can be informal, but the boundaries are clear. Some organisations have found that they don’t agree with what the ambassadors, sometimes box office staff will say that the guests you’ve brought in are freeloaders or there are new kinds of communities brought in who clash with your existing audience – those kinds of things. The buy-in at top level is really important because ambassadors can, as I said, bring in lots of new ideas or they can show something that’s not working that requires a radical overhaul. Once you start off those relationships it’s important that you can deliver and respond to what’s coming back to you. And it can be difficult to monitor the effectiveness. There are lots of different ways of doing that. For those of you who don’t know, I wrote a guide on arts ambassadors which you can download for free from the Audiences London site which covers a lot of this in more detail. There are different ways of finding out who’s done what but the most basic one is to trust your ambassadors and they can tell you how they’re doing. But there is that wild-card thing in that they don’t necessarily know what impact some of their conversations have had. Success strategies for working with arts ambassadors It’s really important right at the beginning and it sound obvious, but great recruitment is important and it’s a point where people often get stuck. I’ll tell you a quick story. I was reading about a guy who was trying to get into work at the BBC for many years and he tried everything. He went for interviews and he just couldn’t get the door open and he was really passionate about doing it. Then one day he was moaning about it to his mother and she said, ‘Well you just need to speak to your cousin who works in the so and so department and so he did, and all of a sudden he was in. Sometimes we overlook obvious contacts that exist. The guide that you can download tells you a lot more about the strategies that people have used to recruit ambassadors and some of them include: • advertising on local radio • having a section on the website • word of mouth

All the general recruitment things apply. They might be part time, voluntary, unpaid, but treating them like employees really helps.

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Plan in time management – the number one complaint from people who set up ambassador schemes is the amount of time it takes – so plan in management time. It’s relationship based and relationships take time to build, to manage and people really underestimate how much time it takes to manage a team of even three ambassadors. Good communication structure – so everyone knows who’s doing what, who’s responsible for what? Effective teamwork – they really are part of your organisation, your team. Follow through – make sure they’re not over promising and you’re not under delivering the experience. Sometimes it’s not just about the experience on stage, it’s the kind of back up that’s needed for new audiences, new attenders, people making a first time visit. Evaluate and Take Forward. The benefits and pitfalls of networks Benefits • It’s genuine when it works really well and people are connecting and passing the

information because they really care. • It can be cost effective - but not always, particularly if it’s a big scheme. • Dialogue, connection, exchange of information – that’s the sort of thing we automatically

do as human beings and it’s really valuable. Networks mange this, and expand it, accelerate it and direct it. If facilitates input from people who are not necessarily pulling the strings so you get to see things in a different way. People connect in ways you might not have even thought of so they ask you to do things that are different.

• The unexpected outcomes can be a benefit and a pitfall. Pitfalls • The offline work can take a long time to grow and it’s important to factor that in with

people to people networks • Over controlling it. Part of the value of networks is the freedom and creativity but not

managing or regulating it enough is a danger • Very time hungry because it’s time consuming • Not respecting the purpose of a network. It’s not just a sell, sell, sell approach - that

doesn’t work. It’s about relationships first, opportunities second. When the relationship is there the opportunities are more likely to be heard and taken up. And even when there isn’t a sale, the awareness is valuable within a community.

• Chain letter factor of not having people feel they must pass the information on or something terrible will happen.

Success factors • Having communication channels that actually work which in the offline world can be great

people and events. • Having common purpose and practice - a love of a particular artform or work or a desire

to improve particular facilities • Central point of feedback - somewhere or something that connect everyone or everything

where sharing can take place and there’s a reference point • Something people desire - people have to get something from it • Permission based - not just barging in and taking over networks. Working in partnership

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• Stimulate co-operation and respect for differences • Great delivery

If marketing is about creating and keeping customers, then networks can augment a lot of marketing work. They can help you source new leads; they can encourage try-outs and first time attendance; they can help you retain audiences and deepen the relationship with them; they can help you research, monitor and get feedback. Enthusiasm is a powerful communicator, a powerful virus and it’s one of our best assets, working with people who are enthusiastic about what we do. Trust takes time to build up. I hope what I’ve talked about has given you a taster and will encourage a few questions. Before we start questions, I’d like to try an experiment with you.

Exercise Part 1 1. Think of something you want in connection with a marketing project that you are

working on. 2. Now think of any three groups you are connected to. Part 2

1. Form a pair: Discuss: How could these groups support you in getting what you want?

2. How could your project support them in getting what they want?

Part 3

1. Now form a group of four. How can your group members support you in getting what you want?

2. How can you support them in getting what they want for their projects? Q&A Q 1: I want to ask about the recruitment process. I am in the process of setting

ambassadors up for the Albany in South East London but I also want to do one for the Royal Court – very different venues, very different audiences. What’s the best way of recruiting ambassadors and how might it be different between the two venues?

ML: There isn’t really a best way. When you’re recruiting, it’s like targeting. It’s about

looking about the lifestyles, the communication channels of the audience you want to have a dialogue with. It is a mini audience development exercise in its own right. You need to be really clear about the differences between the two audiences and then thinking about who are they connecting with regularly so for the Royal Court you might want to go through social clubs and businesses (young professionals) or have a page

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on your website and if you have talks and workshops, see who are the same faces that attend regularly and are real enthusiasts. You could advertise and you could talk to all the box office staff and ask if they know of anyone who might be interested in doing this. For the Albany it’s different. There’s a very strong community vibe in Deptford and you could look at whose heading up the community groups you are interested in targeting and it might be you have to go out and talk to them. Sometimes tried and tested community leaders have a bigger agenda that they’ll try and drag into the scheme rather than simply people enjoying themselves and having a good time but they can be good partners.

___________________

Q2: We (our group) were all talking about setting up a student ambassador scheme.

We recently set up an off West End website and network through Audiences London and we thought about setting up an ambassador scheme through that scheme but we wondered whether we should have ambassador schemes in place first at our venues or whether we should set it up from scratch?

ML: Did working together come out of doing the exercise? Yes ML: That’s really interesting. I think collaborations are really powerful. As long as there’s a

common purpose, there are resources that can be shared and you are clear about your individuality and you can still make it work then there’s a real power. You need to look at that and do some work on it. Are you aware of existing schemes like the Donmar Warehouse? I think the learning might be accelerated by you working together but be clear of your boundaries – retain your own brand identity. You might look at targeting a specific market as you can get overwhelmed by the response and the questions your ambassadors ask of you if you’re trying to target different groups.

___________________

Q3; The problem we identified was about promoting our audio described, signed

and touch tours which we are in the process of setting up. The three groups we thought could help us were family, artists and colleagues and when the pair of us were talking we realised we knew within our families a lot of teachers who in turn would know a lot of special needs schools in different areas quite geographical spread. With artists, we realised we knew so many artists and it would be beneficial for them to go out and meet groups and taking rehearsals to them rather than relying on them to come in. And out of our colleagues, we identified two people who would be really great and are already freelancing with the company.

So when we joined up with our other pair, they suggested that Scottish Ballet

would be good to contact as they do fantastic touch tours, so when we get back we’re going to phone them and see how to do it.

ML: That’s a fantastic result. What did you see about networks from doing that?

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Using people we’re in contact with already and seeing who is interested in helping us who are close by. So it’s not about going on the internet and seeing where we tour to, but using people already involved in the company.

___________________

Q4: Do you know anyone who’s used the ambassador’s idea with a touring theatre

company and whether that can work because you’re not necessarily based in that area?

ML: When we were researching the guide, we found about 50 different schemes in the UK

and very few touring companies. The one that springs to mind was Tamasha Theatre Company. What they had were kind of ambassadors. They had people who were involved in club promotion that they kept relationships with and Asian business men in particular cities where they maintained that relationship in that city even when they weren’t touring there so when they did visit they could augment what the venue was doing. So they were able to make it work but it did require the busy marketing person sometimes going there and meeting them or at least having a phone call even when they weren’t touring there so it was quite labour intensive to keep the relationship going. Also Serious who promote contemporary urban music do a really successful ambassador scheme in Manchester and so this was a case of an outside promoter setting up an ambassador scheme and using local partnerships and getting young people into the Bridgewater Hall for the first time. They had someone working for them on the ground, so the relationship of the ambassador leader was critical – a lot of it is about team management. It is possible but a lot harder.

___________________ Q 5: I’m working with an organisation at the moment that is running an ambassadors

scheme that under-delivered and got into a situation where they had a lot of people out in the community, but not spreading the good word – indeed doing the complete opposite. They had spent 6 - 8 months setting up the scheme but now they have a problem with all these ambassadors causing problems. Have you any advice?

ML: Can you define what it was that went wrong? They set up a scheme whereby a group of people came in to a ‘Welcome to the

venue’ situation and the performance, for some reason, didn’t happen. Then the fire alarm went off so it was a complete disaster. So it wasn’t completely their fault, but they had spent a long time setting it all up.

ML: Was it the first case the group had come to the venue? For that particular group, yes. ML: That’s about the worse case scenario I can imagine and it’s really rare. Nine times out

of ten it’s fine. Open dialogue is critical and really addressing the issues to take things forward and it doesn’t sound as though it’s going to happen overnight. If they’re still complaining about it, they want to have a dialogue about it and why their needs

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weren’t met. This needs to be addressed and then if they feel they can trust you, then there’s hope –it’s a really tricky scenario.

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Speaker biographies Prof. Jonathan Drori is the director of culture online at the UK government department of Culture Media and Sport (DCMS). Culture online is a project designed to extend the reach of culture and the arts to new audiences, using a range of new technologies. Uniquely within the UK government, Jon heads a creative team which includes commissioning executives, producers and technologists and which has recently won a string of industry awards (including three BAFTAs) and special citation from the national audit office. Jon came to the DCMS from Scient, where he was MD of the media and entertainment division. Previously he was head of commissioning and editorial director for BBC Online. Jon commissioned the BBC’s first websites and founded the BBC’s education digital media group, responsible for many world-first digital services. As a BBC executive producer he was responsible for popular series on both arts and science. Jon and his teams have won many international TV and new media awards. Jon is also MD of Thoughtsmith, a London consulting group, is a trustee of the 24 Hour Museum, present chairman of the H. H. Wingate Foundation, and on the grant-making learning committee of the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of BAFTA, the Royal Television Society and the IEEE. He writes for the Financial Times and is an occasional executive producer for Channel 4 for landmark science series, most recently winning an Emmy for The DNA Story. Jon is visiting professor at the University of Bristol, specialising in the uses of technology for learning. Henrietta Hopkins is a partner in Hopkins Van Mil: Connecting Museums, with Anita van Mil. Hopkins Van Mil provide fresh solutions for international collaboration and strategic marketing for museums, the arts and related organisations both in the UK and internationally and offer training, mentoring and planning services. Until April 2005 Henrietta was head of international issues and strategic marketing at the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) in the UK where she provided encouragement and support to the sector in effective engagement with colleagues and audiences in other countries. Henrietta has worked as an adviser on international relations, marketing and fundraising to museums and small arts companies for the past sixteen years. Henrietta is included in the Heritage Lottery Fund’s directory of expert advisers. She is also Hon. Secretary of the UK National Committee of the International Council of Museums (ICOM UK). She graduated from Oxford Brookes University with a 2:1 in Art History and English Literature. She has an MA in European Cultural Policy and Administration from the University of Warwick and an advanced certificate in arts marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the Arts Marketing Association. Henrietta is a member of the Museums Association and the Arts Marketing Association. Mel Larsen (née Jennings) works as an arts marketing consultant, coach, facilitator and trainer. Mel's seventeen year career in the arts includes working as administrator for touring company Black Mime Theatre and marketing officer for Talawa Theatre Company before joining A.R.T.S. consultancy firm as a full-time associate. She has also founded several voluntary community projects such as, the Streatham Festival, (now in its fifth year, www.streathamfestival.com) of which she is voluntary artistic director, Yellow Bowl, an artist-led community project and The Artists Tea Party, an artists’ support network. As an independent consultant since 1999, key projects have included; audience and arts research in the Caribbean for the British Council and CARIFORUM; researching and writing, A Guide

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to working with Arts Ambassadors for Arts Council England, which led to facilitation of workshops and seminars in Australia and New Zealand for the Australian Arts Council, Creative New Zealand, for PANSA in South Africa and for CultuurNet in Belgium; working with Morton Smyth Associates on Arts Council England’s groundbreaking, Not for the Likes of You project; coaching for the Arts Marketing Association’s Step Up professional coaching scheme; supporting ambassadors schemes for organisations such as Cartwright Hall, Audiences Central, London Sinfonietta and London Symphony Orchestra and, evaluation of the Waterloo Arts & Events Network. Tracy-Ann Smith is currently based at the Natural History Museum. Her qualifications are in Law (CPE) and English Literature (BA Hons). She has experience in teaching English language and literacy (ESOL) for refugees, migrants and asylum seekers and has developed adult learning language resources for Hackney Museum. She has also served as a community liaison officer for GLOSCAT Further Education College and cultural diversity programme developer before her current role of acting head of the new audiences team at the Natural History Museum.

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Sustainability is the key word here. How should we allocate limited time and resources to ensure that we generate audiences for the next event while also focusing on the audience of the future? Keynote speech: Yinka Adegoke (US based business journalist and former deputy editor of New Media Age) ………………………………………………………………… 2 Alan Brown (Principal, Alan S. Brown Associates LLC) …………………… 9 Seminars: Keynotes in conversation ……………………………………………………… 18 Using new technology to interact with visitors – Roger Tomlinson, consultant 23 The changing face of Guardian Newspapers Ltd (GNL) – Rachel King, GNL 36 Chelsea Football Club case study – Elaine Clark and Vicky Mudge ………… 54 Getting to know you, CRM on a shoestring – Heather Maitland ……………… 60 Speaker biographies’ ……………………………………………………………. 75

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Keynote speech: Yinka Adegoke and Alan Brown

Go to www.a-m-a.co.uk/images/downloads/YinkaAdegokeKEYNOTE.pdf to download the Power Point presentation I’m going to talk a little bit about marketing, but more about media and at the end come back to where marketing fits into all this. Over the last few years I’ve written a lot about the evolution of media, particularly ‘newer’ media (it’s not really new anymore) and how broadcast media, be it TV, radio newspaper, has been changing. Broadband and digital have gone main stream as you can see from the figures from Ofcom.

Marketing in the context of building relationships with young people and diverse urban markets – Yinka Adegoke, journalist and former deputy editor of New Media Age

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British homes take more digital in more ways – Ofcom Q1 2005

• Every week more than 80,000 households install a new broadband connection; across the UK, around ten million households now benefit from high-speed, always-on internet services – Ofcom, April 2006

• In Q1 2006 Digital Terrestrial homes overtook analogue terrestrial homes for the first time. This means that more homes receive Freeview than receive analogue terrestrial services on the primary TV set.

It’s the same in the USA – indeed it’s more rapid because cable companies have been particularly successful in getting broadband out there, offering very good deals on telephone, TV and internet packages for the equivalent of £50 – £60.

This creates a time-shifted demand. People don’t just expect things to be broadcast but broadcast when it suits them. It’s becoming more and more mainstream:

• On-Demand TV and Digital Personal Video Recorders (Sky+, TiVo). 1.4 million of the 7.7 million homes in the UK who subscribe to Sky have a digital personal video recorder – BSkyB, March 2006

• More than 10 million Americans have DVRs in the US – Park Associates.

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• Since Apple Computer launched a video download service on its iTunes Music Store in the US more than 15 million episodes of television shows such as Desperate Housewives and Lost have been downloaded at between $1.99 each time.

• Comcast the biggest cable company in the US with 22 million subscribers claims that already, more than 95 percent of its on-demand programming is ‘free’ to its subscribers.

The democratisation of the tools of production Some interesting people are starting to notice this and take an interest in how it works in terms of communicating with younger audiences. ‘Young people don’t want to rely on a Godlike figure from above to tell them what’s important. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.’ Rupert Murdoch I love this quote because when you think about it, it’s obvious but not the person who said when you consider that Rupert Murdoch owns The Sun, gives us American Idol and Fox News etc. But even he gets it. Do-it-yourself media How much easier it is now to do things that were once considered only possible if you were professional or had lots of funding?

• Production costs fall as prices of typical tools such as digital video-cameras, desktop music and video editing software, blogging tools.

• The falling costs of distribution. • You need great search engines, blogs, recommendation sites such as Amazon.com etc

to find the stuff and you will. The tools are out there now. They’re cheap, they’re easy to use and some of it is free to download from the web. It’s easier for people to produce their own content. And it’s even easier to distribute the content using the web. It’s free, you can post your content whenever you like. More importantly, what brings it all together are the search engines – you need the aggregation tools. The Googles, the Amazons, the eBays make it much more possible for the ordinary person to put their stuff out there and make it available to either everyone or a particular group of people. Architecture of participation This graphic brings all the two sides of the argument together. It’s from a book by Chris Anderson and he took it from the University of California.

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There are two way conversations happening now from all sides of the fence e.g. the enthusiasts can play around with content, cut and splice it, and then send it out again to the casual fan who in turn can send it back to the remixer. It’s no longer about the original concept of a creator sending stuff out there for you to buy it if you want it, or watch when it’s put out. It’s more about participation now and people talking to each other. MySpace, a phenomenon The site that really pull this altogether is MySpace. It’s less than two years old and yet has been a phenomenon.

• Bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp for $580m in July 2005. • Had 20m users signed up – now has 80m and grows well over 100,000 new users

every day • It’s officially the 8th most visited site in the US and the third ‘stickiest’

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MySpace is now the most visited site in the U.S.

1 MySpace www.myspace.com4.46% 2 Yahoo! Mail mail.yahoo.com 4.42%

3 Yahoo! www.yahoo.com 4.25%

4 Google www.google.com 3.89%

5 MySpace - Mail

mail.myspace.com 2.85%

6 MSN Hotmail www.hotmail.com 2.39%

7 MSN www.msn.com 1.92%

8 eBay www.ebay.com 1.59%

9 Yahoo! Search

search.yahoo.com 1.36%

10 MSN Search search.msn.com 0.93% But what is it?

• a social networking site offering its users a wider range of free communications tools: email, instant messaging, your photos, your friends’ photos, your videos, links to your friends videos, music clips

• You build your own site cut and paste tools

Weekly Market Share of Visits Ranking Among All Websites (U.S.) – July 2006, Hitwise

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• Community, Community, Community!!! It’s not just MySpace, there are other sites as well. They all have their different niches that bring people together. It’s all about people taking part rather than just receiving the content. They contribute to it. comScore May 2006 MYSPACE.COM 51.4 million

Classmates.com Sites 14.8 million FACEBOOK.COM 14.1 million YOUTUBE.COM 12.7 million MSN Spaces 9.6 million XANGA.COM 7.2 million FLICKR.COM 5.2 million Yahoo! 360 degrees 4.9 million LIVEJOURNAL.COM 3.9 million MYYEARBOOK.COM 3.0 million Explaining how young people use these sites is very difficult. But I came across this article in the New York Times which gives us an insight. It’s called, ‘Someone to Watch over Me on a Google Map’ ‘I’m twenty four years old, have a good job, friends but like many of my generation I consistently trade actual human contact for the more reliable and emotional high of smiles on MySpace. I live for friends to view, post some comments and the dodge ball comments that clog my phone every night. I prefer, in short, a world cloaked in virtual intimacy. It may be electronic, but it’s intimacy never the less. Besides, eye contact isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and facial expressions can be so hard to control. My life goes like this. Every morning, before I brush my teeth, I sign into my instant messenger to let everyone know I’m awake. I check for new email, messages or views, bulletins. Invitations, friends’ requests, comments on my blog and mentions of me or my blog on my friends’ blogs …’ Marketers have to think their way around this kind of media, when the users are as much involved in making it as they are in consuming it.

I couldn’t talk about media you control, media in which you take part without talking about YouTube. As a journalist it’s the exciting one as we consider who’s going to buy it. Will it be Rupert Murdoch, will it be MTV?

• Just two years old and has more than 70 million views of videos every day • Users post more than 60,000 of their own videos daily

YouTube – the new television?

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• Up and coming young filmmakers and musicians now try out on YouTube and build a following before signing deals with record companies

• TV stations taking note and working with the site On-demand media consumption and audience participation at its very best

Since I did this slide three weeks ago, the number of video views each day has gone up to 100 million! NBC, the US network are concerned that some of their videos are on the site to view for free and yet at the same time they want to work with the site to show others because they realise the power of it. YouTube is on demand media consumption and audience participation at its very best. A young band posted a clip of themselves doing a silly dance and then hundreds of other young people went and made their own clips of themselves doing an imitation of the dance. This is how it works and it could only happen on the internet. The thing that is really relevant to you as marketers is that this kind of participation media, this niche market media creates great activities for anyone working with communities and so many of you do, be it a niche market or a larger group. It’s that bit cheaper, easier, more flexible but you have to think in that flexible way to make it work for you and if done badly or not handled with care, it can backfire quite spectacularly. Everyone thinks internet advertising is just about search markets, advertising space and ticket sales but I think it’s a little bit more about really engaging with people rather than selling to them. This is about being confident enough in your brand and your product to take a step back and give people the tools to work with you, to work your media or content. The Long Tail ‘Mass culture may fade, but common culture will not. We will still share our culture with others, but not with everyone.’ – Chris Anderson, The Long Tail

The Long Tail in Retail

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Go to www.a-m-a.co.uk/images/downloads/AlanBrownKEYNOTE.pdf to download the Power Point presentation We have heard a lot at this conference, both yesterday and today, about the tools of technology – it’s a theme of conference everywhere and I have the general impression that we have lots of new tools in our toolbox but we’re not sure what we’re building with them and that’s the provocation I have for you today. What are we building with these new tools? What can we do with them so that when we come here next year and the year after, we have something new that we’ve built? Peer to peer marketing or social network marketing, I use the terms synonymously. P2P is the term used with computers. If you’re in someone else’s wireless space, you get a message on your computer saying that you’re a part of someone else’s network whether or not you want to be and I think it’s an appropriate metaphor for marketing cultural events. The theme here is social context and the power of social context in driving arts attendance. We are just beginning to awaken to that idea. Arts participation does not happen in a vacuum. We would like to think that it really all has to do with what happens on stages like this one but it also has a lot to do with other things as well. An industry in search of a new marketing model There is a book in the States called, Subscribe Now! written by a man named Danny Newman who’s still alive. He gave a speech at a conference last year in the States as if nothing had changed in 30 years. It was a little disturbing! In the States, subscription is the sales paradigm for many cultural organisations and there’s so much value built around subscription, it’s like an addiction because it generates this enormous amount of cash six months before the season starts and basically finances everyone’s seasons and people are holding onto it for dear life. We all know that everything is changing. People are valuing flexibility and convenience and wanting to make later decisions. Meanwhile we are asking people to buy things at fixed locations six months in advance and so there’s a growing disconnect between the sales paradigm and where consumers’ behaviour is headed. So, we’re in this funny place where we’re in an industry in dire need of innovation, but it’s not happening anywhere. I often say that the non profits arts industry is like a huge multinational corporation with ten thousand branch offices and no headquarters. It’s like an octopus with many legs but no head … because no-one is out there saying, ‘OK folks, we need to innovate here and here and here and we’re going to try it and pilot test it and refine it then we’re going to roll it out’. It doesn’t work like that. There’s a long literature on the typology of consumers who influence each other. Forty five years ago, there was a very important book called Diffusions of Innovation (Everett Rogers, 1962) which coined the phrase ‘early adopters’, ‘change agents’ and ‘opinion leaders’. This has come back recently in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point where he talks about ‘mavens’, ‘connectors’ and ‘salesmen’ – mavens being people who are vectors for new information (always spreading the word); connectors being the social glue holding groups together and salesmen being the persuaders. What he talked about was so intuitive. We all

Alan Brown – Peer to Peer marketingA strategic approach to social network marketing

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know and are people like those he describes. Another great book, The Influentials (Keller and Berry, 2003), talks about the one in ten people who tell the other nine what to do. Initiators and Responders Several years ago I was involved in a study in of classical music consumers in the States and one of the themes that emerged was the notion of ‘initiators’ and ‘responders’. Initiators are people who strongly agree to the statement: I’m the kind of person who likes to organise cultural outings for my friends. These people are psychologically designed to look around, see what’s on, call friends, arrange tickets, get reimbursed (or not!) and they do that instinctively. Responders are people who agree to this statement: I’m much more likely to go to a cultural event if someone else invites me. Initiators and responders are not mutually exclusive, you could be both. The study I did was a sample of culturally active adults (which is about half the population in this study) and about 18% agreed strongly that they were an initiator (i.e. they agreed strongly with the first statement above) and three times the number, 56%, said they were a responder. This has been so provocative. This simple data point has been resonating through the arts industry because what it suggests is that there’s a tonne of people who would love to come to your programmes but never in a million years are going to get it together to figure out when and how and where and who with. They are just waiting for the phone to ring, for someone to say, ‘Do you want to go out?’ to which they say, ‘Yes, I’d love to’. This is where I get blank stares from arts administrators because they would like to think it’s all about the art. And of course, when the lights go down, it is, but who invites you is often what gets you out of the door! So really, you’re in the business of creating social experiences for people – a part of which is art! I wish initiators all had red dots on their foreheads so we could identify them because they are very attractive consumers. • They are three times more likely to be ‘extremely interested’ in arts activities • They attend at twice the frequency of non-Initiators • They are constantly scanning the media for things to do • They are very interested in the educational aspect of attending • They are six years younger, on average, and 50% more likely to be single • They are two to three times more ethnically diverse • In sum, they are NOT subscribers

A lot of the marketing world is re-organising around this notion of viral /peer to peer/ social network marketing. Many of the advertising agencies on Madison Avenue have whole departments devoted to this.

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BzzAgent An example of this is a business in Boston called BzzAgent.com (www.bzzagent.com).

Here’s a woman whose favourite campaign was Fantastic Oxypower – a household cleaner product. She’s volunteered to talk it up among her friends in exchange for recognition and free products – but no compensation. This is a very successful business. At the moment they are refusing to take new clients because they’re overbooked.

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Vocalpoint Similarly Procter and Gamble has a site called Vocalpoint.com (www.vocalpoint.com) where Moms can sign up to give feedback on new product ideas and talk them up amongst their friends.

Procter and Gamble say, ‘we work with this influential group of moms to help companies in industries that include entertainment, fashion, music, food and beauty. We collect feedback and generate valuable knowledge and insight for our clients through surveys, product sampling and previews of products and services’. They have several sites. This one is for Moms but they have other sites are targeted at other niches.

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Saddleback Church – The Cellular Church Here is one of my favourite examples – Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. It was founded by a man called Rick Warren, the author of a book called The Purpose Driven Life, one of the best sellers of all time in America.

This church occupies a 120 acre campus; it has 20,000 members (one of the largest in the country) and their members all give 10% of their income to the church. How do they do this? Well, the 20,000 members are sub-divided into several thousand small groups of six of seven people who meet weekly for prayer and fellowship and that’s where the cellular notion comes in. The church is built on cells of people who enrich each other’s lives. I hope the church metaphor is resonating because where else do people gather together in large numbers for fellowship? In spaces like this – this auditorium. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article about this church in The New Yorker and said, ‘The real job in running Saddleback is the recruitment and training and retention of the thousands of volunteer leaders for the small groups it has’. Film Clubs Film clubs are the latest form of communal entertainment (I read) and it’s an interesting analogy with art because it is an art but the beachhead has come through film. There are all sorts of online film clubs – some are for Mom, others for film buffs that take an intellectual approach etc. My own favourite is one in Brooklyn Massachusetts called Chicks Flicks, founded by Barbara Lee and there are 57 ‘chicks’ on the Chicks Flicks list. They meet at 10am on weekday mornings every few months and watch a documentary that Barbara chooses and they talk about it. She says, ‘It’s a way to be with friends and it broadens our views’.

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No one from the film world has organised this group. It’s self-organised because people found value in doing this activity together. What it boils down to is this. Social network marketing builds on many deeply rooted concepts from anthropology and sociology and psychology. The psychology of behavioural change is that individuals are more likely to do something when they have a peer group that is also doing it. Imitation is the most basic human instinct. There is a wonderful book called Emotional Contagion (Hatfield, Cacioppo and Rapson) that shows that if you’re on a plane and someone takes a drink, the person next to them will take a drink; a person smiles and people smile back … it’s the most basic human instinct that we’re building on here. Personal selling is one of the avenues that builds on social networking. There is all sorts of personal selling. Red Bull, for example, is the most quintessential peer to peer (P2P) marketing model in the world. They have 50% of the energy drink market in the United States and they do no advertising. It’s all social network marketing. They have student brand managers on college campuses who basically get Red Bull into the right parties. It’s incredibly successful. Personal selling is growing. Why is this? It probably has something to do with people more and more hate being marketed to. They distrust marketing. Every survey I undertake shows over and over that word of mouth keeps growing as people’s source of information. It’s my theory as to why tele-marketing still works. It’s because people are so hungry for a suggestion as to what to do that when someone calls them and says ‘Would you like to come to this show?’ they say, ‘Sure, I’d love to. Thank you for the suggestion’. The irony is that we’re not selling household cleaners. We have the product that changes lives, that gives people a window into themselves and history; that renews people gives them a reason for living. But for some reason we haven’t been able to work out social network marketing and the people who sell household cleaners have. And so that is my provocation and I’d like to take you quickly through some definitions and concepts. What is P2P marketing? P2P marketing is a sales model that leverages social context within peer networks to stimulate participation in small social groups. It happens so naturally, it’s happening all the time. Look out at an audience at any performance and there are all sorts of social groups. I did a study for Disney Theatricals in New York City, looking at their audiences for The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast and Aida. There were people coming in groups of between 6 –15, i.e. smaller than a formal group sales booking but bigger than a typical ‘individual sale’. We interviewed ticket buyers immediately after their purchase to ask who they were coming with there were a host of reasons why – an anniversary, a college graduation etc. If you looked under the surface you could see the rich tapestry of social occasions that underlie cultural participation and we have to find a way to access and to act on that. P2P marketing, perhaps, is a way of doing that. Key P2P concepts Imagine if your tickets were off-sale tomorrow and only available through authorised re-sellers. Would your audience find you? I wonder. The objective is to recruit, motivate and satisfy a network of re-sellers. We’re only beginning to explore this in the arts. It’s new thinking. There are no ‘best practices’ to run to. I think Arts Council Englands’ publication, A Practical Guide to

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Working with Arts Ambassadors (Mel Jennings), is a wonderful place to start with lots of ideas and case studies. I think of two kinds of re-sellers – ‘activators’ and ‘initiators’. ‘Activators’ are content experts such as artists. ‘Initiators’ are those people we talked about earlier who have a gregarious psycho-social profile. Both these groups can become powerful advocates for your organisation. The key here is that P2P is values-based, not product based. It transcends people’s pre-existing interests because people will go to see things that they would never select for themselves if the right person invites them. How else are you going to get around the issue of preference if people aren’t pre-disposed to your programme? P2P is perhaps one way. Key concepts: P2P marketing creates relevance when there is none As marketers, we are in the business of creating relevance and often the only relevance, the only context people have in going to an event is what we told them in a marketing message. We are architects of value because we are marketers and what we sell is relevance of the specific piece of art. It’s easiest to sell to people who know what we’re talking about. And even if they don’t know a particular work of art, they may know the artist – so we sell them the artist. But what about those who open a brochure and don’t know the repertoire or don’t know the artists? On what basis can they select this product? If they don’t know the genre or the idiom … if they don’t know your institution … how are going to sell them? If they don’t usually go to live performances, how are you going to sell them? If they don’t have a group of friends who go, how are you going to sell them? If they don’t see your programme as relevant, how are you going to sell them? It gets harder and harder as you peel back the layers of relevance to actually make the sale. You have to think in terms of messaging in layers of abstraction so that if people don’t have the context and don’t know the artist or your institution, you’re creating value connections wherever they are. Social network marketing is a way of creating a value connection. Key P2P concepts The communications strategy that supports P2P is ‘structured word of mouth’. We’ve heard a lot about the modern technology that allows this, but the basic message scary as it sounds, is that it allows consumers to ‘hi-jack’ your brand and take it wherever they want. If they want to get together and drink wine before a show, let them; if they want to smoke crack before your shows, let them. Implementation models • Arts Ambassadors case studies You can refer to this publication for ideas • Play Groups A theatre group I’ve been involved with has started a Play Group – it could be called a

Theatre Group. The analogy here is the Book Club which has become hugely popular. This is like a book club but with plays.

• Arts in Motion, Philadelphia This is an organisation that does cutting classical music in night clubs, mixing hip hop with classical. They only use P2P marketing and attract audiences that do no respond to traditional media.

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• Activator networks Recruiting activators and initiators is incredibly difficult as I’ve found out on a project I’ve

been working on. Even people who had identified themselves as initiators aren’t sure what they were getting involved in or what we were asking them to do. We aren’t asking them to buy a subscription or even by an individual ticket so recruitment has been tough. We’ve sent letters to high volume single ticket buyers, contacted programme stuffers, invited visitors to the company website to start a Play Group etc. But I have a sinking feeling that the only way we are going to find these activators/initiators is by physically networking, talking to people then, in the old fashioned way, inviting them face to face to be a part of the programme.

I have to be really honest here. This is really tough stuff and we haven’t figured it out yet.

Hopefully when we have figured it out, next year or the year after that, we’ll be able to share with you how we’ve done it.

Case study – Urban Voices Series This is a multi-disciplined presenter in North Carolina that had a brand problem with a segment of their audience. They had a beautiful, elegant logo and identity but were trying to sell an Urban Voices Series which was really edgy, underground art – so this part of their product line was very inconsistent with their brand. The challenge was, how do we build a new audience for this Urban Voices series? We mapped out a process to look at their product line and figure out what were the programmes most appropriate for a P2P marketing approach. There certainly were some –events and programmes targeted for a certain niche. The first step was to articulate the core values that were associated with those programmes. This was not just about saying, ‘Do you love dance? Then come to see this’ but to looking at the core values that lay beneath the programme and then looking around and asking who shares those values in the community. What groups of people should we target? Then we went into the mechanics of recruiting the Activators within each target group and providing them with language, tools and ongoing support. Here are some of the values we associated with the Urban Voices Series: • I reject traditional views of how I should fit in • I challenge authority and question what I’m told to believe • I don’t need anyone lese to validate my way of life • Hip Hop is a legitimate culture • You never know what’s going t happen when art forms smash together • Good art is unpredictable, like me • New technologies are an important part of my life • I’m a progressive thinker Then we asked who, out there in the community, shares these values? We found: • Student ‘arts activists’ • Socially ambitious young professionals who want to be on the bleeding edge • Hip Hop Youth • Black Youth • Urban Creatives • Art film community

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The challenge was to go out into these communities and meet and identify people who were willing to step forward as Initiators or Activators and incentivising them – not necessarily with money but with access to the artists and other pre-requisites. And then we identified the appropriate P2P tools to use, e.g.: • Pass-along e-mails • Print-to-Web redemption tactics • Automated reminder services • Online invitation tools • Instant feedback loops • Blogging • Online social networking Tools must be used in service of architecture and until you get the architecture down, you’re playing with tools. So ask yourself to what end you are using, for example, pass-along e-mail chains. Take, for example, reminder services. So many people receive your brochure and they are excited, but they don’t want to buy six months in advance or even a month in advance, so they put it down and forget about it. That is a missed opportunity.If you can create an action for people to set a reminder and design it the way they want it e.g. ‘I want to be reminded four days in advance with a text to my mobile phone’ we could capture that demand which so often dissipates when people receive your brochures. Instant feedback loops is a tool that has been used very successfully by a presenter in Michigan with a very challenging programme that they were finding hard to communicate about. They sent out e-mails while people were at a show asking them for feedback and asking permission to publish it. Overnight, fifty people sent comments which were turned around and put into an email the next day to their e-list. It was instant fuel for P2P marketing. The vision I have is that we will not be sitting here a year/3 years/5 years from now wondering what the next sales paradigm for the arts is. You can go home tomorrow and invent it. Don’t look to other people to do it for you. There is no world headquarters here. Imagine a time when you have Initiators on your database and you know who they are and what their interests are – not just what they bought, but their attitudes: what they like to see, what they aspire to be as human beings. You can act on them and organise them. Imagine a time when there’s a tab on your website that says ‘groups’ and you see a long list of maybe a hundred groups and they are people who get together to go to your programmes. And they may smoke crack before a show or whatever, but that’s the whole point. You are letting them to create the glue that holds them together and brings them to your programmes. That’s my vision. I hope you share it.

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Yinka Adegoke and Alan Brown Q: What skills and qualities does a lead activator have? AB: Activators are, by definition, content experts. They are most likely artists who are

passionate about the content and so will get other people involved. Filters are sort of a sub theme of this conference. Consumers are overwhelmed by choices and this can lead them to seize up and do nothing. What you have to do is give them filters and one of these is to give them an activator. This means that consumers are not hearing from you but someone else. This means you have to surrender to their message in order to allow social network marketing to take off.

My thinking about this has evolved. At first we were just thinking about initiators but that

never felt like a complete picture. I’ve been thinking more about responders and contemplating that the explosion of social networking online is really about responders opting in to a peer network.

We need to find a way to let responders opt into a group that they want to belong to, one

that they can quit if they wish, and also one that they can change. Some version of MySpace could be the next tool for arts organisations.

Q: Do you find people are members of multiple groups? AB: I dare not generalise from my personal experience! - Activators have a similar role to the art critic in a way. People respond to reviews and

this is what makes them what to go. YA: It isn’t about people being in one group. If there is something you are passionate about,

you’ll get friends along. You can be both an activator and a responder. Activators probably have a wider range of interests.

Q: Is it necessary to be non partisan? YA: That is one of the real challenges of marketing. The generation coming through can see

through marketing messages. Q: The arts will always be behind what else is happening in the world. I can see good

ways making sign posters and can see getting along the nation’s 10 top bloggers to an arts event might be a useful thing to do. But are we in danger of creating fake communities?

- These communities are already there – I know this from my experience working for a

touring company. They build their communities themselves and what we need to do is facilitate them – give them support and information if they want it - but letting them get on with things themselves.

AB: It’s all about letting people make choices and not forcing them into anything? One of the

problems with online cultural calendars is that they offer too many choices. One of the reasons you go to Amazon because you know what you’re looking for. Activators could be used as a filter for a calendar and so you would identify with a person who would recommend things to do.

Keynotes in conversation

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If you start a group, they may want to go to someone else’s show. Why not help them do

that? Why not help them book tickets etc.? From the consumers’ perspective you are a gateway to the rest of the world.

Q: Could you tell us a little more about the Play Club? AB; It was a pilot test. They were looking to a better way of selling single tickets. One of the

problems was that the theatre company didn’t embrace it at a high enough level. They were passive about recruiting people. None of the board members volunteered into the programme – and it strikes me that if you can’t be an initiator for an organisation for which you are a board director, there’s a problem.

The company had a tough time. Eventually about 20 people came forward and

volunteered to start a group. The only requirement is that they come to three events per year. They can personalise the experience as they wish e.g. meet the director, receive advance scripts etc. It’s only just starting but for those who have taken part have been very pleased with it. It’s not a discount programme and they did pay for some of the educational stuff.

Q: In the next couple of years we’re going to ask the community to build the

programme for the forthcoming festival, so there is going to be a lot of social network marketing involved in it. The whole phenomena about word of mouth is amazing and for year this is the box that people tick when asked how they found out about an event.

- The problem is we don’t know how to control word of mouth. - And if only we could work out how it starts, then we could pour all our money and

resources into that. AB: I find that large organisations, in particular, are very sceptical about this subject. The

whole notion of social network marketing is ephemeral to someone who has to sell 25,000 tickets a week but I tell them to look at the Cellular Church. It is scaleable but there is a tipping point when it takes on a life of its own and you have to develop the technology to deal with it.

Q: Can a community get too big? Surely some of the people who signed up to

MySpace did so because they felt it was a community where they could have a presence. But the bigger it gets, the less that presence is?

YA: The thing about MySpace is that it’s made up of different communities. It is about creating your community by deciding who you invite to be among your friends. The tipping point has shown that 150 people is the maximum you should have in a group.

- Different people use it in different ways. AB: Embracing online social networking is moving into the adult population and that’s going to

increase over the years, especially among young adults. Teenagers use it to construct their identity. Adults will use it for specific purposes to enhance their life – to pursue specific purposes e.g. French romantic opera.

YA: There are a couple of examples of that. The Saatchi Gallery has experimented with it

because they know advertisers like that market. There will be more. A lot of advertisers are starting to experiment with it e.g. Toyota that used one of their models as a type of

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friend. Mini also ran a campaign where they invited people to talk about their car and found lots of people said nice things. However, it can backfire. General Motors, for example, asked people to make an ad about one of their models on YouTube and ended up with a lot of people making ads about how the car was a gas guzzler.

Q: Has anyone got any experience of doing this kind of thing? A: A board member of the Belfast Film Festival set up a site on MySpace and invited people

to join and they are using it to actively target people. It uses a different language and he’s trying to ensure the site adopts this. The festival itself doesn’t officially engage with it as that would be the kiss of death. The chat is probably mainly from activators and it’s in its early stages and could go anywhere.

- But all it costs is time? - Basically, yes. Q: Lots of organisations have Friends and volunteers. How do you differentiate what

between events you offer your Friends and other groups? Is there a risk of devaluing those Friends?

AB: The problem is that a lot of Friends are not Initiators and not inclined to act as

Ambassadors. There’s nothing worse than forcing people to try and invite friends. - Volunteer groups, can be a difficult to manage because they can be vocal against your

organisation. AB: There’s a natural group of people that will come together around an artform. In that case

you want them to criticise your work because when they do, that’s the smell of burning rubber – that’s what it’s all about. Are there some groups that could meet afterwards to criticise what they’ve just experience. A great deal of the value of an experience is unlocked when people start talking about it afterwards and we don’t design facilities with that in mind.

There should be a space in every theatre, cinema and museum that is for the purpose of

sitting down and talking to strangers about the art. We should invite people to criticise. - We’re really bad in the arts at encouraging productive criticism and yet it could be a way

of engaging audiences in conversation. It could be a way of developing product. AB: I’m working on a research project at the moment around measuring intrinsic impact of a

performance on personal individuals. It’s a two-part form. The first part asks you about ‘readiness to receive’ – how much do you know about what you’re going to receive - and is asked before a performance.

The second part is about captivation, emotional growth, spiritual value because we have

to start assessing ourselves not just in financial terms and numbers of tickets sold, but about the experience value of what we do. One of the questions we have to ask is whether someone left with unanswered questions. 65% left in this state and that’s a lot of unsatisfied curiosity. There’s a need to engage after an event to encourage people to talk about what they saw.

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- A lot of theatres have tried to do this with post show discussions, but found people don’t attend. But I experienced a website surrounding an art-house film where the Director went online two or three times to engage with online discussion. This has really grown and it might be a way forward.

- I think one of the problems between pre- and post- show discussion is that the

conversation flow is only between the artists and the audience and some people actually want to share experiences with other audience members instead. At the Auckland Theatre, we set up a text2u project and in it’s second stage is planning to invite 18 - 25 year olds to text throughout the show and have their comments displayed during the show.

AB: There is a huge trend in offering programmes with layers of context so that people can

access it the way they want to. It’s a huge challenge for the arts. Some people need more than the work itself – some consumers want to ‘get it’ more than they used to. It’s more about the intensity of the experience.

One example is the Martha Graham Dance Company which has produced an

introductory video to Appalachian Spring. This has shown that the audience response is categorically different among those who have and have not seen the video. People who value the performance as a sacrosanct event are the ones who control our art groups – in the States at least. But now, we are branding a new format that is about breaking down evenings into a three parts – a lecture demonstration at the beginning, the performance itself and the post-show workshops. You can take part in whatever you like.

- At Scottish Dance Theatre we have just started doing that in response to a problem we

had in our education programme. We start with a talk from our artistic director who introduces the dancers, explains the work. Then there is an interval followed by a performance of the piece, and the then the opportunity for the children to ask questions about it. They love it.

AB: My experience is that more and more older adults idealise the education experience. - We (London International Festival of Theatre - LIFT) have just finished an Architectural

Competition to design a Parliament Space specifically to talk about the arts and it will be hub of our next festival. All the performances that we bring will start in their own spaces in other venues but end up in the Parliament Space. We hope all the curators will run online blogs that are all about sharing an understanding of the work. We also hope to run events with local communities and invite them to share their experiences online.

AB: I call this kind of work, ‘readiness to receive’ and it’s a huge deal in terms of the impact. If

you can increase that readiness, it increases their response. Q: We have been trying to do interesting content on our website for a long time e.g.

blogging etc, but the response has been really poor. What’s happening? - Arts audiences have not been early adopters of the internet – they can be technology

resistant. - We’ve had great success at Graeae where the internet has really worked well with the

deaf community. It kept them involved.

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- If you look at the AMA message board I think you’ll find the last message was posted in 2005!

Q: Thinking about the girl from New York mentioned in Yinka’s presentation and the

idea that a virtual smile was more reassuring than a real one. Are we going to get to a situation where 1,000- or 2,000- seat venues aren’t the places where people want to meet?

YA: There is an issue about asking people to contribute to how they want to see and

experience things. If they contribute, it gives them a sense of ownership and then they will be more likely to attend and bring people with them.

Q: Looking at the take up of Sky Plus, it strikes me that we are really rigid in the arts –

always starting performances between 7pm and 8pm. Are any other industries facing this time/space issue?

YA: It’s certainly affecting broadcasting. There is a paradigm shift where the next generation

will come along with a completely different experience in mind. AB: But there is so much value around the live experience. YA: I think you’re completely right. AB: The virtual world is where a lot of people lie, some almost exclusively and this has led to

increased feelings of isolation. On one level the virtual world activates imagination and it is a beautiful thing. But on the other, there is a search for authenticity, people wanting something that is original, indigenous and real. We’ve got it. We’re in a place to provide a solution to this increasing sense of isolation but at the same time arts groups that define themselves around a certain type of experience at a certain hour in a certain kind of venue are going to die, because you have to understand how consumer access a certain kind of content and go there, otherwise your world is going to get smaller and smaller.

- I think online music works really well and the reason is convenience. You can have it

now. What’s interesting is that live music has exploded in recent years. These two things go hand in hand. People are spending more time on their computers but they’re going out more too.

Q: Is building a sense of anticipation a way of adding to the experience? - I came across a lovely blog leading up to the opening of a Broadway musical. It was

fascinating as you followed the Director’s emotional roller-coaster as the show dived. I think if the show had been in London, I would have gone to see it, knowing that it was going to close in three days’ time.

- There must be something about that sense of discovery in finding the value of

something you’ve never heard of. AB: The other thing that technology allows for is the fragmentation of tastes so more people

are able to like different kinds of art because they have access to it. People can hear music from different areas and different cultures and sample a broad range and then go deeper into the ones that interest them. What it’s called – the genre –matters less. People just know they like it. The world music phenomena is one manifestation of that.

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Q: Are we dealing with too small amount of numbers and too short an amount of time

for people to really engage in interactive conversations? AB: If you only offer three programmes a year the you’re going to have difficulty in building

communities around that. This is why I think a lot of social network marketing needs to happen collaboratively and groups in the States are so reluctant to work collaboratively and they don’t see the strategic value of other people’s programmes. All they can see is the competition. We need to get a theatre, dance and music organisation to work on collaborative theme e.g. spirituality

Q: I think people do want to share a big emotion in big spaces e.g. Saddleback

Church, football etc. Durational performances have taken place over a period of 24 hours.

AB: Yes, I agree. - Maybe theatre and dance audiences are too middle-class, conservative and buttoned

up to feel comfortable about sharing in these kinds of communities. - I don’t agree with that at all. There are all sorts of different people in audiences –some

are quite adventurous. - We did a survey recently to out about people’s favourite venues and what factors made

it their favourite. The key was about being around like-minded people – it was about being in that particular community in that particular building.

- So you don’t have to use new technology to create these networks. You could be old

fashioned and invite people to hold their book clubs or whatever in your foyer. - I think there’s also an opportunity not just to think about audiences but the public at

large. A website can offer a preliminary invitation to attend your venue to a far broader range of people.

- The museums and galleries sector has far greater flexibility because they are not tied by

performance start times etc. They have been able to try 24 hour opening and they have the Museums and Galleries Month where organisations hold Welcome Weekends and Museum Directors actually go down and see and meet their audiences. I’m working in one particular gallery (a small one) where every member of staff has to cover lunch breaks and Saturdays so they really understand who their audience is. This isn’t through market research but by seeing them and talking to them in person.

This portion of the conference is about long life and building relationships and this session is devoted to talking about building relationships using the web. Objectives for this session • Review how we relate to visitors and customers • Identify what we need to do online

- Capture and register

Web too – using new technology to inter-act with visitorsRoger Tomlinson (ACT Consultant Services)

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- Interact - Communicate - Track and evaluate The web is a totally track-able medium. When you visit a website, the server that takes the website to you tracks who you are, tracks every mouse click and move – where you hover over and so on. And depending on the software you’ve got and what the Internet Service Provider (ISP) host provides, you can get access to this information. This means you can understand your customer behaviour and, if possible, get some of that output and feed it into other databases. • Explore opportunities and examples

Spend a lot of time looking at other people’s examples. • Think about developing a strategy for building relationships

We’re far too passive about our relationship with customers and what we hope and want our customers to do in their relationship with us. We need to know what we have to do to for them to engage better with us and to attend and visit more.

• It is NOT about technology • It is not about convergence, in the technological sense • It is not about new media, in the technological sense

As Anna-Lee Bell the editor of Guardian Unlimited said in her session, the website was set up as separate division and only recently did they start wondering whether a story should be posted on the web once it was written and complete or wait until it’s been in the newspaper. They made the decision that it should go online immediately and so now they are talking about the convergence of the two Guardian mediums and that one team creates the content. I think this is significant for many arts and entertainment organisations as many still see the web as a separate area of their activity, not linked to the others – and it needs to be. • It is not about new e-marketing techniques

We know what these are, but I’m surprised at the number of organisations that are still struggling to adopt these, as they are fantastically efficient, cheap to use and produce amazing results. Maybe it’s just a case of people being late adopters.

• It is not about Web 2.0 and next generation websites

One of the sites we’re going to look at and that everyone talks about is Amazon. The website, concept, all its technologies were written some years ago but it is still quoted all the time as an example of one of the most interactive sites around that aims to build up complicated relationships with its visitors.

• It IS about people-to-people communication

It’s not about computers or the internet but about intimate experiences, one person communicating with another.

• It IS about human relationships • It IS about changing how we relate

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Management consultants always say that it’s dangerous to change too many things at once. I’m saying we need people change. In order to start building relationships on the web they have to change how they relate to those people and to do that on a real basis.

• Using what we know about attenders in our communications • Understanding behaviors and motivations • Developing a strategy for building relationships and moving people up the loyalty ladder • Valuing attenders and treating them as friends

Don Pepper, the guru of customer relations, says there’s nothing is worse than ‘faux’ customer relations. The customers know what we know about them but we don’t use it in our communications. We may write to some people as though they are frequent attenders when in fact they have never even attended! But they get the same text all the same. We’ve got to make it personal and specific. This is one of the most important things about web relationships. We need to use the knowledge that we have in our communications, understand their behaviours and motivations and try to develop a strategy for building relationships to move people up the loyalty ladder. How do we get somebody from being a no prospect to a first time attender and what happens next in moving them up the ladder? Where do we go in growing and building our relationship with people? We need to change how we think about people, value our attenders and treat them as friends ‘The website IS the organisation’ (Jacob Nielsen) • What parts of your organisation are served up on the web? • What are the opportunities the public have to relate to your organisation and communicate

with it, offline? One thing that research keeps showing is that the public thinks the website will represent the organisation and that what that organisation does, says and how it functions will be on the website. ‘If it’s not there, it doesn’t have it’ is the assumption made. This is something for us to think about. Just out of curiosity what parts of your organisation is served up on the web? Delegate audience feedback • Technical – swapping auto CAD files and set designs; sharing things about lighting plots;

sending each other files that they load in and out of lighting rigs – all being done virtually. London theatres are putting in WiFi as the technicians use it all the time. Why bother carrying around the lighting plot on a laptop when you can access it via the internet and share it with people?

• Education • Press – journalists are able to log in and access extra information, higher resolution

images etc. And they can upload articles they’ve written for you into the archive so other journalists can use them. It’s very useful.

• Archive • Box office RT: As in fund raising? A: Yes. • Location – all those maps of how to get there • Customer Care

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• Have your say • Brochure

We could go on but the fact is we put on lots of information. Imagine two producing theatres, both with a wardrobe hire department. One is on the web and has a thumbnail of every single costume and what it can be used for, details of cost and an online order form. The other tells you to ring Gladys. We have to ask ourselves what is the opportunity we can offer to our public offline that we don’t offer on the web. If we do offer it on the web can we retain the same quality? I phone Gladys and I can have an in depth discussion and get her advice. But can I transfer what she would say, set up a link? If we are doing everything on the web, it does require management of the site to ensure that all those functions there. And the data captured in some of those relationships is very useful in our understanding of who are visitors are. I haven’t yet found a theatre website where, when you log into a box office, you also log into an online chat service, so that you can ask a question online to a member of box office staff and get an answer straight away. • Putting ‘life’ into web marketing

The public perception is that ‘the website is the organisation’. This means that the virtual needs to be equal to the physical. We have to find a way of emulating on the web how we talk to people face to face and on the telephone.

• Increasing customer expectations of virtual relationships and self-service management

It’s important to understand this as research from Forrester, EMorri and Neilson is showing us that most arts organisations are behind where the public want them to be and where they think public arts organisations should be. This is because they assume we are good at adopting these new technologies. The public want to be able to do everything they need online.

Evidence shows that web marketing reaches new people, so it is essential to start relationships online. I’ve looked at research specifically for the arts and entertainment business and the average for new attenders coming through websites numbers 19%. The highest number in the UK is 68%. People are finding out about organisations they didn’t know existed because they’re on the web and also coming to understand them and starting new relationships. Research undertaken by Eugene Carr of Patron Technology shows that people may live around arts organisations but still don’t understand them. The web is a way of getting them inside. • Cost effective

The web is a cost effective medium and as such, is starting to replace other media. This means that it needs to adopt best practice as it applies to offline relating – and not adopt those awful ‘Dear Concert Goer’ ‘Dear Theatre Lover’ openings

• New opportunities to communicate and relate in a closer more tailored way

If you’ve got 20,000 people on a database you need 20,000 audience development strategies. This means that we need to segment as much as possible and think about how

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we communicate to those real people that make up the database and in a way that makes sense to them.

• Potentially more responsive, closer, more personal medium

It is interesting that if you talk to people and monitor an e- marketing campaign then you will hear that they have very high opening rates compared to non-arts organisations – in excess of 80%. They’re getting high levels of sales immediately. This is because they are able to reach people easily and these people respond with e-mails as if the organisation has spoken to them personally … which they have. What the recipient doesn’t realise that the same email has gone out to 250 people!

What we want on the web is Amazon-type functionality. This very old technology welcomes you back to the site and offers recommendations. It is a customer-centered web experience where you can buy items used or new (although a used opera ticket would be a waste of time). And it is profiling you by looking at what you browse through and what you add to your basket. How many of you buy from Amazon by the way? A considerable majority. How do you react when stuff you put in the shopping cart but didn’t take to the check out and when you go back now they’ve popped it in and they say, do you still want it? I wonder whether we could be doing that. At the Lowry, they know from web logs that people do go to the pages of certain companies and that they will visit them a number of times. For example, for contemporary dance companies, they will log in and then come out again and then go back in. So couldn’t the Lowry send an e-mail based on the idea ‘We know you’ve been looking’ and asking if there is some extra information that could be sent to persuade the potential customer to buy tickets? Amazon has done what they can with the use of technology. To make it easier for you to find what you’ve been looking at, you can view your recent history and everything else. I’ve talked to some of the guys doing the development of the site and yes, there’s a fantastic amount of automated software and fuzzy logic but there are still people manipulating some of the links. So they’re pushing you in certain directions but you’re in control. You can switch this off; you don’t have to leave it on. I would say, in relation to your ticketing function, emulate Amazon. It is possible but you need to change the rules in your business for transactions. Customer recognition – key steps • Customers encouraged to register or create an account • Self-service account and relationship management, including ‘customer profile’

These are important to customers. There used to be a case that organisations didn’t want to ask a customer to register when they visited a site. That was in the old days. People say that they surf purposely and look for specific sites – they’re not just wandering. And so if they visit your site and you ask them to register, and they’re interested, they will. So it is worth doing it.

• Customer profile helps determine what is shown/served – reflecting interests • Offers built from past browsing and purchasing history • Triggers drawn from past behaviour, (such as Lowry) including past browsing and ‘shopping

cart’ contents

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There are lots we can do once we get a customer to register, but things can go wrong. I’m registered with Ticketmaster and I’ve given them my profile – arts and theatre events – but they resolutely serve up to me what they want to sell. Similarly I’m doing a piece of work on ticketing in Edinburgh and so set the Live Nation region to Scotland. But is there any live event that might be of interest to someone living in Edinburgh? No. There is no mention of The Playhouse or anything Live Nation is doing in Scotland. So, it can go badly wrong. Can you imagine what it’s like for customers if they sign up and fill in personal details and no one does anything with this information? It’s a ‘faux’ relationship Registration and recognition • Opportunity to register/sign-up Offer this on the home page, and serve it up on other web pages throughout the site • Provide log-in on every web page

There’s lots of evidence that people start typing in the registration and then do a bit more surfing on the site and then finish off later on, so it’s important that the facility runs from one page to another.

• Registration produces recognition Page views recognise the customer. At the simplest level here we are in Wales with all these Joneses. If you have their e-mail address and password then I’m genuinely convinced that you’ll probably get a unique person. You could improve it by asking for a mobile phone number but I think there is no need for this additional stuff. E-mail address and password should be all that is needed to create unique records

• Give a choice of ‘lists’ to sign up to This is a simple start to profiling

Let’s look at some websites – each time we’ll show you the opening page and then we will shoot in. Brighton Dome (www.brightondome.org) This is interesting as its won prizes. Design issues on the web are in the eye of the beholder. If I really like the site, I do so usually because I’m just interested in what the site does. On the front page there’s a ‘how to join’ button but I found it wrongly linked me to corporate sponsorship, trust and foundations. The ‘keeping in touch’ button takes me to the very useful email-marketing part with up to-date-news, sneak previews, offers etc. The South Bank Centre uses focus groups to carry out tests on navigation on their site, quite literally and this is useful. We have to be careful because generic terms don’t always translate. A customer may click on a button which they think will allow them to request a brochure, only to find they are on a virtual tour round the venue. We need to make some decisions about the way we talk and take care not to treat everybody as an insider. The question is how do you take an outsider and make them an insider? Perhaps we need to use technology based on outsiders. West Yorkshire Playhouse (www.wyplayhouse.com) This is quite a nice site with cycles and a roll over calendar. It says that if you get their e-bulletin you’ll be first to know and provides a good clear sign on page as to how to sign up. It has a clear data protection statement, and takes the trouble to actually give you a named person to contact. A lot of organisations use an address that starts enquiry@ or info@ but I think that’s wrong. I want to deal with a person. Chapter (www.chapter.org)

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Chapter does something interesting between their online technology, ticketing database and customer loyalty. The big thing is that you can sign up for a CL1C card. You are given a membership card and from that you are recognised and earn loyalty points for events you attend and this translates to a monetary value that you can spend in various ways – sometimes even to free beer! Arnolfini (www.arnolfini.org.uk) A straightforward and clear site but there in the middle of the site is a pregnant space where I would love to be able to register and log in for e-mail. But I have to go to the ‘keep up to date’ button and then choose from lists. This seems to be a database driven form with address line 1, address line 2 etc Customer profiling • Self-completion of preferences.

Is this a ‘profile’ or an ‘account’ or their ‘preferences’? I get asked whether organisations should tell customers that they’re doing a profile or opening an account or asking their preferences. It is up to your organisation to decide. What are you asking them to do? What are you trying to engage them to do?

• Self management and self completion:

This allows the customer to think about what they want out of you and, if presented in the right way, on their terms. Self-service management is the big thing that the web has ushered in. Various pieces of research have said that this is what the public really want to do. They want to be able to manage their own account. If they move house they want to be able to change their address, change e-mail address, look up what they’ve already bought, change their interests etc. A choice of lists can enable life-style choices

• Choice of categories

Make sure they are expressed in terms the customer understands. Allow the customer to go back and edit or complete the profile/account later, if they wish.

• If offering online ticketing, link the data into the ticketing system and vice versa.

There are various firms that have developed interfaces with ticketing systems that allow this data to be exchanged.

Bristol Old Vic (www.bristol-old-vic.co.uk) This has a ‘subscribe to our mailing list’ button on every page. They only want your e-mail address and they offer the choice of signing up to the Bristol Old Vic general e-mail list, student list, or family and children email list. It’s really simple. They say thank you and send you an e-mail confirmation that you respond to to say it was you who signed up and a privacy statement. Theatr Mwldan (www.mwldan.co.uk) One of the exciting arts centres in West Wales. A fully bilingual website and you can subscribe to an e-list through a cleverly designed bilingual form that shouldn’t confuse anybody. Again I wonder on the choices what ‘non-mainstream cinema’ is in the perception of the general public. Once joined you can change profile and unsubscribe. A welcome message is sent to tell you when your first e-mail update will arrive. Aberystwyth Arts Centre (www.aberystwythartscentre.co.uk)

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Newsletter, name, e-mail and choice of full range of things and subscribe. Interesting again they have Cardi card – offering discounts on screenings, etc if you’re a regular visitor. It costs a small amount of money for which you also receive closer communication and access to offers and so on. Who remembers when Smart cards were being touted to us? I first went to a conference in 1990 someone told me how Smart cards were going to be revolutionary in arts marketing and only now, 16 years later are they starting to be adopted. At last affordable plastic cards are available but of course they’re going to go out of date so fast. Already in the US chips have come in, and at conference in Los Angeles there was a presentation about a Californian Leisure and Night Club and where you buy a membership and they fire a chip into your shoulder – a tiny micro apparently. Then, when you walk up to the door it opens, it knows who you are, and when you stand next to the bar it charges your account and so on. This is not new technology. This is there and it works now. Inter-action Develop engaging ‘rich content’. It is worth spending time on the web page. What do we mean by interactivity, about dialogue and feedback? A lot of developers and public say that interactivity is simply about when you interact with the web site – looking at places to go, things to do, things to read. Engaging rich content leads to what used to be called ‘stickiness’. Lots of arts organisations say they want to do this but I have found it difficult to find examples of them actually doing it. • Draw customers into activity on the website - Self completion surveys - Offer audio and video downloads/streamed playback - Reviews and other media coverage – maybe put on bad reviews at the end of the run? - Forum, for discussion or sharing or user input - News Feeds (RSS) from news to What’s On and on-sale prompts

• Blogs by artist directors etc – It’s fascinating that some touring companies have got a dancer producing a blog of their experience of touring around the country. Other touring artists do the same. Some Directors do blogs about what it’s like working on the production all of which is engaging people. • Offer access to a digital archive

- Past media coverage - Reviews - Photographs - Programmes - Recordings De Singel, Antwerp (www.desingel.be) We’re good at taking off out of date stuff but what do we do next? Could it be kept? The best example I know is Antwerp’s De Singel website. It’s a trilingual website with everything in three languages and all the source content from Patronage and Artifax. The site is rich in terms of content and their archive has an incredible amount of information. They show you what they’ve put on, going way back to productions, information on artists,

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press reviews etc. It’s all there. You can even print out programmes in advance, free of charge. IOWA Arts News IOWA Arts News are undertaking a survey of people and organisations about what they are doing in adopting new technology - in readiness for a conference in Pittsburgh this October. If we could ask arts organisations to tell us about their technologies it would give us a couple ways of using surveys. I have tried to find online surveys by arts organisations but couldn’t find many. An interesting online survey, however, is run by a Singapore organisation that organises classes and workshops. Their survey asks visitors to the site what their interests are and tell you that they will try and design classes and workshops around this information. What a good way of thinking about it. Tell us what type of things you’d attend and we’ll try and do something around it. Zoomerang (www.zoomerang.com) Zoomerang is a nice piece of kit and there are others like it around. It allows you to do surveys and process the results automatically. So if you want to put on a simple survey it’s easy to do. Sadlers Wells (www.sadlerswells.com) A simple and clean website that always specialises in a lot of audio and visual content. They encourage you to watch the trailer by offering an opportunity to win an ipod. I like the ‘play loud’ button – it’s got good interaction. Strathmore (www.strathmore.org) Strathmore is a concert hall in Washington, USA. On their website you can click to download a podcast about what’s going on etc with a welcome by the arts marketers and details of a selection of things coming up. Podcasts are interesting because they can act as a trailer, be used to develop understanding and appreciation or act as a conveyer of news. The huge advantage is that we can do this ourselves and don’t have to rely on somebody else. National Galleries of Scotland Martin Reynolds and colleagues at the National Galleries of Scotland have re vamped their web site. They are having a big Van Gogh exhibition this summer you as well as being able to buy tickets online with timed entry etc, they have also developed a PodCurator for the event (www.nationalgalleries.org/vangogh/podcurator.html). This is a free audio/video file recorded by Hannah Gordon giving an introduction to this particular exhibition that you can download. In developing ways of interacting, they have tried to get people to use their ipod to go round the exhibition, but have also found visitors who have already listened to the download before arriving in order to decide what to see. Paul Watson and The Lazarus Corporation (www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk) In advance of this session the AMA asked if I could include examples from small organisations as well. An example is Paul Watson and The Lazarus Corporation an individual organisation. His website offers you an RSS feed and with this you get separate items and a list of RSS feeds, starting in February. He actually sends you an e-mail of the work he’s producing along with some text. He also runs a bulletin board, a complete interaction for visitors. Interestingly

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he has received 1350 posts in a short time – people interested in his work or just using his site for debate and discussion. Q: What is RSS? RT It’s a nice ‘keep in touch’ button. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. You sign up

to receive RSS to a news reader. The current version of Internet Explorer requires you to use an external news reader to do this for you. However, the new version of Internet Explorer will have RSS readers in it.

The new version of Internet Explorer is not going to be backwards compatible. Things that work now will not in the new version. Web developers will need to test for compatibility. This is mainly because the old version had lots of security holes that have had to be closed off to technology as lots of web developers found clever ways of making sites do things and Microsoft will have to take them away.

- So it’s a simple and straightforward way in which you could produce an RSS feed

with details of each new production

- At the Derby Playhouse we have a nice RSS feed and offer interviews with directors and people like the Australian soap star Martin Little. We take visitors inside the rehearsal room and have interviews with actors etc.

- Some people ask what do you do with the press officer in the internet age when

people don’t read newspapers? You put all that material on the web to make it available to the wider readers, even as an RSS feed.

Communication • Develop effective communication strategies according to customer behaviour

In analysing customer data in ticketing systems there’s a classic rule that reoccurs – the Pareto Rule.

So a database of attenders says:

- 15% attenders buy 50% tickets - 35% buy 35% - 50% buy 15% - 100% attenders = annual attendances.

This keeps occurring over and over again and apparently this conforms to the normal curve which market researchers test out so it is probably a paradigm of behaviour. Andrew McIntyre (Morris Hargreaves McIntyre) has undertaken research that shows that those 15% say they really like the organisation’s current brochures and means of communicating with them. But the 85% are actively deterred by what we are putting out to them. We need to think about the 35% that comes three times a year. If you survey these people they will describe themselves as ‘frequent’ attenders. On their measure they are. We need to be with them. Arts marketers need to be on the outside with the visitors looking at the venue and looking at what the organisation does. 50% go once a year or every two years often for special occasions so we need to understand their messages. Tim Baker (Baker Richards) makes the point that we don’t do enough

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subscription in the UK. Why is this? It’s used in Australia, New Zealand, USA, Scandinavia, and Benelux countries – persuading these people to visit three or four times a year. How? By communicating with them and offering incentives. Why don’t we do more of this? • In most circumstances remember the 15:35:50 segmentation

Then segment customers by, for example, age and character • Choose relevant communication tools

Use SMS with caution. SMS is age dependant and has not been adopted by those over 35 years of age.

• Use newsletters appropriately – once a month if you’ve got something to say. • Regular publications

Provide real news and up-to-date relevant information, ideally not in current website publications. Look back as well as forward. Include reviews and past media coverage.

• Validate, Validate, Validate

These people need to be told all the time of how they didn’t come to see that absolutely fantastic great exhibition or concert. Tell them how good you are.

• Targeted e-mail campaigns

Be specific about who the recipients will be. Run the ‘Why did they send it to me?’ test. Make them tailored and personalized. Make offers and request responses relating to past behaviour. Encourage forwarding to and inclusion of friends, unless, that is you are offering exclusivity.

Viral marketing works. There is clear evidence that if they people receive interesting information they will send it on and it is shared. SMS This is a medium that has been slow to reach acceptance as a marketing vehicle. Progress has been made with mobi-tickets tickets sent to mobile phones. One voucher from Ticketmaster can contain up to six tickets. They are effective for vouchers and special offers e.g. students being sent offers and told to show their phone voucher in order to get a ticket at a certain price. Nightclubs have had success with ‘proximity’ offers – using identification to find where a mobile phone is and making special offers based on where you are. Ministry of Sound, for example, send messages to women telling them they can get in free and then to men asking if they know they’ve got thousands of women attending tonight. Fascinatingly they text things to screens in the nightclub and have a conversation and there is no censorship. Orange Wednesdays have been fantastically successful in cinemas. Active Media who work with Mobica in Edinburgh with mobile tickets are looking to do this with a partner in the theatre for last minute ticketing – ranging from a really cheap price, to a really expensive price. It is essential, though to get agreement and sign-ups before using these techniques. And beware of technology glitches – some Windows phones don’t receive mobi-tickets. Avoid ‘faux relationship marketing’ • CRM guru Don Pepper argues that customers ‘know what we know’ about them

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• Customers are disappointed and unhappy if we don’t use what we know in our communication with them The challenge is not to send out to those who’ve already booked tickets at that venue for that particular event. It’s even worse if it’s about a special offer.

• Essential to match communications and content to behaviours • Avoid the generic, and focus on the specific • Don’t forget the ‘loyalty ladder’ • Have a strategy for moving people up the ladder • Plan a structure and rewards/benefits that fit with actual behaviours – smart cards a clever

way around friend schemes • Don’t assume, but lead

Don’t assume they’ll understand what they’re going to be attending. Think about what you want a first time attender to do.

• Look from their point of view, not yours Newsletters I’ve looked at loads of newsletters from organisations and the jury’s out on whether they’re working. Many look like a brochure and are simply posted on the organisation’s website. The (?) Playhouse newsletter has each part linked to micro sites, so it can be profiled to those who use it. Systems track and remember when things are sent, so you can at least have the different versions. The British Library has a headline approach with links to the articles, and then, further down a ‘what’s on’ listings. Track and evaluate • Unique in arts marketing are techniques in providing full tracking: • You can track to see if e-mail - Is received - If it was opened - If links were followed - If micro site pages were viewed and buttons clicked • Databases can record web behaviours such as pages viewed, so what prospects looked at

can be monitored and used to inform the tailoring of communications Use an effective medium carefully • E-mails don’t die

Eugene Carr of Patron Technology reports that: - 47% are forwarded to friends and relatives - 78% are opened and lead to purchases later - 34% get printed out and used to make a purchase later - 27% trigger an immediate on-line purchase This is a fantastic response rate. Brochures are often out of date or too huge to make a decision. The Perth Horse Cross Concert Hall and Perth Theatre have combined their brochure and you get a small book of all the things to do and it’s daunting. It’s far easier to say yes to a simple email about a show asking if you would like to attend. A brochure decides what you’re not going to attend. • 80% of people say they open and read arts e-mail

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So write to people because you have something to say: - Something new, interesting, persuasive - Something specific to a smaller hotter list - Be short and to the point - Insert hyperlinks to micro sites specific to the reader - Synchronise databases to ensure communications relate to up-to-date

purchasing history Develop a strategy for building relationships • Prospects sign-up and register - what happens next? Think about what steps you take to welcome and trigger a first attendance • First-time attenders?

Vital Statistics are developing a new package whereby each time a new household is created it is going to signal to you to send out a welcome pack to those people. The Bristol Old Vic are currently looking to do this.Then, on the night someone attends a show, they will send out an email saying thank you and hope you enjoyed your visit, or whatever.

• How to follow up their first visit? Bringing people back

Understanding motivations, finding the right triggers and delivering the right messages are key. Look at Andrew McIntyre’s work on the audience climbing frame. It’s very interesting what people go to see and their strategy.

• Developing frequency – single tickets or subscriptions? • Creating loyalty – Friends or similar schemes? • Drawing people closer – adding value? • Nurturing people as ambassadors, potentially donors or sponsors

I’m going to close with this example from the New York Times. If you are one of the 2,500 people who saw the off-Broadway musical Altar Boys last week, its producer Ken Davenport probably has your number or at least the e-mail address for those of you who bought your tickets online. So don’t be surprised if a thank you letter on behalf of Matthew, Mark, Luke and Abraham shows up in your electronic mailbox on Monday, including a discount offer for a return visit or to send to friends so they too can fall in love with the boys. We’ve moved and we can respond and make it as personal as we can. Action plan

- What will you do next?

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Hello everyone, we are very pleased to be here for what we hope will be an interesting session. My colleagues here with me today are:

- Simon Falconer: Digital Strategy Manager - Joe Aujla: Classified Manager - Gemma O’Hara: Manchester Agency Account Manager

We have a presentation that will last 35 minutes, but firstly could you fill in questionnaires on your seats regarding your attitudes and opinions towards digital marketing within your organisations. We will feed back to you on this later in the session. After the presentation we will move on to a Q&A discussion based on your experiences. We will be talking about the changing face of Guardian Newspapers Ltd, as that is what we know about, but we are hopeful that what we are talking about will have resonance with all of the organisations here. Part 1 – Berliner Success Last year my colleague Mark Finney was here talking about the Berliner Format change for the Guardian, and we were asked to come back this year and discuss the success of the format. It struck us as we came to write the presentation we needed to make a change. Even in this last year we can’t believe really how far the organisation has come on. I went to a conference last week which was about digital, there was a quote there from a fantastic speaker from Yahoo, that Rupert Murdoch used the words ‘violent change’ that we’re undergoing at the moment. I don’t know if any of you can relate to that; we, as an organisation, certainly can; we are going through a stage of unprecedented change at the moment So although we want to look at the Berliner and the success of that, we wanted to move on to discuss the digital arena, which is something that our organisation is obsessing about at the moment. Part 2 – Of the Web, not on the Web But also how our organisation is making the transition to being much more digitally focused and how that means that we have to actively have to take part and drive innovation online, and not be willing to passively accept changes and then finally Part 3 – Commercial successes How this can lead to commercial success for both the Guardian and organisations that work with the Guardian. Berliner success We will discuss how The Guardian has been able to make the web offering a success. It’s all about learning for everybody at the moment. And a couple of commercial successes we’ve had. It would be interesting to see how you guys are thinking about making money from digital opportunities. It’s like the elephant in the room, but how do you make money from them? It’s difficult to know.

The Changing Face of Guardian Newspapers LtdRachel King, Digital Integration Manager

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Why Berliner? There was huge pressure on us to go tabloid, across the whole newspaper industry The Independent – good for its brand-changing to be a campaigning newspaper – The Independent really stole a thunderous march on the newspaper market by turning tabloid and they did it very quickly, basically to keep The Times at bay. It’s made a radical difference to their organisation. They would describe themselves as a campaigning newspaper now – they use their front pages as a marketing tool as a front-page news story. We applaud what they have done. The Times – all about convenience – the Times was the second to turn tabloid, and they could learn from the Independent’s experience. Their design works, although at the beginning we found it a little difficult to locate different sections within it. Why should the Guardian change? Something happens when you have a tabloid paper that makes you have to lead with one big story literally because of the size of it. To us, this didn’t seem to be the Guardian way of doing things. When we reported on 9/11, for one of the very first times the Guardian cleared the front page and we had one big story on front page. How are you going to follow up on this? You know it’s got to have that impact otherwise you are shouting all the time and it’s just a loud voice shouting about nothing. I think the Guardian wants to be a quieter voice and we want to be listened to when we do have something to say. So, for all of these reasons and at the time from huge pressure from people traveling on the Underground and all these things they wanted to have a more convenient smaller paper. And so the Guardian chose to take the third way, which was this Berliner format. I think now, because it’s sort of the same format as, proportionally same format as the broadsheet it almost looks like it’s always been like this. Maybe I’m too close to it, but it looks like a natural format and you manage to get your range of stories on the front of it like that. And what we think we’re offering is convenience without editorial compromise, which is what we set out to do. The Guardian and The Observer, two successful launches Both launches have been a success and actually have helped to re-invigorate and re-skill out whole organisation. The format has been a real success and the readers are happy with it; it is seen as a high quality product. GNL platforms in growth despite decline in market The Guardian +2.3% (quality daily market -2.3%) The Observer +4.3% (quality Sunday market -1.2%) We’ve just had the June ABC figures released last week and we’ve even seen stronger success with The Observer up to 9.5% year on year growth, which is fantastic. The Guardian is up 3.7% for the June figures.

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We haven’t doubled are circulation, but it was never about that – it was about creating an appropriate newspaper for the 21st century. Elegant … contemporary, a design classic What I think is so important is that The Observer has its own identity, so it’s not just that ‘one size fits all approach’. The Observer looks like The Observer and The Guardian looks like itself as well. Within the new format as well we haven’t lost our voice and we’ve kept the level of arts editorial the same – actually it’s increased since last year. There’s going to be a bigger commitment to the arts and that’s something at the heartland of everything the Guardian does. Award winning You don’t just need to take our word for it – media commentators and judges alike agree that the Guardian and Observer are both deserving of the highest praise and awards The new format has been recognised by the industry and these are some of the awards we have won over the past year:

• Newspaper of the Year (The British Press Awards 2006) • Best Print Launch of the Year • Best Designed National Newspaper in Europe (European Newspaper Awards) • Dan Chung, Photographer of the Year (What the Papers Say Awards 2006) • Alan Rusbridger, The Judges Award (What the Papers Say Awards 2006)

I think the most interesting one is the design award as it was for overall design and it wasn’t merely a media award. PART II – of the Web, not on the Web Despite or perhaps because of the success of the Berliner format change, Alan Rusbridger has been able to say, ‘these could be the last printing presses that we ever buy’. This fairly contentious statement is meant to be provocative, and is intended to make GNL and interested parties consider what the future of Guardian Newspapers Ltd is. Where does it leave us as a news-based organisation in the 21st century? It leads us to these digital opportunities and our website. The website Most of you have a flavour of how we represent news and how it’s different to just an online newspaper. Obviously we do post news content but have a different way of representing news online as well. Key trends affecting us both Media and arts organisations are more similar than ever before. We both have websites – who is the media owner? UGC (user generated content) is a key factor as is monetising digital. Let’s look at the digital arena and the key trends that are affecting both of us in terms of art organisations and media organisations. The two biggest things here are: User generated content (UGC) – when readers and users are putting content on themselves using blogs to give their views and opinions whether it’s using MySpace, which is hugely successful and has been dominant, or by using other sites which are now competing. With

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blogs, are you happy for people to say there could be improvements in what you are doing, or openly criticising you? You have to think about this. You can now create debate, take creative ideas out into schools – we are now putting the person into the Internet. A lot of it is technology that has enabled a 2-way dialogue between users and readers. Do we want to engage in this way, or do we just carry on talking at them or do we face that and recognise its not always going to be negative, or positive but by enabling that negative voice to be heard you can shape that and engage with it and use it as a positive. It’s very interesting as a newspaper as we are used to having many letters sent to our editors. What’s really interesting now is that people are e-mailing us, and that the letters are incredibly crafted works of art. There are lots of different ways to interact with us and allow people to put their views onto the website; the way we monitor this is by letting other users report it if it’s offensive and we track it. But it is media and it’s live. Blogs How many of you have posted comments on Blogs? I’m a big Archers fan and I put a few comments on the Archers talk board and it’s really mad to see your words live straight away and within a minute someone has responded. It’s a really different experience. Web 1.0 versus 2.0 Or how people are using the Web nowadays A lot of people talk about Web 1.0 versus web 2.0. These days it’s all about people and how people use the web to control, communicate and create. Just to pick out a couple of examples: Ofoto is a site where you download your photos from your holiday and create a website for your photos. There was nothing wrong with it a couple of years ago. We got our digital cameras and tried to e-mail our digital photos and crashed everyone’s e-mail system which was a disaster. Now we have a website called Flickr – you still down load your photos, the difference is you share them; say you’ve just been on holiday to Croatia, somebody will type in search Croatia and they will get lots of photos of Croatia, just like Google Images. They’re all people’s personal photographs and you can let people share them. So planning to go to Croatia on holiday becomes more interactive and brings people into the Internet. There was a really interesting piece in G2 a couple of weeks ago on technology in the arts. The article quoted four different experts from arts organisations. One of the main topics of discussion is that technology becomes interesting when it becomes invisible in that it’s not about doing a pod cast – if this medium is the best for what you want to get across, and then the pod case becomes invisible. You don’t think about electricity, you just flick a switch – it’s all about getting light. Another example is Britannica Online – an enormously brave decision for them as an encyclopedia to go on line; It has gone through major changes in the last few years. It’s a fixed encyclopedia for a fixed amount of money to use it, which is fine.

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The alternative is Wikipedia, someone here must have used Wikipedia? – Do you know that the WIKI part of it stands for ‘what I know is’ which is quite interesting. It’s basically about people putting their comment and their knowledge on to the web. So if you’ve got blogging which is about comment and opinion, reacting to news, whereas Wikipedia and wiki sites is about taking knowledge that you know and putting it into a resource. People say we are embracing a wiki idea on our travel section, but other environments lend themselves to this approach. People do want to know what your opinions are about travel, so the Croatia thing may be ‘this is what I thoughtt about it and the tidal swell means its’ too dangerous to swim’. Our Heritage – launched in 1999, set in stone June 2000 Some of you may know that the Guardian and Observer are owned by a fantastic organisation called the Scott Trust, which exists purely to ensure that the Guardian does not go out of business, and continues to publish in perpetuity. What is just as amazing is that we are not owned by shareholders, we haven’t got Rupert Murdoch dictating our editorial policy. We can write what we want to whom we want when we want to. And when this digital online stuff started happening, around 1998 there was a certain amount of nervousness justifiably in our organisation – does this mean the death for newspapers? I’m sure you heard that kind of debate a couple of years ago. And we had a very clear choice you could say yes it does and therefore you clear keep quite away from it as much as possible, or you say it doesn’t mean the death of newspapers they will have a different role, but also we can provide an amazing service for our users on line, and that is what we have tried to do at Guardian Unlimited, with the whole hearted support of our owners. Guardian Unlimited being put on the sign outside our building created a ripple right through our building, it was a clear signifier that the Scott Trust embraced our digital offering and that Guardian Unlimited was here to stay. The network We have 20 different sites – three of which are devoted to the arts. The site structure allows us to grow our audience by discrete communities i.e. success through lots of small successes added together as opposed to growth through sensationalist news. Collectively the three arts sites generate over three million page impressions every month that’s a lot of traffic generated by our arts sites. And having this network structure, it seems to work really well and we’ve managed to create audiences of discrete communities but lots and lots of them. So we have a highbrow, interesting, engaged audience on our arts site and also have a fantastic audience on our football site. They all are engaged, upstream, which means all the things that are important to the Guardian, that we have a really educated audience. All of those things mean that we still keep hold of that audience, but we are actually really big in size and scale. It’s one of things that we don’t feel massively comfortable about in our organisation. We are the biggest online editorial resource in Europe. You know we’re significant but quite a small media player really and now we’re the biggest UK newspaper website. It’s odd for us and not what we expected. Audience growth People sample Guardian Unlimited (GU) for key news and sports stories and ten of them will come back again. We measure success in terms of both the number of people that visit out site and also the number of pages that they consume.

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So these are the growths in audience figures. We measure our success in terms of both page impressions, which is one person looking at one page once, and unique users and this is the main figures that has increased for June as well.

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Online brands becoming global brands We have an overseas audience of:

• 9 million users • 74 million page impressions

All this results in us having to look at our organisation slightly differently. We are used to being a small but significant UK media player, digital makes us a bigger player (largest newspaper website in the UK) and with a global footprint. ‘Best newspaper on the worldwide web’ webby winner two years running (the Oscars of the internet) It’s very much a global brand in that we have more page impressions generated from overseas users than we do from our UK users, which I think is just bonkers. I think it’s just new, it’s different, it’s things we haven’t had to, it’s a nice problem to have but it’s something that’s really different for us as an organisation. So how have we done it? Basically we’ve got some bright bods that work at the Guardian, people like Simon Waldman, our director of digital publishing, people like Emily Bell, former editor of Media Guardian, but now she’s editor in chief of Guardian Unlimited. I think what is interesting for us as an organisation is that our overseas users use us differently from our UK users, so overseas users are much more likely to find a story through search; they don’t go through the home page, they all go through to search. Which then has an impact on what does every page have to look like then, does every page has to be a home page? The page per user count for overseas is much less. In the UK we have many more loyal followers; there are people that are familiar with the Guardian brand, reading 200 pages a month sometimes, really in depth users – this isn’t the case with overseas users.

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We only show UK ads to UK users; we were one of the first organisations in the UK to instigate what we call ‘geo targeting’. If you do advertise with anybody else, ask them what their policy is on geo targeting – even the big players are not good at this. Building websites for sustained success

We’ve built the site in a way to make it easy for it to work well. It’s basically building the site so it works well with search engines. So most of us know how search engines work – it’s just basically little spiders picking up stories – someone does a search on caterpillars, goes out finds stories on caterpillars but it uses it puts it higher up ranking using lots of different filters. I think someone from Google has written a book on how it all works, but it is actually a bit of a dark art. And things can make it work much better, for example having a big archive and keeping your archive open. Tagging it well, so if your search is on caterpillars then tagging it on caterpillars and butterflies as well. Make it very clear and make it easy for those spiders to go and grab that story. Accessibility and linking – if you’ve got a blog or if you’ve got a network then link to lots of other websites or blogs; all that traffic is an algorithmic formula; all that other traffic helps you go up the natural search linking. Keeping your content refreshed helps in terms of natural search. We have an open source policy, so we let anybody link to our content; if we write a review of a play in one of your theatres you can link to that. Websites that are written with the software ‘Flash’ are completely hopeless for search engines and so that’s why we’ve seen some of those beautiful flash introductions on sites disappearing – it needs to be text heavy to work well on search, because that is what the spiders are looking for. I’m sure Google and others have got some interesting areas now for searching pictures and sounds and this is becoming more and more important for the web. And I’m sure the way that the spiders go out and getting information will change. If you look at newspapers sites, although a lot of the principles are employed by the likes of MSN, and Yahoo before, the Telegraph redesigned most of its site in the last three or four months, and so they allow a lot of individual items. The BBC is another good example to be

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tagged by users, so you can see on the columns and the site that this is the most popular story/item on the site at any given point. Innovations

Carolyn McCall, Chief Executive of Guardian Newspapers Ltd, said: ‘This innovative development underlines our ambition to ensure that the Guardian's distinctive, independent content is available in a variety of formats throughout the day, meeting the changing needs of our online users and readers.’ We wanted to show you something that we’ve launched on G24; every 15 minutes you can get a six- to-eight page print off of the latest news on the site. Say you’ve got a tube journey home for example, you print this off and its updated every 15 minutes and you’ve got the latest UK and international business and sports news. It’s quite condensed but it’s an experiment and it’s launching now and it’s handy for people, giving people something they want when they want it, which is something we espouse. Another example is the launch of our Web first strategy, where we’re going to release foreign news and business news first on the web; this makes sense, because if something happens now you wouldn’t see if for 24 hours later in newsprint. If it was an earthquake or something like that of course it’s going to go on the web site now. However, going back and looking at old models it’s a bit like a music company releasing a free music down load first before they release the paid for CD. Your business models are completely thrown out the window, but we have to do it – if we don’t, our competitors will. Deepening the user dialogue March 2006: first collective blog by a British newspaper site It’s a conversation, not Speakers Corner where you are using a loud speaker and shouting at people. Did we ever realise what privileged position the media community used to occupy? The days of the ‘4th Estate’ – are they over, or do we need our editor brands more now than ever? This is an example of how we’re trying to deepen the User dialogue. In March 2006 we created this site; comment is free, and again the editor was Georgina Henley, you might know was deputy editor has now come and is the editor of this. So it’s a really big step and it’s not a backward career step she’s a lady who is going to go very far indeed, and has seen how important this thing, digital stuff is for the Guardian. Culture vulture – deepening the arts user dialogue This is about creating a sense of community. GNL delivers the most coverage of arts in the national quality press. The Future Foundation discusses ‘no brow capitalists’ everyone consuming and creating more culture – culture vulture reflects this positioning exactly.

Culture Vulture is our lovely arts blog; this is a way of deepening cultural dialogue in the arts and has been really fascinating debate recently about critics and you use critics as a user to determine choice of theatre production. Charlotte Higgins has been leading that and I think it’s a fascinating discussion and I urge you to participate in it.

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The importance of permanence It’s all about choice; GU is often the number one in natural searches for key news and arts search terms A couple of years ago a lot of newspapers had the strategy of keeping news stories live for about six months and then taken them off. We’ve always kept all of our news stories live; we’ve got over a hundred million stories on our website; we generate 300 stories every single day, but 30,000 stories are read every day. If we only had the news stories up there then your traffic would be a lot lower. This has helped us to keep our page impressions high. We sort of stumbled initially on this by accident – when Guardian Unlimited launched we were quite strong technically and we wanted to archive everything, because we can and we have some great storage capacity. Back in 1998 that was a good thing as it was a lot more expensive. All of a sudden that’s wow and it just shows that a hell of a lot of our traffic comes from older stories and articles so it shows that they have relevance and importance. And for those of you here with lots of content on site it could be of more value than you realise. It’s a question of how to stick everything up there, data storage isn’t as expensive now so it can go up and we’re rapidly seeing other newspapers doing this the same thing across the board. But all that published content original content is of high value and is worth getting out. All those elements we brought in to get our site good for searching you can actually see, well no you can’t really, basically doing a general search and Guardian unlimited coming up as the top two websites on the search.

Dialogue + permanence = relevance And this is why we are the most blogged newspaper website outside of the US. If our stories were not up permanently we would be removing ourselves from the conversation Suggestion: go to www.technorati.com and check out subject areas close to your heart and see how many blogs are discussing these topics. E.g. by looking up ‘Arts Marketing Association’ on technorati , I found this very useful l report www.a-m-a.co.uk/images/downloads/Benchmarkingreport.pdf

Again we’re one of the most linked to websites for blogs in the UK, aside from the BBC, which is incredibly important this is called the open source link to you. There’s actually a web site called Tetrarty.com and its really interesting to look at – it is a blog aggregator and what it does is it looks at all the content that’s being discussed in Blogs and pulls it all together and brings together all the topics of the conversations. So for example if you looked at Lebanon today you‘d get the number one or Israel would be the number one subject area. Where it becomes really interesting is that on a really micro level say you’ve got a performance or something happening you can look at it and you realise your performance is being discussed now by 50 different blogs. And you realise there are 50 conversations happening out there. You can go and look at what people are saying or otherwise without a blog aggregator it’s really difficult to access some of that conservation that’s happening about your content. Obviously you can choose to take part in them as well and that’s interesting. Finding new ways to engage – user generated content UGC – been there is a wiki site like wikipedia http://www.ivebeenthere.co.uk/ suggests that everyone writes a recommendation on there to experience its immediacy. It’s about users telling each other what they know; logs tend to be more about comment and opinion

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And building communities E.g. soulmates, our online dating agency with 30,000 members is the most successful in Europe; we’ve had a marriage every day from those who have met online. www.guardiansoulmates.com Editorial Innovations: pod casts Pod cast was a word coined by a Guardian Journalist e.g. as in this article from 2004 http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,,1363761,00.html The free one we did with Ricky Gervais, how many downloads did we have? Zillions! It was the number one download in the States and the UK simultaneously, loads and loads and loads. And we thought we’d get about 10,000 – we completely underestimated it. But now we have lots of pod casts on our site as well as some to discrete communities, e.g. arts pod casts (around 40,000). It’s an interesting concept – what does the guardian sound like? – download and find out for yourselves. Editorial Innovations: image and audio Editorial can be presented in different ways nowadays – see this example http://arts.guardian.co.uk/tomhunter/0,,1684162,00.html

Platform Innovations As a rule of thumb we are trying to provide Guardian content where and when people want it. Some of our platforms are:

• Mobile phone • RSS reader • PDA • Pod casts • Vodcasts • Emails • Blackberry • G24 • Newspapers • Magazines • Digital edition • Website

www.guardian.co.uk/index/platforms These innovations enabled us to do this Tom Hunter piece. Instead of just having a write up with the exhibition we could view the pieces using Flash, and had an audio review from one of our critics talking through the different painters. This was about four months ago and now we would collate that into a pod cast link and you can take it with you to the gallery and listen to the journalist talking through the exhibition. Part III – commercial success stories We talked about ways to monetise digital ; these are some of the ways in which we are doing it:

• Reader offers • Digital edition/ crosswords • Ad free • Advertising • Sponsorship

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Also an example of where we have worked with a partner for mutual benefit: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/mostlymozart2006 How do you monetarise digital? Ways in which we do it on our website are readers offers, which are really successful and popular - selling theatre tickets or books. We actually do charge for a couple of satellite services, our daily crosswords and we also have an ad free version of the site, which users can choose to have. Guess how many people have downloaded that page and paid £25 for our ad free version? - about 37 people in the last 4 years. People may say they don’t like advertising so we say OK fine but then here’s the opportunity but you have to pay for it and content has to be paid for somehow, they choose not to take it which is interesting. And obviously we have advertising and sponsorship on site as well. This is an example of one of the campaigns we have undertaken: Weekend Photography Prize with Windows XP

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We have lots of cross media deals now where people will be embracing Guardian Unlimited as well as the print newspaper Guardian and Observer. We are working with the Barbican at the moment through a micro site and those interacting with the content, downloads too, are driving traffic through to the Barbican’s other websites; through entering the competition, there’s data capture there to get details for future marketing and direct mail activity. You can go straight through to buy tickets, and content created by our dedicated arts journalists at Guardian Unlimited. This has been live since the 5th June and already we’ve had 20,000 individual and unique users to this site. See what a niche it is, a number that far exceeded our expectations. Of the 20,000 there were 12,000 from UK, because this could be opened up on an international basis it’s worth thinking about your international audience when you put things up online – this will vary depending on what field you are in. I’m well aware but you need to think about who is using and why it’s available to these people. What I think surprises us the most is the average time on this micro site which was over six minutes, so if you think about this kind of sponsorship of online activity that’s a long time to be interacting with a brand and yes actually there are free downloads, but that’s people being immersed in the Barbican brand. Conclusion: A though to leave you with ‘This switch from the push model to the pull, from intrusion to invitation, is a fundamental transformation for everyone involved in the business of content, whether that content is a two-hour film, a half-hour sitcom, a radio programme, recorded music, an Internet site or a 30-second advertising message. The end users rather than the creators and distributors are in control. And that changes all the rules.’ Scott Donaton – Madison and Vine – via the Future Foundation ‘call that Entertainment?’ 2006 Q & A Q Why is it good for advertisers to filter out people coming from overseas? A Oh very good question – basically the phrase I used was geo targeting. Say you’re Ford

UK and you want to sell a car – you are not interested in somebody in Holland, someone in America seeing your advertising – for you that’s a wasted ad so we filter it out. But to answer the question, if you want them you can have them.

- Moneterising the overseas page impressions for our site is the biggest single

challenge we have how do we make money out of all these people, that’s difficult. We’re working on it.

Q Does blogging online undermine journalism? A My view is it that it supports it and engages it. It’s the whole thing about user-generated

content. If you didn’t have the news would you have as many things to blog about? During difficult times like the London bombings last year we had the blogs and people blogging and sending in photographs, e-mails and texts and around about London, a core part of the content that was on the site. If you’re looking for well crafted pieces of journalism a lot of the comments in blogs are not that and it’s that whole thing about user generated content in that its’ quality, a lot more people are getting creative and that’s great, but if you look at MySpace for example, and all the stuff people are creating

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content, creating music which you can down load for free and everything quite a lot of it is awful. And it’s a fair question to ask of arts organisations and media organisations; to become editor grams in a sort of way you still have to revert back to excellence in the long run but we don’t really know. Do you agree with that?

Q Yes. Do people then just visit websites to post their own blogs and not read any

of the articles? A Generally it is free blog aggregate we’ve got – you’ve got to read something to be able

to make a comment. We only allow a certain number of people, actually in the 100’s, a set number of people that can initiate comments in the first place.

Q My question is about cross convergence with print advertising and digital

advertising and also the editorial link with the advertising – are there any added bonuses?

A Advertising and editorial in our organisation are completely separate things and I think that the trust that readers and users put in The Guardian means they would be very disappointed if anybody could buy editorial. Cross comparison you buy, as you know, internet impressions by the thousand almost like by inserts, and advertising I think by the cm and it’s as long as a piece of string how expensive or cheap it is because it depends on how much you want to buy. We’re really flexible like many organisations are on size and scale how big your campaign wants to buy pretty much its comparable.

Q Is there any feedback on the format change? Anything you like or dislike?

Feedback in general? A show of hands? Any specific questions on the change to the Berliner?

A It’s easier to handle, but doesn’t fit on a Starbucks table, but the Times does. Q How many more people now, through your research, have you found now read

and pick up the Guardian now? Is it less intimidating to readers? A That’s a really good question. I don’t think we’ve carried out any particular research on

that.

- We can’t answer the question at the moment but there is some research that’s ongoing and it’s probably a little more useful now revealing six to eight months on than initially because you have that quick kind of reaction. It’s like when people get broadband it’s a change to format. There is a tracking study that I can look at and let you know if you are particularly interested.

- What we are desperately keen to do, which I’m sure is the same for your

organisation does as well is that we don’t want to be seen as dumbing down in any way, shape or format. There were a couple of criticisms levelled at the Observer particularly when it had its format changed. Mostly, curiously around its use of colour and particularly the use of the colour pink which is seen as a dumb colour and more relevant for magazines. We haven’t taken out the use of pink in the Observer, but we are used to it a bit more but that’s an example that we are being perceived as a bit more dumbed down, or accessible in the wrong way, but actually it’s just about using different font and type faces to make it more appealing, modern and fresh. Those are the sorts of comments that come through when we undertake qualitative research.

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Q Does the online user of the Guardian differ demographically from the old-fashioned newspaper version? In terms of geography in the UK?

A Yes there is I think it’s inherent in the online population that there is still a slightly higher skew to the South East.

- Interesting to compare, because I’ve been in Scotland recently and you know

Libby Harrison from our Scottish Office, seeing a couple of agencies in Scotland so looking at these figures. What we see is Guardian penetration in Scotland, let’s face it, is not fantastic at all, and the Observer is marginally better but not great. But we have much better penetration for our website. It does still have a London and the South East bias but it is better. One of the things we have been campaigning with our technical team for is to do regional advertising; I guess for quite a few of you here regional advertising would be something that would be great to do on national sites like ourselves.

It’s not a quick fix and it won’t happen until 2007, but it is going to happen. The reason why we can’t do it is can see virtually where people are on where people are accessing Guardian Unlimited from but you do it by looking at certain codes that are on their hard drives on their computer. And basically you find that from their service provider is supposed to for example if you live Chelmsford in Essex you get a certain little code that says Chelmsford, Essex without fail every single broadband service provider have been useless at allocating the correct codes to people. So we don’t know were anybody lives, for example all we know is that there is a huge, mega broad bank provider in Ipswich so it looks like there’s a third of our users live in Ipswich – it’s a nice place but I don’t think its true. So we’ve got a big fix to do on all of that data, and it’s not even our data to fix it’s the broadband provider’s problem – when that happens we’ll be able to do regional advertising.

Q You say you look at your online competitors quite often to see how they’re doing

how they compare. What types of criteria do you use to judge the success of your web site compared to theirs?

A Speaking to media agencies and that kind of thing, talking with the back room and that kind of thing. And otherwise standard metric tools, if you subscribe to something like comscore and nearest netratings you can see how you’re performing in terms of new visitors and page impressions. We’re in a fortunate position in that we have an industry body, not sure about whether the AMA or what other industry bodies you are a member of do this? Trade figures can even decide that it’s not that commercially sensitive and that sometimes it’s in the interest of an aggregate to trade. But you have comscore net ratings that are cheap to sign up to and the like of Hitwise, as well. Because of who we are and the importance of our online business we subscribe pretty much to all of them and analysts then look at them all and see which ones are measuring more accurately. And of course you’ve got ABCE and increasingly smaller and smaller sites are becoming ABCE audited especially in this sort of kind of print equivalent it makes sense for your online and your offline both to be audited.

We also have a Web analytic tool called Hit Box HBX I don’t know whether you have something like that? It’s great actually, horrible to use but the information you can get out of it is great. It literally shows us on each page, each story how many people are looking at it, from which company, for how long and they will repeat it, which came from Google, literally anything you want to know. But that kind of data can be hugely influential in terms of learning what is successful and what isn’t.

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Q In terms of Guardian Unlimited have you seen a decrease in allocation of

resources to your print and increase in resources to your web media or has your print stayed constant and the web just gone up there by needing extra resources? Everyone in this room knows that the quantity issues alongside issues of manpower and the time and so on it’s actually financial reasons. It’s interesting I was picking up on one or two of the comments you made, the future is not printing the paper, potentially, the analogy there is to stop printing brochures. And look at moving to a purely digital platform. So what’s happened internally in your organisation and where do you see it going in the future?

A It’s interesting that all the board members went off to Geneva a few months ago and they had a presentation from the CEO of Kodak. I think Kodak is a fascinating organisation a bit like Britannica, in that it was completely a paper based organisation, then digital cameras came along, the Internet came along and they ignored it really and then it became a serious problem and within 18 months their business was in very deep trouble. They had to make some very sharp and deep changes, and they did that and are now recovering and doing quite well and moving in the right direction.

What happened to Kodak was a lot sharper and harder than we’re seeing; we’re in a luxurious position at the moment, as we’re just starting to make some money on the web, and starting to break even after seven years, and we have 65 purely online journalists, we have the biggest number of online journalists in Europe, and therefore lots of cost attached.

As you see your numbers online go up are you seeing them decrease for the newspapers? At the moment it is a flat line but obviously this is different over different time lines, and demographics, but fairly flat while online is growing. But research is showing that the web fulfils slightly different needs for people and so perhaps it’s replacing other media targeting and spending less time perhaps with television. So perhaps the two are not cannibalising each other.

I think it’s fascinating and I think if you looked at the figures you’d think that 90% of Guardian readers would mean 90% look at the Guardian online. It’s completely not like that at all it’s closer to 40% so they are different audiences. The key thing is you can’t ignore print, yes it’s moving about but it’s more about saying ok, budgets don’t get higher, so you say I get £10,000 this year compared to £15,000 last year how do I use my money? Do I move to digital, do I do direct mail or do I do print? It can be more about getting the balance right – getting print to work for digital and vice versa – it’s like building bridges between both and capturing different audiences. I think the most successful type of marketing campaign to do is to brief us as much as possible about what works, what doesn’t work what are your key objectives, what do you want to get out of it, is it strictly to sell tickets or is it brand awareness?. Thinking about how you resource the online thing is important. One of the last things we’ve learnt is that you can’t have the same person doing that job, we actually need resource to make it successful, and that’s the leap we’ve had to take as an organisation. My whole role here is actually about getting a print orientated team to embrace the online. For the vast majority it’s really simple but it’s asking a lot of everybody. Lot of new learning, when I started at the Guardian ten years ago I was working on two magazines, Guardian Weekend and Observer Life – now the magazine team are

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working on ten magazines and two newspapers every weekend, with lots of different sections in them, all the different features and sections that we sell perhaps a network of 20 different websites. People come into an organisation it’s really difficult plus all the different platforms that there are, its really complicated and we manage all of that information data and communicate it to clients. It’s a learning curve for everybody and everyone’s in this same situation. It is moving really fast and you know it’s about change and adapting your thinking and your whole mentality and as companies employ more people it’s more pressure on individuals, but it’s more about managing what expectations are. A really interesting opportunity for all of you is your individual websites. We’ve talked about similarities between the media organisations and the arts. Who’s the leader over here? We all are – you’ve got websites, how do you monetarise what you’ve got on your own website. Could you go to network sales sites and put ad sites on your websites and get them sold? You’ve got, all of you amazing audiences, incredibly erudite, well paid, professional, AB, probably slightly higher female bias fantastic audiences how can you guys make some money out of these people? You're media owners as well, just a thought.

Q Has the standard of subbing improved with the change to Berliner? A This is a really contentious area with the editorial team – if you want to wind our editorial

team up, just mention something like that. Yes, I think our subbing has improved do you think so? - Yes - Yes I think it has a bit; we have Ian Maize – the Readers’ Editor – who takes on

board any comments. - I will just share with you a funny subbing error which was completely my fault; it was

a little ad from the Quakers a few years ago. They’re the most gorgeous people if you speak to them, such gentle and peace loving people, just gorgeous, and once a year they had enough budget to place one ad – the most important advertising they were doing, and basically the setting of the ad went wrong; they sent us the copy late, I didn’t have time to proof it before went on sale and it was printed as the ‘Quackers’. We found out straight away and ran up to Ian Maize and said you’ve just got to do the best apology you’ve ever done in your life. We had to work the apology really carefully as well as we didn’t want to repeat the mistake for obvious reasons. It was picked up by Private Eye.

Q You talked about violent change in your primary product the newspaper, any

thoughts about how this might continue? A We’ve talked about our figures at the moment our newspapers are selling well. I think

something that is a fascinating area is mobile. Probably all of us in the room have mobile phones. Currently we’re doing beta testing on a mobile product that is different from wap in that it works well on mobile a phone called on to go, it’s a free test if anybody wants to try it it’s on the website. And 99% of the UK population has a mobile phone – you’ve got content in your pocket and everybody’s talking about convergence. Convergence devices where you are not going to separate, in the way we were talking about electricity earlier – not going to think I’m going online to do this it’s going to be something that’s around you in lots of different formats everywhere. I think that’s going to be the challenge to get right. It’ll be interesting to look back at this year in three years time because we‘ll do some good things but we’re probably making some horrendous mistakes. We just don’t know. It feels like this, I get such a sense of change right now.

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All organisations are worried about their marketing budgets and where they should be doing stuff. People talk about digital but you should actual talk about six or seven different elements whether that’s e-mail marketing, or websites or research or mobile all these different things RSS is a really challenging and interesting area a really simple syndication it’s a way of almost creating your own personal web site by pulling off stories from every website you look and tells you all the stories that have come on there. So you almost don’t need to look at the websites at all what happens there how do you monatarise that? Interesting, don’t know. What are you doing in your organisation how’s it affecting you?

Q It’s interesting to take a look at an organisation like yours that has looked at and

addressed some of the issues. A There are some things we don’t know the answers to yet. As Rachel just mentioned its

different bits of your content, your brand going out to people you don’t know, through this bit of technology. It’s almost thinking I don’t know where it’s going but every individual item carries what my brand is about, it conveys what we want to convey. People might not come through Guardian.co.uk from the front page – they may come through search or a story on their mobile that’s been text to them, you need to ensure, it may be just the synopsis of the article that carries the essence of what you’re trying too convey and what you are about.

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Go to www.a-m-a.co.uk/images/downloads/ChelseaFCPresentation.pdf to download the Power Point presentation. Football – an art maybe, but entertainment, definitely. You might compare us with a stage production: our players are actors, the pitch is the stage, and the manager is the director. Like your organisations, we put on events each week. What’s it all about? ‘football is a game in which a handful of fit men run around for one and a half hours watched by millions of people who could really do with the exercise’ Anon A few statistics about Chelsea FC from 05/06:

• Chelsea FC was 100 years old last year • Season ticket holders – 23,579 • Gender split roughly 85% men and 15% women • Members – 62,787 in total • Gender split roughly 80% men and 20% women • Adults – 45,498 • Juniors (under 16s) – 17,289

It is a male sport, but female fans are on the up and we must keep the whole fan base buoyant. It’s more than just football We have an online store/merchandise; a sports and leisure club; a hotel and a Community and Learning Centre (the hub) Here are a few questions for you, our audience: Q Who thinks Chelsea is rolling in money? Not quite……it’s an expensive business. On match days, our outgoings include: Staffing; players, manager, coaches, doctors, physio, referee and officials, pitch retrieval team, ball boys, CCTV operator, 60 turnstile operators, 800 stewards, 850 Catering and hospitality staff, crèche, programme sellers, box office, megastore, hotel, administration and IT, Police, crowd doctor, London Ambulance Service, St John’s Ambulance, security, licensing, traffic relocation and road closing, staff parking, press, officials and guest seating, publicity and programmes, gas, electricity and water. On match days our income includes: Tickets, Corporate packages, merchandise, hotel, food & beverages, advertising, sponsors, TV, programmes Q Who thinks we all relax in the closed season?

A Case Study from Chelsea Football Club Elaine Clark, Head of IT and Vicky Mudge, Customer Database Manager

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• The Training Ground • The ‘Closed’ Season • three months from mid May to mid August • Pitch events • Stadium works and refurbishments • Relay pitch • Set ticketing prices and policies for the next season • Season Ticket and Membership renewals • System installs, upgrades and enhancements • Player purchases • Kit launch

Q Who thinks we have a completely ‘captive’ audience?

• Our hard-core fans • The ‘Special One’

Q Who thinks we sell out every game?

We have 14,000 tickets to sell for each home match, and that can mean 34 events in a typical season. We tend to sell around 75% of tickets on line and 25% through our box office. We still have to look at ways of selling tickets to less popular games. We have to get people off the sofa and into the stadium.

Our vision and brand values Vision: ‘By 2014 we will be recognised internationally as the World’s No1 Football Club’ Brand values: • Integrity • Excellence • Unity • Leadership • Pride

We’re just like you We need to manage our customer expectations and grow our customer base We need to uphold our image and manage our brand How do we plan to do this? CRM Why do we need to bother about CRM?

• Because we don’t know who all our customers are or how they interact with us • Bad press damages our brand • We need to get our customers off the sofa and into the Stadium

CRM has been the BUZZ word in business for years. The trouble is it only seemed to be relevant to the Blue Chip companies it has never been taken seriously by middle size or small businesses. That is not until now. Let’s face it we as customers ourselves have high expectations of service and value, so why would we not aim to deliver the same service and value to our customers?

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I think the BUZZ word should now Evolve or die! CRM at Chelsea

• Just another trendy acronym? Or a sensible approach to business? • For us it means developing ‘Customer Intelligence’ • Creating a holistic view of our customers so that our marketing makes sense • Taking care of the customers we do know about and building relationships with ‘NEW’

people So what do we do? Chelsea like many other clubs has always been in a good position as far as customers are concerned. We don’t have the problem of competition from other brands. Or do we? OK it is safe to say we have a hard core of supporters who will always be Chelsea fans no matter how we treat them, they are not likely to start supporting Fulham because they had a bad customer experience at Chelsea. However these fans are getting older their lifestyle changes. They start off as young adult male/female love their footie and come to every match they can, they then get married move away, have kids, get divorced etc. Whatever the reason they stop coming to the match on Saturday. How do we replace these customers, while at the same time ensure we keep them in the loop so that once their circumstances change they come back to us. It is all about creating the Customer Experience that our customers will never forget no matter what their circumstances, if we market to them at the right time with the right piece they will always interact with us. None of this is easy which is why so many companies shy away from CRM, but with the right tools and a positive attitude towards change then it is possible to emulate what the big boys have achieved. Here at Chelsea we have started to create our own CRM ethos, which with the help of our Team keep us at the top of our game. We will: clean up our database (It is one of our biggest assets); create a customer lifecycle; stop blanket marketing and keep track of who buys what and when using campaign tools. With all this new found knowledge we aim to grow our database. In two years time we aim to have grown our database from its current 425,000 to around two million.

Our Strategy

Develop CRM Strategy

Greater Customer

Value

Create CRM

Capabilities

Manage Customer

Data

Manage Customer

Activity

DeliverCustomer

Insight

Use CRMto

drive value

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What will this give us?

• The ability to market customers based on their profile • Not just send them everything and hope that they buy! • An increase in average spend in top deciles and encourage spend in lower deciles • Keep our ‘Enquirers’ in the loop

CRM means ROI Return on investment. It also means a happy customer and if we have happy customers then our brand is valuable to us as a business and to others who want to be associated with our brand. All-in-all CRM is a recipe for success and that’s why it’s all about the passion! It’s a passion ‘Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I don’t like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that.’ Bill Shankly Q & A Q What are your actual strategies for getting new customers onto your database? A Our new system (tickets.com) will make things much easier to do this. We’ve been

trying to get this in place for 5-6 years. We aim to create a data warehouse where information on purchases across all our different areas of the business is stored. We will also add information on customers from our Smart Card (Team Card), which we operate. There will be a profile on every single customer.

It’s very early days yet, but until we get a wide enough profile and segment the customer data base, we won’t know where the customer gaps are. We imagine that we will be sending specific literature to specific groups of people. One of our challenges is to grow global markets. This is where we think there is a huge opportunity. We will be creating new and exciting ways for these customers to interact with Chelsea, e.g. through the website, SMS text, e-marketing. We will be targeting the Far East, much as Manchester Utd targets India.

Q How did you approach your research? A We are doing it now through collating information and segmenting the customer

database. Q There are lots of similarities in your business to many of ours. I’m sure many arts

organisations have the equivalent of your less popular games, e.g. Chelsea vs Wigan on a wet Wednesday. What are your strategies for filling these seats? Are you looking at manipulating pricing and do you think this is an issue?

A We are going to look at last minute pricing, e.g. making special offers on the day and texting and e-mailing customers with these. Our top ticket price is £48 full price, and a season ticket £790 – £1,500. We’ve decided not to increase our ticket prices this year, as Arsenal hasn’t, even in their new stadium.

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Q How family friendly is a match at your stadium? A Young people are our audience of tomorrow and we are targeting them in many

different ways. This year we moved our family stand into the East side, which is over the tunnel so young people can see the players etc. We’ve doubled its capacity, and lone adults cannot enter this stand. We can control the atmosphere in this part of the stand, but if a parent decides to take a child into the main stand I’m afraid they will be exposed to the ‘typical’ sights and sounds of a match, which is not particularly pleasant! We have concession prices in other parts of the stand. We have a crèche, which is always full on match days. We give young people freebies, send them birthday cards and they have a chance to come along to the annual Christmas party for children where they will meet the players. You can host a children’s party at Stamford Bridge. We have open days and open training sessions. We do a lot of work with communities through our learning centre. Schools and other organisations can visit and use the centre.

Q Is there any part of your plan which involves bringing in other customers? A We will be looking at acquisition data but not quite yet. We will be getting some

Experian lifestyle sets as well.

Particularly for the female market, we would be looking at other ways to get you to buy into our business. You can get married at Stamford Bridge and you can have your ashes scattered here. We want to be a bit classier about things in general. We have open days and stadium tours; people come to our restaurants etc. We’ve not captured information on these types of visitors before or run specific campaigns for them. If we can get them onto the site then we’d like to try to get them into the stadium.

Q Do you sell tickets to your home games for the visiting side? E.g. would you try

to market to local residents who support the visiting team? A We are bound by lots of FA rules on this one. The tickets are printed off and the visiting

team sell their allocation for the specific stand at our ground. We have to be careful, e.g. getting a Celtic fan into a home stand would not be positive. This area is not one of our priorities.

Q You obviously have lots of financial imperatives, e.g. to make money, but within

this, are there any particular market segments you want to target? A The family sector, definitely. We need the cross-section of fans into order to grow the

business. Q Is there a plan, a journey through which you want your customer to travel? A I suppose there is already a typical journey. A boy becomes a junior member of the

club, might go onto buy a season ticket, goes to university and then we lose them. There are lifestyle changes, marriage, divorce etc. One of the things we know already is that our ‘members’ say we don’t interact with them enough, so keeping them and interacting with them is really important. At this stage, we are making lots of assumptions as to why people stop coming to matches, and we will be looking at this in further details once we can identify these people through our CRM system.

Q When you have sell-out games, it must be so difficult and frustrating for those in

your fan base (especially those who live away from Chelsea) when they can’t get tickets. How do you deal with this?

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A This is so difficult for us. Sometimes the website grinds to a halt. We need to encourage more members and give people in further distance markets a reason to join, particularly for younger people.

Q Do you know how many supporters you actually have in the UK? A The Football Association runs an annual survey on this, and I would assume it runs into

millions. We only know anything about the current people on our database. Q In the arts industry, we’ve used CRM heavily, although probably with less

resources than you have. We also utilise it for fundraising and individual giving. Is CRM a cutting-edge tool for football clubs?

A Manchester Utd is the only club who have been utilising it in any sophisticated way, but other teams are now realising how important it is. We hope that we are leading on the creative side.

Q Would you think of buying players from a specific part of the world in order to

build market share? A We can’t answer that one! Q Do you think the celebrity lifestyles of certain players are a help or a hindrance to

your brand development? A They can be both, but clubs have clear rules and responsibilities. For example, fines

and other penalties are imposed for certain behaviour and we know that bad press is not good for the club.

In terms of customer complaints and feedback, if we have the CRM right then we can deal properly with them. For example, last season, disabled customers were sold the wrong price tickets. We need to be able to deal with these problems swiftly and efficiently.

Q If the team is doing well does this increase your income? A Certainly, it plays a big part. People spend more on all services when they are happy

with what has happened on the pitch. When we don’t win, everything is wrong. There are strong emotional links to the Chelsea brand.

Q Your target of almost another 1.5million customers on your database must be a

bit daunting? Do you have any other measures of success? A It’s not just about the numbers; it is about the accuracy of the information and about our

whole team supporting what we are trying to do. We have CRM champions in each department; everyone has been briefed on what we are trying to do and how customer service is at the heart of it. We are also trying to ensure that all the mail preferences are up to date and that our teams pride themselves on having quality and accurate data. We have quite a few celebrity supporters so we have to be careful how we communicate with them.

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Heather Maitland (Consultant) Go to www.a-m-a.co.uk/images/downloads/HeatherMaitlandHandout.pdf to download the hand out. Go to www.a-m-a.co.uk/images/downloads/HeatherMaitlandSeminar.pdf to download the Power Point presentation. HM Who does CRM at the moment?

Adrian Bevan, Visit Britain We have a database of 6.5million contacts worldwide and we are communicating with them on a monthly basis, sending newsletters, link them to our marketing campaigns and a lot of investment is going into this area at the moment. I hope to learn something new today. Doug Buist, Salisbury Playhouse We apply principles rather than spending loads of money. For us, it’s about communicating with people on our database less randomly than we did in the past.

Thanks for your answers. I’ve got news for you; CRM is really basic, and it’s bizarre stuff. We have been ‘doing’ CRM for years in the arts and the commercial world in catching up. It’s about doing what we’ve been doing for ages but perhaps in a more focused way. This is what I am going to talk about in this session:

• How do arts organisations use Customer Relationship Management? • How can you find out what kinds of relationship you already have with your audiences,

visitors or participants? • How can you use that information to decide the most effective ways of building a

deeper, longer-term relationship with them? – this is where it gets a bit fuzzy in the arts ..

• How can you use CRM to help you prioritise your resources of time and money? • How can you do all this with a shoestring budget? – very few of us have 6.5 million

names and addresses I want to have a look at some of the skills you need to do this and to have a bit of a practice – I’ve got lots of real examples for us to look at today.

• understanding individual customers’ needs – it’s interesting what Peter Fisk said earlier, that ‘there is no such thing as an average person’

• using that information to make relationships with those customers more productive – let’s discuss what productive means in our organisations

• looking at the whole relationship with a customer • planned and systematic – this is what makes the difference, and what makes CRM work • investing resources to get a better return

Here is a real life example – Stamford Arts Centre – which is really in the back of beyond. 19,000 people live in the town, and then there are fields and fields of carrots …..

Getting to Know You: CRM on a shoestring

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• 456 ticket buyers in 2004/5 bought for six or more familiar live events

• 16% of ticket buyers that year • 34% of box office income that year – they were really important • Each spent an average of £187.38 that year (where ticket prices range from £4-£7) • Average lifetime value of £567.86 (sales profile report forever)

If they lost 10% of these people, they would lose around £8,500 per year, which is really important for a venue like this. So the big thing for them is about how they can keep these people happy? It gets worse though, because:

• 3,151 customers on the database have not bought tickets in the past 18 months (24% of all customer records).

• 9% of people on the database bought tickets for the first time in the past 18 months but for only one event in that time If they got these people to come to just one more event, they’d get £17,730. This is only a small organisation, so imagine how this would impact on a larger organisation.

So, CRM is really about ‘stopping the revolving door’, stopping customers coming in one door and leaving again. In an organisation with a small catchment area, it would be difficult to find new customers to replace the ones who leave. The issue is that if you keep a customer satisfied they will become loyal. It’s a little bit more complicated than this, as different customers have different wants and needs, so the idea of the customer defining the relationship is really important – it’s about putting yourself in your customers’ shoes.

On a shoestring, this is all you need to be able to look at your audience – here is a loyalty ladder.

These are some statistics generated from two reports generated by Databox.

Why do we need better customer relationships?

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First time attender

Used to attend but doesn’t any more (lapsed attender)

Repeat attender

Occasional attender

Frequent attender

Subscriber

Advocate or Friend

Volunteer

Donor

In order to come for the first time a customer has to be aware of your organisation. You’ve then got to get them to come back again, and once they do, it’s much easier to get them to come back again and become an occasional attender. As Peter (Fisk) and Claire (Eva) this morning pointed out, your customers are very busy, with lots of other calls on their time, so to get them to become frequent attenders you have to become a very important part of their lives. For the many people coming to Stamford Arts Centre once a week, the centre is really important. You can get them to do something that really demonstrates that you are important to them, such as becoming a subscriber, or an advocate. I know people have been talking about arts ambassadors, or becoming a part of the friends organisation. Lots of people have volunteers because it’s a really good way of enabling customers to make a strong commitment to your organisation. And then, of course, there is the donor. We mustn’t forget the lapsed attenders. What do you know about yours in your organisation?

• Collect and store information about customers (boring bit) • Analyse the information to understand customers and divide them into target groups

(this is a bit more interesting) It was interesting how Peter was talking about statistics not being useful, and that attitudes are more useful – that is what we are talking about. The problem is that on a shoestring we can’t afford Mori.

• Decide how your marketing campaigns need to change to get more out of your relationships

That’s the Theory, but what does CRM involve?

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• Explore the information to discover new ways of looking at customers This is probably familiar for performing arts organisations, and the smallest organisation can do this if you can persuade your audiences, visitors etc to book in advance. Stamford Arts Centre went from 70% door sales to everything being sold out weeks in advance, so much so that that they had to put on ‘secret screenings’ for customers on their waiting list. Collecting information: paid for events (all types of organisations) Again, this is what they did at Stamford Arts Centre:

• Make it easy • Reserved seats – if you want a specific seat then you have to book it • Differential pricing for the music programme, e.g. £2 more expensive if you book on the

door; it’s worth trying this • Set some procedures for staff – how they deal with customers has to be clearly outlined,

and the first question is always ‘Have you bought tickets from us before?’– this speeds up the transaction

• Make sure everyone understands why data collection is important • Show staff what the data says about audiences

Collecting information: free events What do you do in this scenario?

• Encourage audiences to book in advance

1. Collect and store information

The Dana Centre is an offshoot from the Science Museum, and it’s branded quite differently. It’s for the age group 18-35 and it’s because everybody thinks the Science Museum is for children. The centre provides a place where adults can engage with science and all events are free but they have to be booked in advance. They do things like closed-circuit broadcasts of heart surgery.

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Here’s a photograph of Christine, and she inputs data into an Excel spreadsheet. She captures first name, last name, what they saw and an e-mail list. They have a very clear handle on what they do. Once you’ve done that, free events become very much like your paid events, and the framework for CRM is the same: Collecting information: free events

• Encourage audiences to book in advance • Make it easy • Reserved seats • Set some procedures for staff • The first question is always ‘Have you been here before?’– it’s a welcoming and chatty

thing to say • Make sure everyone understands why data collection is important • Show staff what the data says about visitors

Storing information

• Housekeeping: set some procedures as part of everyday work routines There are some grotty databases out there. One organisation I went into had a database of 48,000 contacts and the box office staff had entered gobbledegook into the first line and the postcode line on loads of files as they’d worked out this got them quicker into the sales process. They have a really large housekeeping challenge now. What information do we need?

• What information does your organisation collect? • What information does your organisation use?

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Q We collect lots of information we don’t need and that we don’t use. Have a conversation with your neighbour and discuss what the key bits of data are that your organisation collects and actually uses.

Responses:

Richmond Theatre We are moving over to a new box office system and we work with TicketMaster and in terms of collecting information, it’s on different levels for us, so it’s difficult for us to standardise questions the box office ask. We look at people who have attended similar shows, so we are very limited in what we use. NFT We can look at the demographic, and we look at people who’ve booked for previous seasons. There are so many different options that it bombards you, and we don’t actually use all of it. The Stables, Milton Keynes We collect standard information such as name, address email address, publicity methods (this is the least useful), as box office don’t put the true response or just tick it afterwards. I don’t, therefore, trust the information. Marcus Wilson, Hi Arts The issue we have in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland is that we work with small community venues with large catchment areas and they don’t have box office systems. People will travel to see big shows. I want to establish a simple database system where they just capture the name, email address and the postcode of bookers. Then, we can e-mail information and it’s so much cheaper. The postcode is essential for us in order to map customers and see how far they are traveling to events.

HM – so your approach is to capture the minimum data because you know that’s what you want to use. I think you are better capturing minimum data and then using it in a planned and strategic way. You know you can trust the data as the staff only have a couple of things to capture, and you are not confused by so many options and you have a clear and systematic idea of what you are going to do with the information.

• Understand customers better • Divide them into target groups

Don’t forget people are individuals and the target groups have to be meaningful. There is no such thing as the contemporary dance audience. Four out of five attenders of contemporary dance say they are not particularly interested in dance. The people who are least likely to go to a dance event are the people who’ve been in the past year. So if we mail the people who have been the year before, you can get a 40% response rate. It’s about what the customers think,

not what we think as marketers.

• Overview: to make strategic decisions and to focus your marketing • Detail: to deliver a more personalised service to individual customers to develop their

2. Analyse the information

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loyalty and trust We need to have an overview, so we can make the big decisions, but we also need to look at the detail because we need to give people a real personal service. Have a look at the handout – www.a-m-a.co.uk/images/downloads/HeatherMaitlandHandout.pdf you have a lot of boxes, devised by Gill Jaggers some 15 years ago. This is a planned and systematic way of looking at an audience. This is for a real venue. They have put some gloss on it so that they’ve decided that the people who are coming to one art form are different to people who’ve been to several things. They want to cross these over, so they’ve separated them out. They’ve also outlined that they need to speak differently to each target group. So you can see along the bottom that they divided them up. But they also decided to target people on the doorstep, and separated them from people who live further away. The problem is that there are an awful lot of numbers. Can you see any patterns on this handout? What’s the first thing that helps us analyse the data? Look for the big numbers and then look for the small numbers, and I’d look for each column. The next thing is to ask is if there are any patterns you can see across the columns.

2. Analyse the information

Frequent attenders (4 - 5 events in 2005/6)

35518817

Very frequent, loyal attenders (6+ events

in 2005/6)11341862

Volunteers31

On the door step

IndividualsGroupsSchools

Q What do you think is happening with this venue? Answers:

There’s a huge gap in the middle; they seem to be either very frequent or very infrequent attenders.

2. Analyse the information

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There are a lot of people who are on the doorstep who have been once; there seem to be lots of local people who are lapsed.

Q Any thoughts about any of the other columns?

I look after groups and it’s interesting that groups just come once in a year, and if they could increase that they would increase their box office income.

HM – yes, these are people who book for their pantomime, and I’m sure there might be some other offer, e.g. children’s shows, they could make them. The group visitors are not being cross-sold, and that seems a missed opportunity. With the schools they’ve got 168 schools which have never booked tickets and there is no real reason why they can’t. They need some strategic planning, sending stuff out at the right time before the summer break and then again in September, and also making it easy for the schools.

Interpreting the data looks hard, but it isn’t. You were all making hypotheses about what the data was saying, and this is really important. Come up with the theories and then check it out. What would you do to the people at the top of the ladder? Reward and involve them? Who rewards their customers? Make it personal – the free glass of wine is a good thing; special events like meeting the director, back stage tours etc; Christmas cards; just saying ‘thank you’.

• What did you do in the past? – how do you communicate? – how often? – what do you say? – what happens as a result? What do you want to do in the future? – what really influences customers?

You need to change your marketing campaigns, and it quite often, for arts organisations stops at the previous stage. So, look at the next page in your handout, and you will see what this organisation has done. On the left-hand sheet you will see what they did then, and what they will do in the future. Let’s pick a box – schools in the bottom left-hand corner. Before, they just used to post the season brochure. In the future they are ringing to check details, season brochure and schools’ letter nine months in advance. It’s a very basic error to be sending information at the wrong time to schools. I wasn’t entirely convinced about their future marketing activity because if you look, you will see that there are lots of offers for customer segments in the future. They were convinced this would work for them. Q How can you persuade a customer to do something different without giving them

money off? Answers:

3. Change your marketing campaigns

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Adding value to the performance by perhaps offering pre-performance talks etc? The exclusivity of seeing something either before everybody else, or something extra, e.g. the back stage tour.

Doing something related to the main event, e.g. a documentary on a visiting company.

Technically you need to be really clear about what you are doing to each group and then you need to be able to find that group again. You need to put a label against target groups that everybody in the organisation understands. You need to work with your whole team to create the labels, because you will all want to use the data. I’ve discovered that performing arts organisations stalk their audiences. I made a big mistake three years ago; I went to see Le Costume at Warwick Art Centre. I live 2.5 hours drive from Warwick and they have sent me information every fortnight for three years, and it’s a complete waste of money because I would only go there for a special event. If you look at the AMA website, in the old conference reports, you will see some really good stuff about CRM. There is an example in Revolving Doors – at the South Bank they were only

mailing 8% of their database over and over again, and ignoring all their other customers.

Q Let’s look at the back page of the handout. There is a grid for you. How would you

divide your audiences? Response:

By their needs and/or their interests. They could be into traditional things, or experimental things and that will affect their behaviour. Ask them about their attitudes, not their potential art form interests, and then you can segment by their needs.

Newcastle Theatre Royal

Change your marketing campaigns: be holistic

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This is an example of some work by Katie Raines, who is a specialist in CRM and the arts. She’s related three kinds of relationships the venue has with customers – frequency, membership and giving, and can you see how planned it is? New attenders, non-attenders and irregular attenders are on the free mailing list, but once they become irregular they ask them to pay £5 per year for the mailings (it actually costs them more than that to mail it out). What they are doing is getting the customer on the first step to say that they like you as an organisation. It is then more likely that they will become friends and/or donors. They tested just simply mailing their irregular attenders cold or mailing those on the paid mailing list, and the latter responded better. They worked out that it wasn’t worth mailing the rest of the irregular attenders, so it ended up saving them so much money. You can see that they are asking regular attenders for £5 but also then asking them to become friends, then asking friends to become regular donors. Does anybody else do this where they combine their information about customers with that about donors? Quite a lot of computerised marketing systems enable you to do this, e.g. even older versions of PASS. (no response) Any questions about that? Q How do you communicate with your audience what you are doing, without

annoying them? A You let them on in the secret – you say ‘it costs us this amount every time we send you

this brochure – could you help us out?’ Think about what charities do, when they send the freepost envelope out and then saying ‘it helps us if you put a stamp on this’. You can say ‘we’re doing a campaign to get non attenders to share your delight in enjoying opera’. People are very loyal if you are open with them.

At Trinity Arts Centre, Gainsborough they were promoting contemporary opera (Music Theatre Wales) and they’d had quite a middle of the road programme before this. The Director wrote to everyone and asked attenders to bring a non-attender with them for free. A few days after the event a customer came into the centre and said ‘I’ve done a

Frequent

Free Mailing List

Stage 2 (£5 per year)

Friend (£40 per year)

Regular attender

Irregular attender

New attender

Non attender

Regular donation

Single donation

Frequency Membership Giving

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very bad thing, I brought my wife and it was so good I’m going to give you a cheque for £40’. If you get them involved in what you are trying to achieve then they are on your side. Another example was a local authority run venue and the council had made some bad town planning decisions and had also increased car-parking fees, and customers took it out on the venue.

• Discover new ways of looking at customers – Willingness to take risks – Frequency of attendance

We are discovering new ways of looking at customers, and couple of venues I am working with are looking at ‘riskiness’, and this is something devised by Andrew McIntyre from Morris, Hargreaves, McIntyre. The way he does it is much more thorough than this; this is the way I can cope with, so it’s shoestring stuff. So, it’s a combination of willingness to take risks and frequency of attendance. This is a regional film theatre somewhere in England and they divided up their programme into these four key areas:

It’s really important, because you annoy a lot of people by asking them for money when they are not ready, and you can also waste a lot of money on this type of campaign. It’s much better to take this planned and systematic approach.

4. Explore the information

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Regional film theatre

High profile mainstream and crossover films, and a few very familiar classic films

A: Mainstream

More complex and ‘difficult’ crossover films, light art house and popular repertory programming

B: Crossover

Most hard core art house titlesC: Challenging

Archive and the more obscure repertory programming.

D: Specialist

They gave everybody a label according to the weirdest thing they had seen, and it worked. The first thing we looked at was their frequency of attendance and it worked. You can see that the people who were coming to unknown films were coming five times a year, compared to 1.7 times a year for people coming to the mainstream programme. Average frequency of purchase

• D Unknown: 5.0 • C Unfamiliar: 4.2 • B Familiar: 2.0 • A Mass Appeal: 1.7

People were moving up a loyalty level at the same time as they were taking risks. So those taking risks were really developing a relationship with the venue. You can carry out more analysis of this. Here is yet another grid:

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Regional film theatre

6 or more times

3 – 5 times

TwiceOnce

0%0%0%1%A: Mainstream

2%10%12%29%B: Crossover

8%12%8%13%C: Challenging

1%1%1%2%D: Specialist

Q As you can see, it’s systematic and planned. How would you interpret this grid? Responses:

Could it be that on the mainstream line you go once for a treat and then that’s it for the year?

HM Yes, very few people are coming to see mainstream things. They might be coming to

other things. Why might they be doing that?

- It might be coming out later in the run, and people might have already seen the film on DVD.

- They could be getting competition from other multiplexes in the area. HM This is a venue that refuses to have popcorn, and maybe that’s what mainstream

attenders want. Maybe they were doing mainstream films infrequently so they hadn’t got a loyal audience for this programme.

The 29% for crossover that occurs once, could be the awards season – people tend to come out for that type of stuff.

There’s a big two by three part of the grid. It almost seems not worth bothering with the mainstream programme as well. I don’t expect regional film theatres to show the mainstream.

HM Yes, that would be a really strategic decision. I would be worried about the people in

the once a year block. They only had a paid for mailing list, and they weren’t putting ads in local papers. People just weren’t hearing about what was going on.

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Stamford Arts Centre • Season brochure costs 91p to design, print and mail • Total income: £36,389 • Total ‘profit’: £34,025

We looked at spring 2005. We asked if they could afford to spend 91p on every customer. So they are making a lot of surplus on that but this is how it panned out in terms of response rates:

Prioritising resources: response rates

D: Unknown

C: Unfamiliar

B: Familiar

A: Mass Appeal

Once Twice 3 – 5 times

6+ times

14% 28% 80%

Prioritising resources

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Prioritising resources

6+ 3-521

£2,007£670£403£566A

£11,859£1,259£552£312B

£9,204£1,899£937£617C

£3,090£511£102£37D

Season brochure ‘profit’

They are still making a profit from their left hand column, and if you look they are making a surplus of £566 and it’s still worthwhile, but what I did want to ask is why people aren’t responding to the season brochure. So we did a bit of research where the box office rang some people and people said ‘there’s too much choice’. Some of them were also traveling two hours to see specialist music events. It’s really worth looking at where your resources are getting the best return. So, just putting things into context, it’s really worth putting key factors into grids in order to explore them.

So, what is CRM? CRM is:

• understanding individual customers’ needs • using that information to make relationships with those customers more productive (you

have to define what productive means to you) • looking at the whole relationship with the customer (attenders and donors) • planned and systematic (use the grids I’ve shown you) • investing resources to get a better return

What CRM isn’t CRM is not rocket science

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Yinka Adegoke has been a business journalist for twelve years and is currently US columnist of Marketing Week. He is a former deputy editor of New Media Age, Europe’s leading digital marketing title and has been a regular contributor to The Guardian and The Financial Times. He is also a regular business commentator for broadcasters including BBC TV and Radio, CNBC and ITN News. Prior to New Media Age, Adegoke worked on a number of publications including Music Week, Music Business International, and Precision Marketing. In addition, he has written for titles including The Times, Broadcast, Retail Week, Untold and In-Store Marketing. During his time on these publications, Adegoke has developed an in-depth knowledge of business, with specialist interest in the rapid evolution of industries including marketing, media, music and retail due to the impact of new technologies. Alan Brown is a noted author, researcher and management consultant in the nonprofit arts industry. Prior to forming his own consulting practice, Alan served as president of audience insight LLC and associate principal of AMS Planning and Research Corp., where he studied audiences, visitors and patterns of cultural participation in almost every major market in the US His work focuses on understanding consumer behaviors related to arts participation and raising the profile of consumer research in the arts industry as a whole. Within the past two years, Alan has directed proprietary studies for Disney Theatrical Productions, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Joyce Theater, the Aspen Music Festival and the University Musical Society, among others. He currently serves as evaluator for the concert companion project, a new technology initiative of the Kansas City Symphony. Currently, he is leading a consortium of fifteen university presenters in a ground-breaking study of the values and motivations driving attendance and donation. Elaine Clark has been employed in the IT industry for over 30 years, and has worked her way through various roles from programmer to systems analyst and project manager. She is a working mum and lives in Surrey with her two sons. After working for fourteen years with a major bank and then in various IT management roles she took up the challenge as head of information technology for Chelsea Football Club nine years ago. Chelsea FC has a network of around 500 PCs based in three locations around London and the South East. Elaine’s main role is the control and management of all IT operations/systems/telecoms and technical staff. Chelsea FC is based on the 11.5 acre stadium site at Stamford Bridge in Fulham. Areas requiring specialised systems include arena management, ticketing, access control, retail/merchandising and mail order, hotels, meetings and events and CRM. Rachel King started her career at EMAP Business Publishing 1992. From there she moved central sales at United Provincial Newspapers and onto a role with magazines at EMAP Élan youth titles. In 1997 she joined Guardian Newspapers Ltd, where she has progressed through a variety of roles across agency and client sales including agency group head and client solutions manager. In 2002 Rachel was a founding member of a new strategic development team dedicated to a more customer focused thinking and delivery of creative solutions. Since June 2004 Rachel has been working as business integration manager between Guardian Unlimited and the Guardian and Observer display client teams. Her primary focus is working with existing teams and clients to increase cross media knowledge and to activate cross media solutions. She has been a representative to the Newspaper Marketing Agency since 2002 and has worked on projects with the IAB and AOP. Rachel is married and lives in central London. Heather Maitland is an arts consultant with current clients including Arts About Manchester, Shape, the disability arts agency, Dance Touring Partnership and Nottingham City Council.

Speaker biographies’

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Heather is the Research Associate at the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick. She has worked for a wide range of arts organisations: from the smallest of touring theatre companies to running the London end of the Royal Shakespeare Company's marketing operation and including both classical and contemporary dance. She worked on audience and art form development as head of two of England’s audience development agencies. Heather has written seven books on arts marketing, most recently Navigating difference: cultural diversity and audience development published by Arts Council England. She is director of the Theatrical Management Association’s week long marketing course in the Republic of Ireland and has been a tutor at Druidstone for nine years (four as director). Heather is currently working with small venues in the East Midlands and the Republic of Ireland and with large organisations programming dance to help them analyse their box office data and use the information to develop closer relationships with audiences. Vicky Mudge has come from an accounting background having worked for a hotel group as management accountant for eight years. When the opportunity arose within the group to take over the role of systems administrator she moved into IT, and found that she had an aptitude for systems, especially data analysis. She later moved into business consultancy with a major software company within the sports industry and it was from here that she met and eventually moved to Chelsea Football Club. Vicky’s role within Chelsea FC is data manager where she is in control of all the company and third party data. She is also the company data protection officer and is fully occupied with the marketing strategy, data reporting and campaign management. She is currently in control of creating a data warehouse to facilitate all of the above activities to develop CRM and create and manage a single customer view. Roger Tomlinson is regarded as an expert on developing online technologies for ticketing and marketing. For the AMA he writes www.ticketing.org.uk to provide an advice and information service for the arts and entertainment industry. He wrote the books Boxing Clever, Developing and Managing a Website and the Box Office Marketing Guides, all published by Arts Council England and JobWatch (about equal opportunities recruitment), and the Data Protection Guide, both published by the Arts Marketing Association. He is currently writing a revised edition of Boxing Clever for the Australia Council and Creative New Zealand. Throughout his career he has been a trainer, seminar leader, keynote speaker and conference organiser. He has delivered sales and customer handling training; he specialises in marketplace analysis; he has written functionality specifications for computerised systems and handled the tendering and procurement process. He has completed major studies on the integration of ticketing across arts and entertainment organisations and has consulted on this subject in major cities in Europe, the US and Australasia. He carried out feasibility studies and set up the collaborative arts marketing agencies in Birmingham, West Yorkshire, Edinburgh and Glasgow. He was chair of the Arts Marketing Association from 1996 to 1998. He is chair of the Centre for Performance Research Limited, based in Aberystwyth at the University of Wales, and a board member of INTIX.

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The final session challenged us to measure our impact and check that we have achieved the balanced diet of understanding audiences, developing relevance and purpose, engaging with attenders in a meaningful way and building the audience of the future. Are we succeeding? How can we improve? Keynote speech: Sally Malam (BMRB – British Market Research Bureau) …………… 2 Conference overview / summation, Beth Aplin (Henderson Aplin Partnership) ………………………………………………………………….. 45 Seminars: Evaluating cultural diversity – Orian Brook, Audiences London … 20 How do you know when you are talking to the right people? – Kate Sanderson, West Yorkshire Playhouse and Mark Hazell, Norwich Theatre Royal ………………………………………………………………. 32 Speaker biographies’ ………………………………………………………. 47

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Measure and improve – Sally Malam Go to www.a-m-a.co.uk/images/downloads/SallyMalamKeynote.pdf to download the Power Point presentation In keeping the theme of the whole conference, Five Portions a Day, I’ve been asked to have a look at healthy eating campaigns and what they have achieved and, indeed, what they can achieve. This means looking at how campaigns can be measured and improved over time and what lessons, if any, can be applied to arts marketing.

So what can we measure? There are various stages in a campaign development cycle when we can measure and improve a campaign. To help you understand this, it is worth looking at the cycle of campaign development and evaluation so that you can see at what stages we can measure and improve a campaign. With a brand new campaign, the usual starting point is to understand your audience – who are they? What would help you to reach them? One of the earlier portions looked at understanding your audience, so that is not the focus here, though I will come back to this a little later. This audience knowledge then helps you to develop your campaign materials, but you need to test the planned materials before you spend lots of money producing and placing them. Once you are sure your materials say what you want them to say, and that your audience is likely to engage with them, then you can finally launch your campaign. Your main stage of measurement is to evaluate the success of the campaign itself – how did it perform and did it have any impact? This stage of evaluation will be the main focus of this session. The most important thing to note, though, is that your work does not stop there and the key word is cycle - it’s a long term commitment to building a relationship with your audience. It is highly unlikely that that one killer campaign will do the trick and you may need to feed

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your findings back into the cycle, and go round a number of times to create further campaigns, building on your successes, and creating lasting impact. This is certainly the case for public sector health campaigns. Evolution of Public Sector Campaigns I am going to give you a bit of background about how public sector campaigns and, in particular, health campaigns have evolved. So what can we learn from the way public sector campaigns have evolved? These two print ads show clearly how far public sector campaigns have come over time – a move from innocence to much greater sophistication, from nanny knows best, to a much starker approach in road safety.

Health advertising Over the last 30 years or so, health campaigns have taken a whole range of approaches and hopefully you’ll recognise a few of these campaigns, from the shock tactics of the AIDS campaign through to the humour and information of Sid the Slug.

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It hasn’t been a straightforward evolution because when you bring in a new approach, it doesn’t mean you throw out the old. One thing that has developed over time is the tone of campaigns and this can range from the hard hitting shock tactics, for example the smoking campaigns through to providing information, to persuading and motivating people to make a change and supporting people who have made that decision. Improving the nation’s health – tone Tone tends to be rotated over time to vary the approach. People tend to get resistant to shock tactics and that’s a good time to bring in some support. In the smoking campaign, you get both approaches at the same time – the carrot and the stick.

One word of warning – the tone needs to suit the message and the audience for the campaign, to have any chance of engaging them. The healthy eating campaigns tend not to use shock tactics and they are perhaps more like arts marketing in this, compared, say, with the anti-smoking ads showing people dying of smoking related diseases. Improving the nation’s health – subject

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There has also been evolution in the subject matter covered by campaigns. Early ads often addressed risk behaviours such as sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancy, drugs, smoking and alcohol abuse, and this continues today, But more recent ads have also moved on to promote protective behaviours such as physical activity, healthy eating and immunisation etc. And more recently still, particularly in Scotland, there has been a move towards a more holistic approach to health, promoting wellbeing and less traditional health subjects such as parenting and mental health and self esteem. So, public sector advertising has messages of increasing sophistication – but this has implications for what measures you can use to evaluate. It’s easier to measure the impact on smoking, than on mental health, for example. And that is just one of the challenges for health campaigns ... Challenges for health campaigns

The biggest challenge is that you are usually trying to make changes in the long term rather than short term and we will come back to the challenge of measuring this. There’s a clear

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parallel in the arts sector where you want to people to be new customers, but also repeat customers for their lifetime. You may well be communicating with a resistant audience. Even those who recognise the importance of taking measures to improve their health will still have barriers to overcome. People, for example might see the arts as ‘worthy’ and not something they really want ‘to do’ and you have got to get over that barrier. With health, you are trying to change a fundamental lifestyle choice, embedded in social norms, habit and upbringing. In the arts, if a person has never been to the theatre, why should they start going? People don’t want to be told what to do. There is resistance to the government telling people what to do, with accusations of a ‘nanny state’ Health advice appears to be contradictory. Alcohol is bad for you, but red wine is good for you, and so on. Information comes from so many sources – one source tells you to give your child the MMR jab, and another tells you it’s dangerous. These contradictions can act as a barrier to people taking advice or perhaps, more worryingly, a convenient excuse not to do anything. Then there are problems with low health literacy, which makes it difficult to understand information such as food labeling. People can assume a low fat product is healthy despite high salt and sugar content. The attempt to use traffic light systems has been quite a failure and got rejected by the supermarkets. Similarly in the arts sector, it’s something that’s just not relevant to you if you don’t know about different performers, producers etc. How are you going to understand it? Factors like poverty, environment and education also play a big part, and this means that problems have to be approached from a number of directions and given there’s a clear social imbalance in arts attendance, this is particularly relevant for arts marketing as well. And last but not least, health promotion is working in an environment in which it has to compete with higher profile industry campaigns (e.g. McDonalds and Coke ads), persuading people to do the opposite of the message they are giving. In terms of the last point about competition – in the arts sector you may think you have it hard … Advertising spend

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… but look at what the government is up against with healthy eating campaigns. Government spend is much lower than private sector spend on food, soft drinks and chain restaurants advertising. The odds do seem to be stacked against the health promotion campaign. How can it ever compete? Well, social marketing does have the advantage that it is not trying to sell you anything, it’s not going to cost you money. However, it is asking for a serious personal investment and for people to change the habit of a lifetime. Collaboration?

One way around this is partnership working, using sponsorship, common branding, or jointly funded campaigns and this can increase the reach and power of your campaign without needing to find more budget. The difficulty is making sure it does not dilute your message. You need to ensure you have matching or at least complementary tone, brand values and message. Would the government want to join forces with McDonald’s healthy options, while they are still pushing more conventional fast food? Jamie Oliver is another big question – help or hindrance? He’s clearly an advocate for healthy eating but at the same time, he’s got a lot of ideas of his own. Would he put the government on the back foot? And he does have that connection with a particular supermarket …

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What can campaigns achieve? So – seeing how public sector campaigns have evolved, and the challenges they face – but what can they actually achieve?

The government acknowledges that it cannot MAKE people change their behaviour just like that – the best approach is to give them the information they need to make their own choice. The key message here, and one that applies to all sectors, is the NEED TO BE realistic about what your campaign can do. While you would like your campaign to make everyone attend your event, and be converted into regular customers, realistically this is not going to happen. You need to acknowledge that this does NOT mean your campaign has failed. What can we change?

So what can we change? Well the first thing you can influence is people’s knowledge – making them aware of something. This can often be achieved relatively quickly, though getting them to remember it may be a bit longer term. Influencing attitudes is the ultimate goal of changing behaviour and this is a much longer term ambition. You need to be realistic about how much you can change and over what time period.

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Smoking in Britain 1974 –1988

If we look at smoking prevalence over a period of 24 years you can see how slow behaviour change can be. There have been anti-smoking campaigns pretty much every year since 1974 – but if were measuring just smoking levels as an indication of success, each campaign would be deemed a failure, since there is generally no significant change year on year, BUT there is a long term effect suggesting a cumulative effect. How does behaviour change?

It helps to try to understand how behaviour changes. There are lots of models of change – this example is used in evaluating health campaigns. It is not simply the case that people either do or don’t do something. They are somewhere along a continuum of behaviour, from having no intention of doing something, through to regular behaviour, with lots of stages in between, from planning to do something but not just yet, through to having given it a go.

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And people don’t move through the continuum neatly either. They may have a go, fail, and go back down to thinking about trying again at some point, meaning that getting people to do something once does not mean they will do it again any time soon. People may have done something once, but might never do it again. So, as well as looking at new attendance figures for your venue, you need to look to see if they come back again or whether it’s a different bunch of attendances every single time. The main point is that behaviour doesn’t just change over night – and if someone has no interest at all in something, or is opposed to something, you could come up against a brick wall, and they are not going to change as the result of one campaign, unless it is a very EASY change to make and has a lot of benefit and no personal cost. For anything else you need to find a way to get them over that wall, and thinking about doing something. So, bearing this in mind, how can you judge the success of your campaign in the short term and the long term?

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What should we measure?

In the short term you can measure awareness of the campaign – you need this to have any effect! Also take out measures – what did they think of it, was it for them, did they get the message and so on. You can measure changes in knowledge in the short term. If you are giving them a simple message that is ‘new news’ in particular – e.g. message of effect of passive smoking on kids from the DH ad – a new take on something. With really easy win behaviour, you may be able to measure this in the short term. In the arts sector you can also use ticket sales metrics to give you evidence as well. But behaviour is in the long term and that is the way your really need to measure it. In the longer term you can also track knowledge, attitudes and behaviour, remembering they include the stages of change rather than just an ‘all or nothing’ measure. All of these measures can be fed back into the cycle of development and evaluation seen at the start to help develop your long term campaign strategy further. Five-a-Day: A Scottish Case Study To help illustrate all this I am going to use a short case study – the healthy eating message in Scotland, particularly the five portions a day message.

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NHS Health Scotland and Scottish Executive have run the campaigns in Scotland over many years. The campaigns tend to be mass media – TV, press, radio, cinema and posters. They tend to be aimed at the general public, particularly those in the lower social grades. In the short term, they evaluate campaigns using a survey – there has usually measures of incredibly high recall of the campaigns, and they tend to be perceived positively. Since the campaigns have been going on for a long time, focus in this case study will be on longer term behavioural measures that are collected separately in the Health Education Population Surveys – findings from the first eight years were published in 2003, though updated each year. Very different ads on healthy eating were used. The first ad was about simple information and hints. It’s very short, snappy and to the point.

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The second was a more holistic, sophisticated message embedding the idea of healthy eating within the idea of family communications.

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So what impact have these and other campaigns had? Knowledge, motivation and behaviour

Looking at a few measures of success – there were campaigns going on throughout this period about healthy eating – some with the five a day message. Knowledge started from a very low base of only one in five, rising to two in three by 2004. This is a very simple message, if we ignore confusion over what a portion is! You can see a very rapid rise over time – even year on year – but even so, there would be some years when you might think they hadn’t been particularly successful. Again, it is the cumulative effect that is important. What we can’t do is definitively link this increase to the campaigns themselves, but is likely that the campaigns fed in to this, along with other activity, such as supermarkets jumping on the bandwagon particularly more recently. Before we get to behaviour, we need to look at motivation - wanting to eat more fruit and vegetables and this is much slower to change than knowledge - just a little over time. Behaviour itself, perhaps counter intuitively, has gone up more quickly, from 18% to 33%.

The problem here is one of social desirability. As people increasingly know that they should be eating those five portions a day, so they are more likely to over-report their actual behaviour. If you have measures such as ticket sales, you’re on much safer ground but if

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you’re having to collect your information in some other way, you’re going to have to need to think quite carefully how you’re going to do this. Even if this measure over-represents actual behaviour, this is still more evidence that they know the message and they know what they SHOULD be doing it, which should motivate them to change.

Eat Five-a-Day: Differences in 2003

If we look at those who eat five a day in more detail, we can see clear differences by age, sex and social grade in 2003 – this helps us see who still needs to be targeted. If you remember, the core target of the campaign was those in the lower grades and they’re clearly still lagging behind. Eating Five-a-Day: the Increasing Inequality If we look at this over time, worryingly, we can see that the gap in the proportion eating five a day between the most and least affluent has grown over time. This was a clear learning that needed to be addressed in future campaigns.

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Different barriers to healthy eating

One way of doing this was to try to work out how different groups react to the idea of healthy eating, to look at what stops different people taking on the behaviour. If you looked the top line data, you would assume that lack of willpower, followed by expense were the key barriers. However, if we look at the bottom bar, we can see that lack of willpower is more of an issue for the higher socio economic grades, and perceived expense is a bigger factor for lower socio economic grades. That might not necessarily be real expense so that barrier needs to be removed if you are to have a chance of getting that group engaged. There are clear parallels here with the arts.

Further audience enlightenment One clear message emerges – that there are social inequalities in healthy eating campaigns and I’m sure this is also an issue for the arts sector where there are clear patterns among audiences by social grade as well. There are steps you can take to feed that learning back into the next cycle and come up with your next campaign. It is important to keep going round the cycle to build on the effects of each campaign.

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To help you reach these groups, you can use tools such as audience segmentation and I thought it would be helpful to show you an example using the British Market Research Bureau’s TGI data that many of you will be familiar with. This information produced by our ‘Enlightenment’ team.

Segmentation is based on data from seventeen countries and 350,000 adults. The graph above is based on British data. Demographics, activity, foods bought and attitudinal statements towards eating have been fed into this. It puts people together in particular clusters – the bigger the blob the more people there are in Britain who belong to that cluster. They are plotted on two axes. Up the side you can see their tendency to eat healthily. Along the bottom you see how difficult they are to reach. If they’re further to the right they are likely to be more difficult to reach through your marketing campaign. There is a third dimension shown in colour. The blue bobs identify those who are most likely to be open to new healthy eating initiative. I’m not going to go into each group here –there isn’t time - but you could do a very similar exercise for the arts sector to try and find out who your audiences are and what the barriers are. What I am going to do is focus in on one of those group - the indulgers – not the most or least healthy eaters, but relatively difficult to reach ...

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Enlightenment tells us all kinds of things about this group to help us reach them. Who are they? They are mums from lower social grade – so they influence the family diet as well. What drives them? Obviously, their families, but they also want to be young looking and attractive so perhaps that could be used as a driver in a campaign. It tells us what media they use so you have an idea how to target them, what brands they use, so you could use partnership marketing and so on. It gives us a lot of information that can be used to more fine tuned way to getting to these people rather than just social grade. OK, my brain is full now Onto the home straight now. I am sure that you have been bombarded with information over the last few days and you can’t possibly remember all of it – so what is really important from this session?

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The main thing to remember is that behaviour change is slow, and preceded by changes in attitude or desire to change, so be realistic about what each campaign can achieve and think about what you measure when evaluating success. Behaviour change is slow, particularly if you want it to be sustained in the long term. You may want to think about collaboration and partnership working remember the need to have a match in tone, aims etc for you to benefit. And finally, if you want to bring about a true and lasting change in attitudes and behaviours, then you are in this for the long haul. You need to develop and evaluate each campaign and then go back round the cycle, building on what you have learnt to make the next campaign work for you.

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Evaluating Cultural Diversity – Orian Brook (Audiences London) Go to www.a-m-a.co.uk/images/downloads/OrianBrookSeminar.pdf to download the Power Point presentation Schedule for this session • What is monitoring? Why do we do it? • Development of Audience London’s Guidelines • Principles, and Practice of Monitoring • Developing a Plan What is monitoring? Why do we do it? Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) • Are there ethnic groups that seem more or less likely to use our service? • Are there differences in the ways that different groups use our services? • What are the possible explanations for these differences? • Do these differences show that there is a problem in the way different ethnic groups see

us, or in the way we see them? • Do different ethnic groups appear to have special or different needs? • Are we meeting the needs of the community we serve? • Have things changed since we last did a similar survey? • Do we need more data or analysis to investigate this further? Why monitor? • Monitoring can be an essential trigger for real change • Also enables responsible reporting to funders and other supporters • Combined, has a role to play in making the case for public support • However, focus is too often on external not internal uses • Guidelines should help you create a process of self-review which can also fulfill funding

requirements Monitoring is NOT • A way to understand non-attenders or non-users • A market-test of a new product, communication etc • Consultation • The only way of building a profile of your audience – other methods e.g. geo-

demographics can be used as the basis of a marketing strategy, but are not suitable for monitoring (I’ll come on to why)

• A way of identifying a potential audience How were guidelines developed? Diversity monitoring project • Worked with seven arts organisations: theatre, museum, art gallery, orchestra,

contemporary dance, mixed arts centre and South Asian venue – these were a cross section of organisations from the very large, Sadler’s Wells dance company to the small community museum in Hackney.

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• Commission for Racial Equality, Association of London Government and Arts Council England also advised

• Attempting to improve their current (varied) practice • Guidelines on collecting and using data about ethnicity and other sensitive information • Improve understanding of purpose and process of monitoring • Recommendations to Arts Council England, London about benchmarking Regularly

Funded Organisations (RFOs) The project was a huge learning experience for Audience London and we learnt about our own job in general and monitoring. We thought that there’d be one set of guidelines, but found that each organisation had developed its own practices and ways of working within each one needed to have incremental improvements. Some had valid and interesting approach already. They just improved their process and understanding – not just the organisations but the actual funding organisations as well. We were lucky that everyone was willing to do this. Activity • Questionnaire conducted at each venue • Interviews with chief executives and marketing staff about purpose and implications of

the project for the organisation • Conducting focus group with different ethnic groups • Primary focus on ethnic diversity as practice is better established, but disability is also

addressed (sexuality not yet!) There is good guidance around these issues of ethnicity from the CRE but not diversity in general. The question in the census is wrong and needs to be changed for the next time around. In terms of sexuality Office for National Statistics (ONS) is not ready to ask any questions about this area. There are some practical issues coming from tests for the labour force survey, where people didn’t understand the word heterosexual. Three key concerns • Organisations being anxious that they would get it wrong • Organisations feeling that there is something offensive about asking the question

(particularly about ethnicity) • Organisations perceptions that they can’t afford it/don’t have the resources Principles and practice of monitoring Three key principles • Comparison to the population: Knowing whether different ethnic groups seem more or

less likely to use your service requires knowing how your users compare to population (whether UK, West Midlands, or local), which means being able to categorise your audiences in a way which matches other information, i.e. the census categories.

• Recording of experience: in order to have a clue about the reasons for the differences, and whether you are meeting people’s needs, you need to ask people. So monitoring can only be meaningful when carried out in a customer care context (i.e. you can’t ask solely demographic questions)

• Self-definition: ONS ‘Membership of an ethnic group is something that is subjectively meaningful to the person concerned, and that is the principal basis for ethnic

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categorisation in the UK…this means that we should rather ask people which group they see themselves as belonging to.’

Q If the ONS question on disability is incorrect can we use this as a comparator? OB The thing is that the ONS is the only national figure available at different regional

/area level. But other organisations also have these such as RNIB, local authorities. The Census figures may be used as the best we have but need to be improved.

What this means • Postcode analysis isn’t suitable doesn’t allow for self-definition or for recording of

experience • Best to ask in a customer care context, as allows for both • Need questionnaire to allow for quantitative comparison and tracking of progress over

time, though focus groups may be a good follow-up to explore issues uncovered • REALLY DON’T ask any staff to stand in the foyer and count people of different colours • Don’t expect box office staff to ask customers when they are booking – they can’t record

the experience, as they haven’t had it yet, plus there is Data Protection ….. Data protection Legislation governs how you collect and use sensitive personal information. The Information Commissioner considers the following as Sensitive Data: • racial or ethnic origin • political opinions • religious or other beliefs • trade union membership • physical or mental health condition • sex life • criminal proceedings or convictions. Q Can you ask if they are already on our mailing list? OB Yes but you can’t use their contact details for marketing. Q How about e-mail questionnaires? OB They are ok, but contact details collected should only be used for this research. You

could put a link on for them to click to sign up to your mailing list. Data protection Restrictions on sensitive information are: a) you do not collect data of which you have no legitimate need Monitoring is considered a legitimate need, but it’s wise to make your reasons explicit on any questionnaire b) the data you store and use is not linked to a named individual other than for research purposes • So really it should not be kept on your box office system • Shouldn’t collect contact information for marketing in a survey • Can only collect contact details for a prize draw, or to recruit people for discussion group

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• Hand out separate card on which people can join a mailing How to ask about ethnicity

• Ask the question exactly as in the Census (see CRE for full rationale) and use all categories, in same order

• Don’t use a free response box and put them into categories afterwards • Question is heavily tested for acceptability • Ethically better as they are defining themselves. With free response, you decide

what that means and may be wrong • Our focus groups show respondents prefer the Census question • Results are comparable with official figures

The question about ethnicity we tested: Q Which ethnic group most closely describes you? Please choose a description with which you identify, or write in another answer, as recommended by the Commission for Racial Equality White White British � White Irish � Other white: __________________ Mixed Mixed White and Black Caribbean � Mixed White and Black African � Mixed White and Asian � Other mixed: _______________________ Asian or Asian British Asian Indian � Asian Pakistani � Asian Bangladeshi � Other Asian: _______________________ Black or Black British Black African � Black Caribbean � Other Black:________________ Any other ethnic group Chinese � Other: _____________________ Acceptability of ethnic monitoring

• Our previous surveys showed a high response rate to ethnicity question • This project asked people how they felt about answering these types of questions –

of over 600 responses, four expressed anything negative, two of them White British • 3.7% didn’t answer the question (4% didn’t give their age) • In addition, two people ticked ‘Other’ and wrote in ‘Black British’ and ‘African

Caribbean’ respectively. • Questionnaire on website of The Voice recorded 93% satisfied with the way the

government records information about ethnicity (re categories) Q How do these questions differ from Arts Council England advice? OB The only difference in the ‘Respond’ document is that they use dual heritage –

however CRE and Audiences London advice is to use census questions. Mixed seems to be preferable. Guidance will change probably again in the 2011 census with a change in the questions.

Hackney Museum seemed to have the best practice of all the organisations we worked with as they were rooted in the community and understood from the start the need – that they had good practice but not best practice as it can always be improved on.

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Dissenters • Advice given here is in no way intended to dismiss objections, which may be

strongly felt and well founded • E.g. those who object to the term ‘Mixed’ and would prefer ‘Dual Heritage’, as well

as Black British and African-Caribbean • But organisations can feel confident that, by following the advice given here, their

monitoring will overall be widely acceptable • Both of the objections above are issues that the Office for National Statistics is

consulting on, and their remit and resources are best placed to find the most preferred solution (seem to be successful so far)

Contextualising the question

• In our questionnaire we said o ‘Your answers will help us to understand if we are offering an equally good

service to everyone in our communities.’ • Qualitative research also tested

o ‘As recipients of public funding we have a responsibility to collect information about our audiences. Please help us by answering the following questions.’

• Discussions showed that the first statement was preferred as it was felt that public would benefit, though better would be a mix of 1st and 2nd

Asking further questions

• You can add ethnic groups interest e.g. Somali, and we have info from ONS on how to order them

• Careful not to cause offence either by omission or by naming. Check for a list of ethnic groups from your Local Authority

• Think carefully about asking more specific questions about religion, language etc: complicated area

• Can raise expectations amongst respondents – what would you do with the information?

• Consider instead asking about e.g. would you be interested in seeing Bollywood films at our venue, rather than asking more questions in order to make assumptions about their needs or likes

Translating the questionnaire For most organisations it’s not appropriate to translate the questionnaire

• If your marketing is in English, it’s unlikely you will attract non-English speakers • Any who don’t speak English may not be able to read another language • Translating into some languages and not others may cause offence • A literal translation may not make sense to the respondent – likely to need a

community worker to go through it with them Asking about disability

• Ask separately about identity vs. access needs, as may well not correspond (and can’t ask only about access needs – hidden disabilities)

• Have separate options for deaf and for disabled, as deaf people don’t necessarily accept the label disabled

• Social model of DDA – don’t ask about nature of impairment, ask what services you can provide

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• In this case, better not to use current Census question! But look out for updated advice.

Question about disability/access needs we tested: Q Do you use any services to aid access such as Large print � Lift/flat access � Induction/Infrared Loop � Other (please describe):______________________ [Most likely to be answered by those with an acquired disability, who are least likely to identify as disabled] Q Do you consider yourself to be deaf or disabled? Deaf � Disabled � Neither � NB This has relatively low response rates – through confusion or otherwise, we don’t yet know Religion and refugees / asylum seekers…

• There is no duty not to discriminate on the grounds of religion in the delivery of goods and services, though there is in employment.

• Religion can be asked about, it is in the Census as a voluntary question (others are not) to which 7.7% didn’t respond

• But there is a high degree of overlap between religion and ethnicity, and ethnicity is usually more detailed (97% of Hindus and 96% of Sikhs and 74% of Muslims are Asian)

• May ask if you think there is a particular issue in your catchment • Don’t ask anything to do with immigration status as this is likely to be met with a

great deal of nervousness or hostility (including questions such as do you live here? or are you here on holiday?, in some areas)

• If you want to understand refugee/asylum communities, suggest that you develop relationships through community organisations

Asking about sexuality

• The Equality Bill 2006 will make it illegal to discriminate on grounds of sexuality in offering goods and services (it’s already illegal for employment and training)

• We didn’t test this. Complicated area, because of different aspects: identity, desire and behaviour

• ONS have had problems testing questions in this area (many people didn’t understand the word heterosexual) and don’t propose to ask about it in the 2011 Census, though there is pressure to do so

• In this case, all that is relevant to us is identity …. • Watch this space for further guidance

Developing a plan Operational issues

• Involve the organisation: consult to get everyone’s buy in • Once system is set up, keep momentum by reporting on value of exercise and what

you have done differently

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• Resources allocated should be appropriate to size of org. you don’t need a big budget to get useful results.

• Organisation with the least resources had the best existing practice in diversity monitoring –showed in everything else that they did that they really wanted to know how their audiences felt about their work

• Can be done in-house or outsourced Planning with a purpose

• Important to think about how monitoring might affect your organisation’s work • What are your measurements of success? • Against what will we measure success? • Is there anything else we need to demonstrate?

Importance of scheduling your research:

• Representation of programme (and better resource management) • ‘Binge surveys’ are very intensive on resources and can give skewed picture of

audience • Repeat, ongoing surveys – better representation • Small samples, long periods – easier to fit in • Scheduling key events

Sample size • Depends on what information you want to collect and what you want to do with it • More than 250 is likely only to be necessary for cross-tabulation e.g. matinee vs.

evening shows • Less than 100 unlikely to be enough to be statistically robust, though might be if your

needs are specific • Results may not always be statistically significant, but can point you towards areas

for further investigation Q How many will depend on what do you want to measure and what are you

going to do with it? OB A sample size of around 150 is ok but under 100 is not going to be robust. Results

may not be statistically significant but might be useful to make you think about things.

Q Yes for example we found that we had lots of visitors statistically of under 21s

and but these were skewed because of GCSE groups. OB Yes there are problems because of different audience and the fact that they give

good figures. But we are only fooling ourselves if we use these. Data collection: representation of audiences Encourage response from a broad range of people, not just those with a sense of entitlement (not the most diverse group). Better to get a representative sample than a big one

• On site: approach people and ask them to fill in a survey, or interview them. Don’t just leave surveys lying around, hoping they will be picked up.

• Telephone surveys: can cost less than interviews and get a representative sample • Postal surveys: get responses from older and keener customers – fine if that’s who

you want to survey • Online surveys: access is not universal, but may be widespread for your audience

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Questionnaire content

• Phrase questions so that they invite responses from a broad range of audience members, and not only those who are already ‘insiders’ to the organisation or the art form.

• Manageable length will encourage more responses • Customary to put demographic questions at end, and start with something easy! • Ask a free response question, in case you missed anything (but not too many!) • Ask if you can contact them for further discussion • Provide an incentive (not linked to your work)

You may want to provide an incentive to answer the questionnaire but not something connected to your organisation, as this doesn’t encourage those who didn’t have a good experience to respond. Perhaps offering shopping vouchers, Amazon vouchers etc, or say that you will donate to charity depending on replies received. Again emphasize that the contact detail is for asking about further research, or prize draw but not for marketing. Resources for further advice Draft of Audiences London Diversity Monitoring Guidelines – please give feedback! www.audienceslondon.org We really welcome feedback from anyone on these as they're not best practice they’re good practice we hope, and we want to get them better. Commission for Racial Equality www.cre.gov.uk Good Practice > Ethnic Monitoring More information about the ethnic and the practicalities of it which can be an interesting read and particularly if you have any concerns about what I’ve been talking about or if anybody in your organisation has. Arts Council www.artscouncil.org.uk Respond: A practical resource for developing a race equality action plan It has a section on monitoring, which is quite short but quite good. Market Research Society www.mrs.org.uk Code/Guidelines Lot of information on conducting research in general, issues of data protection, issues about asking about ethnicity and all sorts of other things including issues about research amongst young people which I should have incorporated in this presentation which is.

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You can conduct research with people under 16-years old but there are restrictions about how you go about doing it. In terms of this public survey I would suggest you only ask people who are 16 years old or older. The restrictions are if someone is under 16-years old you need the permission of a responsible adult to conduct research with them. There may be ways of doing this for example if there with their parents you can ask them on the spot or they’re with their teacher. Also if they’re 14- or 15-years old and they are out without a responsible adult then you can do the research anyway if the research isn’t controversial if it isn’t about sex or drugs. Do research and give them a note to give to their parents. You could send it by post to parents, and ask to give to child. Especially if they’re booking for family performances you can say here’s a questionnaire for your child. Or work with your education department that they may have groups they have a relationship with or schools that they’re working with who’ve brought kids and can talk to them about getting some feed back from the kids. There is also an issue about people working with children needing police checks and you shouldn’t have people dealing with children without one. But probably people in education department would be police checked so that there are ways in which you can do research with young people but I wouldn’t suggest you do it as part of a normal survey. Q There is one organisation that is a media organisation that obviously has a lot

of online content that young people access and I want to do on online survey to get feedback from those young people. How would they get around this?

OB Would that be Dubit? No Foley? OK there are some online, in the same way you

know about the TGI survey that is an omnibus survey that goes out and asks about all kind of things that may be for newspapers, soft drinks, clothing companies, whatever, and Arts Council England for many years has sponsored questions in the TGI survey. To find out what percentage of the population is doing this or that or whatever. You could ask questions about from the population in the same way. In terms of going out and don’t know off top of my head if there is a general omnibus survey of young people but if there is then at least you could put a question on the omnibus survey. I’m not sure in a commercial sense if that would fill your needs in terms of research. You might find that your Local Authority may have a young persons panel of those who are resident that you could ask questions who’ve already signed up, already have their parents permission, who are already regularly meeting with researchers, that is something you could do. In fact we have the greater London authority who has a panel who’ve said we can ask questions of and also interestingly the organisation that has the biggest and most detailed representation of ethnic groups and different parts of the population in London is the Metropolitan police. They have recently set up a panel of 3,000/ 4,000 people within London, all over, groups, ethnicity, ages and so on. We haven’t actually approached them about putting a question to their panel but we could. There are ways around it.

There are online panels that – sorry there’s a difference between an omnibus survey that goes out to a sample of how many different people versus a panel where the same people are asked the questions each time. It is often used for tracking things such as attitudes to nuclear war or whatever or particular brands. In terms of what I was talking about for young people and in getting parents permission and having police checks, there are online panels where they go and ask the same group of questions. There’s one called Dubit and I’m sure there are others. If you wanted to

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ask a general question that wouldn’t be specific to your catchment area then there might be one in your area, you’d have to do some research on that, but generally you could look at using an on line panel.

Q Creative Partnerships have panels of young people OB Good example – anything approved through schools or the education system is a

good way of reaching young people. There is a responsible adult in terms of developing relationship with that school that teacher to get them to understand why you might want to do this research, get their collaboration obviously different schools and teachers that might be easier or hard.

Q For the Hackney museum did you sent it to the community or was it those

attending the museum? OB No this is actually those walking in to the museum. Q It would be interesting to see which communities used that museum and what

they thought of it really. OB Well I guess the thing with this is that Monitoring is finding out who is coming and if it

is radically different to population and then if more people from a particular group they feel unwelcome and not for them etc. It might indicate a problem, but in terms of proportions there will be other things that might be the problem. But yes you may then want to go to local communities, particular communities to ask them to ask how we can serve their needs better. So which is not monitoring it’s about existing users but it could be useful research in finding out how you might, if there’s a problem with your service, how you might change that.

Q I’ve got a question about the Disability question. We do our research here with

face-to-face interviews. It’s a practical thing – if someone clearly has a disability or someone is using a wheelchair – how do you ask them or do you ask them whether or not they have a disability? I train our field workers and seems to me very offensive to say to them do you have a disability but yet can you acknowledge the fact they do? I always find it a bit awkward.

OB I think again we didn’t do focus group on disabled audiences in this case, partly

because we did a lot research with audiences for disability arts. In all the research we have done there is nothing to say that anyone is offended by being asked. I understand what you are saying in terms that it feels a bit stupid by on the other hand it might be in a wheel chair temporarily or in any case they fully understand why your asking and appropriate appreciate the benefits of it and say yes I’m disabled and this venue is hell to get into and why don’t you do something about it. That’s why they don’t mind being asked. That’s all I can say really.

There are other issues about disabled attenders that if you are deaf and say that English is not your first language so you may have more difficulty with the questionnaire. And perhaps having it available on line for somebody who because actually a lot of disabled have had their access needs very substantially helped with new technology, whether its screen readers, and speech recognition helps a lot. So actually have on line link and text version of survey if maybe for whatever reason

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they can’t fill it out on the spot they can go home and fill it out on line really helpful enabling access to research.

Q A practical question. Small sample over a long period – how can I make sure

it’s a representational sample? OB What it depends on what type of venue are, but for a performing arts venue with a

performance starting at half past seven then you might think about asking the first person through door at 7.10 and first person that walks through the door after 7.20. Now it’s possible that they both might say ‘no’, normally if you just leave surveys around you may get lucky and 20% of the audience filling it in. If you go up to somebody then the response rate immediately leaps and you’re more likely for people to say if you ask them – which is why you get more representative responses than if you ask people to fill it in. If the first person says ‘no’ then you ask the next one. That’s a good way or doing it otherwise there’s a temptation that you ask who you think represent your audience or you think you want to hear about or something like that so to have something like the first person after this time every 10th person or whatever.

Q Can I ask something about objectivity? You say sometimes that you outsource

things. OB Sorry, yes, sometimes things can be outsourced to us or whoever or they can do it

themselves.

We could train our staff who want to do it or go about our venues and have a commitment to our venue or we could outsource it to people who have absolutely no idea of who we are have no commitment, have no involvement and can almost put ‘our’ audiences off. It’s really difficult because obviously we want to get the right questions because people for example just standing there with customer care saying did we look after you today or whatever is difficult. Whereas somebody else who has nothing to do with us

I understand your point completely and I think that’s true about people who talk to us. But all the interviewers we use are really experienced in doing research amongst arts attenders not necessarily experts in that venue but then the attenders isn’t necessarily an expert in that venue either. In a sense there are situations when that could be off putting, yes who ever your outsourcing to you want to know their experience in conducting research amongst art attender or in terms of theatres, museums or whatever. The other thing you might want to do if you don’t want to outsource it and you’ve got another venue near by and maybe you don’t want to use your own staff as it might sway the responses or something. Perhaps you can get temporary staff from another venue and pay them to do the survey. Or even reciprocate it, agree with the venue that you’ll release a couple of your staff to go and do some surveys there and they’ll release a couple of staff to come and do yours. They may not be experts in your venue but understand enough about customer care and attenders to be able not to behave wildly and inappropriately.

Q Sometimes people are more honest with responses when they are not your

own staff. OB Yes absolutely. I agree.

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Q I think, talking about our own staff that sometimes because they’re so

passionate there’s almost that element of leading the reply, and the respondent thinks ‘I can’t offend them’.

OB Yes, I think that probably for a lot of this if it’s about designing a questionnaire,

research methodology, sampling, analysing the results in an ideal world there elements at least you’d outsource but of course not everybody has the funds to do that. It depends on resources. In a way, doing it internally is false economy as if they are your staff you are still paying them. So it depends if Front of House are there anyway and asking a few questions is not bad.

Q I think it depends on the research if its quantitative questions with closed

questions then it’s easier but if it’s qualitative where you might be getting defensive about from the perspective of the people in house it’s better to have an external evaluator.

OB Yes I’d agree with that. Q Also you could plan to use students of arts marketing, work with university

and course quite closely. OB True but you need to bear in mind that as with other things it could be a false

economy as there are other investments you need to make. They may be willing to give their time for free but you may need to spend more time briefing, training and handholding than paying for someone to come and do. And that may be a choice you need too make.

Q I would just like to say to the lady who felt embarrassed asking questions that

most people would rather be asked about ethnic background. I wouldn’t want someone to say I was Hindu if I was Sikh. People would rather know what your background is than what the problem is, be a bit more concerned about your audience, rather than just answering yourself. Ideally when we do print and distribution we know the area is Sikh so we can advise our clients because we know the area. Better to ask rather than not.

That is a timely and a current issue that comes up all the time with organisations I work with and has done for several years. It is just brilliant to have these guidelines that Audiences London has done to start to approach these things in a sensible way and there was quite a lot of fear about it as you pointed out. I feel personally much more able to talk to people.

Orian Brook, e-mail: orian@audienceslondon.org Guide to Commissioning Research by Liz Hill www.ama.co.uk

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How do you know if you’re talking to the right person? Mark Hazell (Norwich Theatre Royal) and Kate Sanderson (West Yorkshire Playhouse) Go to www.a-m-a.co.uk/images/downloads/MarkKateSEMINAR.pdf to download the Power Point presentation. Kate Sanderson

What is this about? Welcome to this session today about benchmarking. This is what we are going to talk about: • Two different organisations and their involvement in benchmarking projects – the

Playhouse’s project is a new project, and Mark is going to talk about the Norwich Theatre Royal project which has been going for a longer time

• History and objectives – why we both embarked on benchmarking • What it actually means – in practical terms • Future plans • plus some ideas and practical suggestions if you’d like to set up something similar

West Yorkshire Playhouse Some key facts about our venue: • a big regional producing theatre in Leeds • two theatres (350 seats and 750 seats) • Around fourteen of our own productions each year plus 25-30 touring shows – some of

them co-productions and this presents us with new challenges • Programme ranges from Shakespeare to new writing, dance to musicals • 200,000 tickets sold each year to 50,000 buyers

West Yorkshire Playhouse and benchmarking Why did we want to get involved in benchmarking? In a way we didn’t call it benchmarking at the start; • History of information being shared by marketing directors in three regional producing

theatres:

- West Yorkshire Playhouse

- Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

- Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse We’d established quite a lot of trust and respect for each other when we chatted and shared information, over a number of years • We were each getting information from our regional audience development agencies but

this needed supplementing with information from peer organisations

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• We decided to formalise this sharing of information and create a more structured, regular project, rather than having this ad-hoc communication

What kind of information were we sharing? • How’s the Christmas show selling? • How much did you spend on your website to get it looking like that? • How much do you pay your marketing officer? We were aware we were all trying to

recruit people from the same pool • What’s your research budget this year? Have you got a research budget this year? • What kind of response are you getting to your direct mail?

Why did we want to share information? • Reassurance –have I missed something here? What’s going on? • Ammunition – facts and figures for a board meeting • Ideas – what did you do in this situation? • Advocacy (especially internal) – seeing if we were doing ok compared to our peer

organisations and being able to talk about our performance with confidence • Marketing & business development

Next steps

We held a series of meetings to work out: • what we were trying to achieve – shared and individual objectives • what the ‘shopping list’ of information should be • how we would share this • how often we would share it – annually, monthly, via email or in meetings?

What we came up with • A shared desire to keep it simple – we have to keep reminding ourselves of this; there

was a danger of spiralling into a data trap, getting too involved in the wrong data • A set of organisation-wide, business-focussed ‘benchmarks’ • Some marketing indicators to support those ‘benchmarks’ • Acknowledgement of the need for more serious thought about how and how often to

share the information – we need to do more of this as well • A desire to involve more organisations – as we began to look a the information it’s clear

it would be useful to involve more organisations, e.g. the whole of the big ten regional producing theatres in order to get a more meaningful average

Organisational information: Here are the organisational pieces of information we looked at:

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• Breakdown of income (grants/ box office etc) • Breakdown of expenditure: - Production - Admin - Marketing - Etc

• Numbers of: - in-house productions - performances - touring productions - seats sold

• Ticket yield – net income divided by the number of seats sold

Marketing information Here are the pieces of marketing information we looked at: • Marketing costs per seat/ earned pound • Salary breakdown for marketing staff • Marketing spend in detail: - Print - Research - Distribution - E-marketing - Direct mail - Photography - Advertising - Training - Postage

What have we learnt so far? There are huge differences in the ways we define and report… and in what’s included in our figures:

• is postage included in the marketing budget or does it go through the franking machine (and how honest do you want to be about that?)

• what about envelopes and other stationery? • who pays for photocopying? – organisation or marketing budget? • who pays for the AMA subscription? – central staff development budget or marketing

expenditure It was therefore really important to talk these issues through together in face-to-face meetings, as we all interpreted them differently. It was important not to make assumptions about what was or was not included.

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What have we learnt so far?

• Starting to understand different organisational cultures and how they affect spend and activity; was the website being looked at as an education resource, a marketing activity, a sales tool? – all of those things meant in some cases it was coming out of the marketing budget and in others it wasn’t. This didn’t particularly matter – we just had to be clear about what we were reporting.

e.g. West Yorkshire Playhouse and the Royal Exchange had long held assumptions about the different balance between campaign and season activity; when we picked out the information we realised the differences were not so great

• Highlights the need to be flexible in marketing approach

What have we learnt so far? • Keep it simple! • Shakespeare or Macbeth – don’t assume that further, and potentially complex, analysis

is necessary when the raw data is more revealing • None of us spent any money on research in 2004-05 – this means we weren’t coding

anything to a research budget, we were sneaking research expenditure into other budgets

What next? • Refine the data and look for absolute clarity on what’s included where – make notes

and/or put detail on the spreadsheet because we will forget, and we may wish to hand the data on to our successors

• Specific research areas: e.g. tracking comparative spend on e-marketing (but we’ll need to define it first…) over the past 4-5 years, and we are all dealing with it differently

• include more theatres – understand the broader context in which we’re working • continue to question the ways we work... gaining more of an insight into the ways we

each approach marketing

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Mark Hazell

Norwich Theatre Royal• a big presenting theatre• 1,300 seats• range of product from

Postman Pat to grand opera

• sold 360,000 tickets last year to 58,000 ticket buyers

• Turnover £6m

One of the questions I am already asking myself is that Kate is selling 200,000 tickets a year to 50,000 purchasers and it is one of the little by-products these types of exercise throw up. The majority of our turnover (£6m) is generated through the box office. I run a department that is responsible for programming, audience development and education, so a lot of it is about engaging audiences as well as selling.

Norwich Theatre Royal and benchmarking • How: Begun by Mike Grayson (Nottingham) to compare business performance; the

composition of the group has changed over the years • When: Started 1998 – we actually started in 1995 and for the first 3 years we did it on

paper! • Why: Improve business performance, and advocacy • Outcomes: Improved business performance, internal and external advocacy, building

improvements; these outcomes are not exclusively attributable to the benchmarking project, and it’s the cumulative result of this work which has lead to the advocacy etc

• What next: More detailed marketing comparisons We publish an annual survey each year and we want to be transparent and accountable to the local community. The survey covers lots of information on audience behaviour, and also information on the softer engagement with the community, to do with education, outreach etc. We are one of the biggest arts organisations in Norfolk and in the East of England. We sit on the board of other arts organisations; we provide box office services for other

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smaller arts organisations that can’t afford this resource. We can also aggregate data for the county because of this as well.

The Norwich story • currently it’s a group of fourteen regional presenting venues; at one time it was up to

around 20; various theatres have dropped out; the smallest is 850 seats and the largest 1,700

• annual benchmarking figures • business-led approach • single sheet of paper – this is one of the reasons it works • primary focus on sources of income • confidentiality – what I am going to show you are averages against our own figures

The group of venues The following venues across the UK work in the group – there are no Scottish venues in the groups: • Belfast Grand Opera House • Bradford Alhambra Theatre • Cardiff New Theatre • Darlington Civic Theatre • Dartford Orchard Theatre • Hull New Theatre • Leeds Grand Theatre • Newcastle Theatre Royal • Nottingham Theatre Royal • Norwich Theatre Royal • Southend Cliffs Pavilion • Swansea Grand Theatre • Westcliff Palace Theatre • Wolverhampton Grand Theatre

Why we take part • advocacy with local authorities and funding bodies • internal and external discussion document • PR purposes • performance measurement • provision of detailed statistical data

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What we measure Measure Average Norwich Theatre

Royal Seating Capacity 1,153 1,300 No of Performances 347 376 Seats Sold 233,324 346,033 Seats Available & % filled 58% 71% Net Box Office Income £2.92m £5m Average Ticket Yield £12.29 £14.55 Net Payments to Producers & % Retention

£2.3m 20%

£3.9m 23%

We don’t compare deals on individual shows, apart from informal chats etc, which are confidential. One of the key things about the venues involved in the project is that we are all independent venues (those venues involved in the larger chains have pulled out of the survey) and we don’t have the buying power to make deals they make. This section is about the primary value for the venues involved; it’s about ancillary sales profit. We work from a 1930s building and we have small foyer space, and we are looking at whether these sales are made from fixed points or from ambulatory points. It’s an issue for us across all of these measures. Measure Average Norwich Theatre

Royal Programmes Profit £31K

£0.13 per head £40K £0.12 per head

Merchandise Profit £23K £0.10 per head

£17K £0.05 per head

Catering Profit £95K £0.40 per head

£64K £0.19 per head

Sweets/Ice Cream Profit £71K £0.31 per head

£100K £0.29 per head

Total Ancillary Income Profit £222K £0.90 per head

£223K £0.65 per head

Here are some other things we measure:

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Measure Average Norwich Theatre Royal

Salaries and Wages £961,258 £846,516

Staff Training (as % of staff costs)

£2,536 0.23%

£14,098 1.67%

Marketing Costs (& cost per seat sold)

£326,936 £1.41

£496,559 £1.44

Number of Friends 1,133 10,500

Friends income £17,615 £188,022

Sponsorship Income £32,683 £31,043

Arts Council Grants £46,119 £0

Local authority support (excl rates and debt)

£532,157 £90,300

Local authority recharges

£27,217 £0

LA/AC support per seat sold

£2.48 £0.26

LA/AC support per seat sold excl recharges

£2.36 £0.26

Salaries and wages Our salaries figure is below the average, possible because wages are lower in the East of England and the cost of living is lower as well. I think the average and our figure for staff training is really low. It’s a damming figure I think. Marketing costs Marketing costs should include salaries – our figure does include this. I am not sure if others do; they may have put marketing salary costs into the main salaries field.

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Number of Friends The number of friends; we have 10,500. I am always surprised how inactive the marketing of friends’ schemes is at other venues. We have a specific market place in Norfolk that has enabled us to get that many friends; we have a more stable population base, people don’t move around as much. We have less passing trade – they are either coming to Norfolk or they are not. It’s also pretty difficult to get in or out of the county, and there is a more established sense of cultural identity. You can see this through support of other institutions e.g. Norwich City Football Club which has more season ticket holders than any outside the premiership; it has higher attendances at its matches than at least three premiership clubs. Sponsorship income We have invested now in a fund-raising department; prior to that it was our responsibility in marketing but it’s an area we could do better in. Local authority support This is a really interesting one for us. We get £90,000 now and we used to get a lot less. Local authority recharges I should explain that the building in which we operate is owned by the local authority but we lease it (the charitable trust) and we are responsible for its maintenance; it costs around £140,000 per year. The combined local authority and arts council support per seat sold/excluding recharges Ours is 26p and excluding the recharges comes down slightly and I’ll explain why this figure was a key one for us to discover later on.

Key findings These are both to do with this particular year and over the past few years: • Norwich Theatre Royal played to over 13% higher than the average • Average ticket yield is higher than average • Retention compares well • Sales from fixed points less than half the average (re ancillary sales) • Ambulatory sales compare well • Staff training budget is 6 times the average • Friends’ numbers are 9 times the average • Friends’ income is 10 times the average • Proportions have not changed through the years

Outcomes • uplift in local authority funding of 15%; we were able to demonstrate with hard evidence

that other theatres were better funded by local authorities than we were; this was at a time of general cut backs in local authority spending. Not in isolation, we include evidence of the economic impact the theatre has every year, which is about £40m. We can argue that this gives a good return to the local authority for a small financial

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investment. • good internal relationship with Trustees • positive PR • recognition of NTR as a serious business by the business community; we are showing

that we can set and measure performance indicators and talk in business language. • new business objectives (eg refurbishment plans) which are very much about increasing

customer comfort generally and the size of the foyer; we hope this will lead to more ancillary spending at our venue

• and, of course, the chance to speak at prestigious events like this!

What next? • expand dataset to include more detailed marketing statistics; there are a lot of pitfalls in

this one. With a group of venues that have a history of doing this, starting to exchange much more detailed information could be problematic, but it is worth trying.

• improve strategy to focus more on customer retention; to try and move away from just selling tickets for shows

Other ideas for benchmarking You might want to consider some of the following things. A local authority developed these indicators with the Best Value Initiative in mind. • Performance Indicators:

Economy – financial calculations, net cost of tickets sold, cost per customer head

Efficiency – box office staffing costs per seat sold, average % of tickets sold per show

Effectiveness – number of complaints, % of programme from local groups, % of sales from local authority area, do you have a business plan, marketing plan, other strategies etc

Equality – number of social concessions to specific groups; access performances you provide; number of first time bookers etc.

Final hints and tips • keep it practical – the information has to be useful to each participating organisation on

balance • it shouldn’t be a burden, administratively or logistically, or it won’t get done • don’t try to do everything – data can quickly become addictive • decide what to leave out – we don’t include information on what % of the programme

was made up by types of events and how much income we retain against each event • establish ground rules for sharing information – the main thing for us is confidentiality • assemble dataset as you go along – don’t leave it until you’ve finished the activity you

want to measure (e.g. direct mail results)

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Direct mail results (Norwich) Here is an example of this, which are our aggregated direct mail results over a 4-year period: • 4 year period: 99/00 – 02/03 • 164 separate mailings • 1,450,000 items • 92,017 responses • 272,587 tickets sold • £3,414,415 income • 5.76% average response rate • Accounted for 24% of tickets sold and income • £363,381 cost • Return on investment of 1: 9.4 (for every £ spent, £9.40 income) Just to put these figures into context, the big 10 direct mailers in the UK send out a billion items a year and their response rate is below 1%.

Audience Data UK I’ll finish by telling you about Audience Data UK which is a project funded by all four UK Arts Councils and aims to improve practice around audience data and try to resolve some of the issues about data. We all know it is stored in different ways, we collect it in different ways, we use different categories, and there is no one place where you can go to get national arts information about audiences. The aim of this project, and it is very ambitious, is to try to bring it all together. Part of the project is to test some benchmarking groups so if you want to get involved look at the website, and/or contact the Project Managers on the addresses below: • to participate in a peer benchmarking scheme, register via:

www.aduk.org or email: cathy@aduk.org or angela@aduk.org Q&A JG We often think about this benchmarking as improving our practice. Mark, could you

talk about how you use it to lobby? MH The benchmarking stuff on its own didn’t allow us to do this. It’s in the context of

being to provide lots of other economic information about our performance to the press and other businesses as well in our local area. It’s about a cumulative effect, a drip, drip effect.

KS We are looking at similar PR issues in that the big ten producing theatres are looking

at using the data in a big PR campaign in order to communicate the value and volume of what they do.

Alan Love, BDRC

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I want to make an observation really. ALVA, the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, has a series of benchmarking programmes. The main one is their financial benchmarking which they undertake with 70 attractions across the country. One of the key issues especially with such a big group is confidentiality and leaking of information. Their approach is to use a data bureau and a separate consultancy to process the data and there is less risk of leaking of information, and to retain anonymity. MH That’s a really good point, especially as you say, once the group gets larger. Tim Baker, Baker Richards Consulting My question is about the market. Aren’t a lot of these factors about the nature of the market, so you are comparing Norwich, in the middle of a large rural area, with places like Dartford, which is much nearer to London and other larger populations? Have you thought about putting in some simple comparators like population on a 45-minute drive time? MH First thing, yes of course there are different market places and those more external

measurements would vary according to market place. I think the interesting thing to us is about the people who are inside seeing a performance – the market place is irrelevant then. We are all in the business of earning the most money out of people once they are with us. Raising the question about the wider market place, it could be useful to put more detailed marketing measurements into this. One of the reasons this works is that we keep it simple; nobody funds the scheme so asking venues to spend more time getting more information might prove problematic.

KS It is about building up different contexts for the information, so I am sure there is

more we could do. JG You are both from large organisations, but there is no reason why small

organisations can’t do what you have done. KS Absolutely, and they are probably doing it anyway through informal networking etc,

and it’s probably a case of formalising this process. I hope we are having those conversations at events like this.

MH That fear of exposure stems from isolation. People feel isolated within an

organisation, which is why getting together like this is great, but it is a rare opportunity for us.

Heather Maitland, Consultant There are a lot of Irish organisations doing it, and small cinema producers doing benchmarking. They are doing it in a pragmatic fashion and not worrying too much about the photocopying bill, as it’s about getting some instant results rather than agony. MH The implication that photocopying isn’t important? I think one of the things

benchmarking gives you is examining why you do things in a certain way and none of us have enough time to do this and any opportunity to do this is important.

HM Is that why you are focusing on business processes so much Mark? I was surprised

that you weren’t looking at outcomes, like you mentioned churn. I wondered whether you had figures, for example, on lapsed attenders?

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MH I suppose one of the issues is that our initiative is chief executive lead. KS In our case, it was about the marketing activity and not the marketing activity. That’s

a whole other project and I would love to undertake that. Our project was focused on advocacy, and making the arguments etc.

MH It also goes back to the issues Tim Baker raised earlier about market place. The

differences in market place make that kind of comparison much more tricky. There has to be a commonality of interest. I’m sure funders would be interested in that kind of thing, but from a business point of view, not so useful.

MH A lot of us get blinded by data. There is a vast amount we could gain as an industry.

The arts councils are struggling to make an argument for the arts to Treasury etc. There are some really straightforward arguments to be made. For example, we can’t say how many people visit theatres, across our whole industry, commercial and subsidised. Some of the national museums are doing some really interesting work on measuring audiences and they have agreed performance targets with DCMS, now the arts councils have not been able to do this. If we don’t do it, then the government will impose more on us. So, get involved in the ADUK project and drive forward the agenda.

Kate Barrett, the Stables, Milton Keynes What formula did you use to arrive at the marketing cost per seat, and did you use different formulae in both of your projects? MH The amount of money we spent on direct marketing costs, plus salaries, divided by

sold (paid for) tickets. KS Yes, we’ve done the same as Mark, and we have used the same formula. Heather Maitland, Consultant Is there anybody here from a museum that could tell us about MUSE? It’s a project trying to do similar things. MH It’s significant that not so long ago the museums were going direct to DCMS to

negotiate their settlement and Arts Council England was being left in the cold. It’s now interesting that Arts Council England is going with the museums now.

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Conference overview / summation – Beth Aplin Each of the Chairs of the keynote speaker sessions is going to briefly give you their thoughts and the pearls of wisdom they have gleaned during the conference. Just to remind you of the five portions of the conference: 1. Checking the Label - understanding the audiences of today

2. Pick your own - defining purpose, relevance and value 3. Tasting is Believing - getting audiences involved 4. Long Life - building long term relationships 5. Fresh Thinking - measuring and the virtuous circle. We have the huge advantage of dealing with a product that can change people’s lives. One of the issues we’ve been learning is that we live in a rapidly changing world and have been shown many mind-blowing statistics of what is happening in the virtual world of the web. We’ve also been given the view that the arts is going to have a different relevance and resonance for different people, so how are we going to get all those messages to different people? Alan Brown was talking about peer to peer marketing and that however sexy new technology may be, it is a means to an end and the tail should not be wagging the dog. So I think we’ve got an interesting challenge. Today’s technology needs to be tailored, tamed, exploited but in such a way it enables us to have rich relationships with a large number of people. I’m now going to invite each Chair to give their thoughts. Carol Jones Just four words from this morning’s session: - Be Curious - Keep Fiddling Lucy Shorrocks One of my big lesions – keep it really simple and the importance of the lessons of the importance of the relationship between the art, the audiences and the organisations we inhabit. Those three elements create a virtuous circle. Also you can learn from the bad ‘stuff’ as well as the good ‘stuff’ and that can give you enough as much nourishment for the future as all the good practice. Thank you very much because I’ve had a ball. Joanna Davies As Sally said earlier, our brains are probably full but I think that’s a good thing. The conference has exceeded our expectations this year because of the quality of the speakers. The one thing I’m taking away is that the new technology is fabulously exciting

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but it’s about the people. But all too often we lose that message – it’s about people empowering themselves having new buyer behaviour, having the world at their fingertips. We have to look to ways to encourage them to engage with arts and we have a product that offers really excellent selling points. We can build excitement, a sense of anticipation and the challenge for all of us is to get the people living in a virtual world to engage with the live experience. Simon Drysdale The conference is always a good opportunity to remind us why we first started doing marketing jobs. One of the things I’ve learnt from this year is about going back to basics and remembering there’s some quite simple stuff we can do ‘out there’ and some things we don’t have to re-invent. Claire Eva was spot on in telling us not to re-invent data and information. But (and it’s a big but) we have to be creative and Peter Fisk and Rufus Radcliffe made it clear that creativity in our jobs is not a bolt on ‘extra’ but an essential element of what we’re paid to do. That’s why I entered marketing and it was really reassuring to hear two successful people telling us that that is the way to go. I think it’s been a brilliant conference. I hope you managed to stretch your minds and make some new friends.

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Speaker biographies’ Beth Aplin is a director of Henderson Aplin Partnership, a company she started with Pam Henderson this year after leaving Catalyst Arts. She has spent eight years working as a consultant following eight years working for Select Ticketing Systems, installing ticketing systems and managing a team of seventeen. The Henderson Aplin Partnership works with cultural organisations to obtain, retain and maximise the performance of their staff. Beth works closely with customer facing staff and senior managers to achieve business objectives. Pam Henderson is an accredited executive coach and the previous director of the Arts Marketing Association. Beth specialises in feasibility studies and business planning for ticketing projects, organisational change management, business process review, customer care and staff management and planning. She has delivered training courses on a wide range of topics, facilitates many board retreats and is a regular speaker at AMA events and is vice chair of the AMA. Some recent clients include: Shape Arts, Arts About Manchester, Audiences London, Cambridge Arts Theatre, Library Theatre, Manchester, Arts Line, The Mid Wales Circuit, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, FACT centre Liverpool, the TMA, The Sherman Theatre Cardiff, Newlyn Art Gallery, New Writing Partnership, Dance Touring Partnership, Crea Cymru, Dbug, Arts Council England, Arts Council of Wales and Scottish Arts Council. Mark Hazell has worked for the National Student Theatre Company; British Theatre Association; New Vic Theatre Touring Company; Cambridge Theatre Company; Wycombe Swan Theatre; Guildford’s Yvonne Arnaud Theatre; Cambridge Arts Theatre; Chichester Festival Theatre and Leicester Haymarket Theatre. For the last thirteen years he has been marketing director at Norwich Theatre Royal. He is board vice chair of Creative Arts East (Norfolk’s arts development agency), a member of Visit Norwich Ltd’s marketing committee and a member of two Arts Council England-organised steering committees: one for assessing the impact of theatre on the UK, and the other for audience data. He is married and lives in Norwich with his wife Emma, daughter Lily, and son Wilf. Dr Sally Malam (senior associate director) has been a researcher in the social research unit at the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB) for the past ten years. BMRB’s social research division provides dedicated expertise in conducting social policy research for clients in the public and not-for-profit sectors. We are one of the largest providers of public policy research in the UK, with a team of over 70 dedicated social researchers, comprising a mix of quantitative and qualitative research specialists. BMRB is also the home of TGI, the leading global syndicated survey of consumer habits and behaviour. Much of Sally’s work involves evaluating the success of government initiatives and campaigns, specialising particularly in the area of health. She is the author of numerous published reports and conference papers. For further information please visit our website at www.bmrb.co.uk. Kate Sanderson started her marketing career in insurance before moving into the arts. She was marketing manager at Trinity Arts Centre in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire from 1994 to 1997 before moving to the West Yorkshire Playhouse as marketing manager. She was promoted to head of marketing in 1999, joined the management team as marketing director two years later and is now director of communications, managing a team of 25 across sales, marketing, press and public relations and graphic design. Since 2003, Kate has also been course director of the TMA’s annual residential course, The Essentials of Marketing, held at Druidstone. She will be leaving West Yorkshire Playhouse in August 2006 to start

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work as a freelance consultant and will be course director for the new Essentials of Marketing course in Northern Ireland in 2007. Kate is a board member of Phoenix Dance Theatre.