Category: Marketing

‘Arts Audiences’ new site launch & upcoming web 2.0 event

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arts_audiences

The Arts Council, in collaboration with Temple Bar Cultural Trust, has rolled out a new site focused on Irish arts audience development, www.artsaudiences.ie.  Here’s the skinny on their rationale for the initiative:

  1. Attendance and consumption; attendance for some artforms is falling; we need to increase the frequency with which people come to, for instance, our venue or festival and we need to keep people coming back year-on-year.
  2. Customer service and experience; customers care about more than just the show or event and we need to see what we can do to make sure their experiences are good ones
  3. Working together; arts organisations should collaborate more to speak to and attract audiences
  4. New media; All of us need to know more, to help us take advantage of the opportunities which a new media landscape have brought. We recognise that organisations operate at different levels of online activity and will strive to reflect this as we address this.
  5. Information; we need to address the gaps in our information about audiences – who they are and how they behave. Figuring out what we need to know is a key step in figuring out what to do.

(see the full manifesto here.)

Plans so far include:

  • A low-tech no-cost project where arts organisations will recommend each others work and we will report on what worked and what didn’t
  • A large-scale national promotion of the performing arts for a period of time in the autumn

Future plans include online resource material, and new training & mentoring programmes.

More imminent, however, is a series of one-day workshops on Web 2.0 and audience development to be offered in Dublin, Galway and Cork in September. They’re looking for registration ASAP, unless the slots have been filled already… it’s only €45 for a full day session, and looks to be a promising build on the excellent Arts Council-sponsored New Media & the Arts conference held last November.

  1. Attendance and consumption; attendance for some artforms is falling; we need to increase the frequency with which people come to, for instance, our venue or festival and we need to keep people coming back year-on-year.
  2. Customer service and experience; customers care about more than just the show or event and we need to see what we can do to make sure their experiences are good ones
  3. Working together; arts organisations should collaborate more to speak to and attract audiences
  4. New media; All of us need to know more, to help us take advantage of the opportunities which a new media landscape have brought. We recognise that organisations operate at different levels of online activity and will strive to reflect this as we address this.
  5. Information; we need to address the gaps in our information about audiences – who they are and how they behave. Figuring out what we need to know is a key step in figuring out what to do.

Arts Council Event Calendar Launch

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The blog’s been quiet lately as I’ve been preoccupied with end of term and the coming exam period– and with few jobs coming through the pipeline there hasn’t been as much need to update the jobs page… but an interesting tidbit in the Arts Council’s newsletter notes the imminent launch of their new online event calendar.

Organisations are invited to submit their upcoming events to the calendar, which may prove a handy centralised resource for all the cultural happenings in the country.

Irish Book Publishers’ Conference

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cleThe Irish Book Publisher’s Association is having their biennial conference on the 21st of February, this year entitled ‘The Burning Issues’.

Lots of interesting sessions planned on managing small presses, negotiating with booksellers, and identifying new markets…

For details see their flier (MS doc file), or alternatively consult their full programme (pdf).

Will you still need me, who will succeed me…

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A few weeks ago the Los Angeles Times carried an interesting story on the ‘graying’ of perfoming arts audiences, seeking to refute the perception that interest classical music is dying out:

[…] representatives of such organizations also offer compelling reasons why seeing gray hair — or, at least, gray roots — in the audience is (a) nothing new and (b) not necessarily a cause for panic, because, at least so far, there has always been “new gray” waiting in the wings to replace the old.

“A colleague of mine says the audience isn’t graying — it’s always been gray,” says Teresa Eyring, executive director of Theatre Communications Group, a national service organization for American nonprofit theaters.

Perhaps nothing earth-shattering here, but it is refreshing to hear the reactions of folks on the ground in response to this perennial whinge…

(read the rest of the article)

Belfastgalleries.com

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I’ve just been having a browse around the Belfast Galleries site, a project of Culture Northern Ireland…  intriguing, I haven’t come across it before. Lots of info on the gallery scene in Belfast, including integration of Flickr plugins, downloadable maps, etc. I think perhaps the design is too cluttered (similar to CNI’s own site), but it’s really useful to have so much information centralised somewhere.

Audiences Northern Ireland has a much better design in my opinion– clean, elegant interface, nice use of graphics:

Most Irish arts organisations still have a ways to go when it comes to utilising the web– don’t get me started on the National Institutions and the dire state of their websites– so it’s great to see some innovative examples. Long may they continue…