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Arts Council England?s New Audiences Programme began in 1998 with £20 million of funding from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. It offered time-limited funding to arts organisations to test new ideas and new approaches to involving people in the arts for the first time. The Programme is now drawing to a close. All funds have been allocated, projects are being completed, reports have been submitted. Yet the most important task remains to be done.

Arts Council England has a firm commitment to disseminating the work and bringing the lessons learnt from New Audiences to the widest possible readership. Essential Audiences is a new partnership project between Arts Council England and ArtsProfessional and is a key part of achieving that aim.

This series of articles will be a window onto the resources generated by the 1500 projects and the associated research and evaluation. Gill Johnson, Manager of the New Audiences Programme at Arts Council England, said ?Essential Audiences gives us a great opportunity to draw people?s attention month by month to useful information about the Programme as it comes in. We know there is a real appetite for knowledge and ideas, and we want to offer arts professionals a convenient and appropriate way of accessing that knowledge. We want it to be a genuinely useful contribution to policy and practice.?

A unique resource

This is the first time that such a large body of audience development material has been gathered together. Making it available, and thereby putting it into the arena for debate, discussion and development, is the crucial next step. It offers the chance for arts professionals to find out what similarly-sized, similarly-situated or similarly-minded organisations have tried, and what they have learned through trying.

For ArtsProfessional, Essential Audiences provides a welcome opportunity to disseminate a valuable body of knowledge and experience of audience development to the widest possible constituency. Its partnership with Arts Council England will give readers a new forum for sharing their experiences of audience development initiatives.

Through this partnership, Essential Audiences will go beyond the page to highlight a range of resources complementing and widening the information presented in ArtsProfessional. Findings will be of interest to arts professionals at all levels ? whether in the basic details of running a ?test drive? campaign, or in trying to create a region-wide partnership. Arts Council England is committed to analysing and presenting reports in a continuing process, and organisations can constantly refer to the New Audiences website for new material at http://www.newaudiences.org.uk.

Themes

Essential Audiences will run monthly until May 2004. There will be regular themed articles looking at a particular aspect of audience development which has emerged from the Programme. In some cases, these themes are still emerging, so this planned schedule of articles may change and develop. Two more four-page spreads are planned, to focus on significant areas of development, conflict, impact and future funding opportunities.

As well as referring to projects carried out under the Programme, there will be interviews and updates, linked to a series of new resources available through the Essential Audiences page of the New Audiences website. Newly commissioned articles and existing reports will illuminate the theme currently appearing in the magazine.

Have your say

Despite the number of projects funded by the Programme, areas still exist where we need to know more. The unique element of Essential Audiences is that readers can feed back with their experiences and opinions to take the debate and the practice further.
Your responses to articles are welcome, as are ideas for inclusion in future editions and recommendations for useful websites or publications. You may also want to let us know about audience development projects which were not funded by the Programme but which could be of great interest to fellow professionals.

Contact Essential Audiences by e-mailing us at audiences@artsprofessional.co.uk

Read Essential Audiences online
A link on the ArtsProfessional website will enable all readers to have access to Essential Audiences. http://www.artsprofessional.co.uk