Attracting and maintaining a diverse audience is a key requirement for all publicly funded arts organisations, yet many have scarce funds to devote to inclusive marketing campaigns. Sarah Dowd offers some pointers for organisations looking to build diversity with limited resources.
Diversity is based on the concept of recognition of differences: recognising that everyone is different, and respecting and encouraging those differences for business benefit, (University of Warwick). By this definition, everyone is unique and can play a role in improving our organisations. In terms of funding agreements and social inclusion planning, however, the diverse audiences you are wishing to attract must be targeted and measurable. From my previous experience, targets have included groups that fall outside the traditional user of the organisation. This definition allows marketers to develop audiences from a wide range of groups, satisfying funders and, at the same time, steering well clear of tokenism. For organisations based in large towns or cities, an example of a non-traditional group might comprise people who are geographically disparate or have difficulty travelling to the venue due to lack of transport. Perhaps if your organisation charges admission fees, a target group would be people on a low income. Clearly, diversity is not simply about ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or social status. Diverse groups are people who can add value to your organisation but perhaps face social, physical, financial or cultural barriers when trying to engage with it.
Including a wider range of audiences does not require money. It requires effort, a desire for change and the heart to see it through. Increasing diversity is not about meeting Key Performance Indicators or government funding requirements. It is about asking yourself two simple questions:
1. Does your product deserve to be experienced by as many people as possible?
2. Do you think certain types of people deserve to experience it more than others?
Increasingly, marketers and educators are taking the lead in conceiving and delivering the tangible evidence of diversity within our audiences. Like the best marketing initiatives, social inclusion efforts require rigorous research, planning and innovation to deliver the best results. This article will highlight some of the most effective techniques currently available to all organisations, regardless of size or budget.
Human resources
We rely too much on technology. Email, and in some respects, the telephone, distance us from our community. Increasingly our work lives revolve around responding to emails, sitting in meetings, writing reports and planning our activities from afar. This begs the question how can we truly understand the wide variety of people and groups that make up our community, if in fact, we have never met them? When it comes to researching and targeting groups for social inclusion, how many of us have used the Internet to develop lists of potential people we would like to engage with, but go no further than that? Its almost as if without a web page or an email address, these groups dont exist. Its time to change our patterns of working and we can instil this by incorporating network marketing into both our own and our staffs forward job plans.
Take a moment to reflect on your own job description and those of your staff, and look for opportunities where social inclusion can be made to be the responsibility of all members of your team and how their actions can deliver real results. Ask yourself, how many friends, family members, old work colleagues do you have within your own social network, how many in your staffs are these people who your organisation could engage with better and with whom you already have a relationship? This method of incorporating networking into the job descriptions of your staff is also not unprecedented. When journalists or PR professionals go for new jobs, it is a requirement that they have a set of contacts that are usable by the new organisation. They are hired not only on the basis of what they know, but who they know.
Research and focus
Start by researching voluntary groups within your community, using the Internet, the phone book and your local councils resources on local voluntary groups, community leaders, schools, businesses and religious organisations. Once you have identified a selection of key people to whom you know you should be relaying the key messages of your organisation, book a meeting. Go for a coffee. Pick up the phone and ask. They wont bite. Take time out of your schedule to actually introduce these key people to your organisation this is called in marketing speak a Fam Visit, or familiarisation visit. You are asking these people to become ambassadors for your organisation and they can walk away as your newest spokespeople to groups you have had little contact with in the past. Show these people you care about including them and the people they represent and they will do your marketing for you.
When developing new initiatives, dont do it in a vacuum. Events, educational activities, exhibitions, and marketing campaigns should be tested with your target audiences. You dont need an external market researcher to do this. What you need is the willingness to do this outside of work hours. Understanding that you are asking people to give their time, you must give them something in return. Focus groups can be incentivised by offering free tickets to participants, arranging transport, providing food and making the experience interesting and fun. Test your product in comparison to others put in wild cards and monitor responses in relation to one another. You may be surprised. But, most importantly, take on board the results and make the changes. The only way this can be done is by doing focus groups at a stage when the product can be changed without undue strain. If you dont make the changes, your test audiences will feel their efforts have been wasted and that your organisation only pays lip service to its audiences needs.
Match-making
Some of the best examples of diversity plans in action are those where the arts organisation acts as a match-maker rather than a creator of social inclusion projects. To use one of my own experiences as an example, in June 2005, while I worked at the Imperial War Museum, I was approached by the Chair of the Royal British Legion South East branch, who was looking for a venue to host a medal ceremony for over 30 male and female Second World War veterans. As the marketing manager for the museums 60th anniversary project, Their Past Your Future, this came at as a unique opportunity to increase our reach to diverse audiences. We contacted a local volunteer group, the Guy Fox History Project, a group of designers and illustrators who volunteer their time to teach history to young people through art, and then invited a Southwark Borough primary school to send a group of children to participate in the awards ceremony. On the day, 30 schoolchildren from culturally diverse backgrounds presented 30 East End veterans with their 60th anniversary medals. After the ceremony, each child was paired with a veteran and they were encouraged to act as journalists and find out their veterans experience from the Second World War. Against the backdrop of the Their Past Your Future exhibition, veterans and children alike participated in an art activity where they illustrated the story they had shared. Two of the veterans were Pearly Kings and the image that endures from that day is of 60 people, aged 8 to 80, representing the vast fabric of our community, singing and doing The Lambeth Walk in the foyer of the Museum of London.
The learning from events like this is simple. Social inclusion is about adopting a philosophy that opens our minds to the opportunities our organisations can provide to the widest variety of people possible. It takes imagination, determination and guts. It requires you to leave your desk and share these values with others. It also asks us to step back from our product and think about some of the ways we can share it with others, outside the traditional ways we use marketing. Whether its poetry for Asian schools in Blackburn or pub quizzes in Burnley, being diverse requires thinking and acting diversely.
Sarah Dowd is managing director of Black Orchid Marketing, a specialist arts marketing and public sector creative agency. For more information on diversity planning or training
e: sarah@blackorchidmarketing.com