A lesson in listening

All arts festivals aim to create events that inspire, engage and challenge the public. But for many festivals, the elusive 16 to 25 age group proves the hardest to reach – the Holy Grail of audiences, if you like. By making Edinburgh International Book Festival events more interactive through debates, discussion and audience participation, we have been able to open up a new dialogue with this diverse young audience. Evaluation and interview have been crucial in allowing us insight into their habits and interests, and in revealing what they think of our Festival – all of which informs our programming and marketing strategies.

To define our audiences better, we divided this complex 16 to 25 age group into four broad sub-groups: school-attenders, university students, first job-holders and those outside formalised schooling. To capture the interest of older school attenders, we recognised the need to bridge the gap between our children and schools programmes and our adult programme. By creating school and public events for this age group, using both hot teen and adult authors, we feel we have lit a spark with this audience.

We recently expanded our outreach programme to target marginalised young people and disadvantaged communities. In 2006, two particularly successful outreach events were held at the Polmont Young Offenders Institution. The poet Des Dillon proved so inspiring in these events that some of the young men have since signed up for literacy courses and a library has now opened at Polmont for the first time. In 2007 we piloted projects in foster care centres and with literacy groups, and are looking to expand our reach further still in 2008.

The Book Festival’s high profile debates and discussions series of events for adults started in 2001 and has proved incredibly popular. There was no reason to suppose this highly interactive format would not also directly appeal to young people. We have developed debates with leading writers and thinkers, including music events on lyrics and poetry (Franz Ferdinand, pictured, joined us in 2006), collaborative events on screenwriting, journalism and graphic novels – all created especially for young people.

We created young-person specific promotion campaigns and leaflets, targeted our distribution and made more and more events freely accessible online through an audio archive and podcasts. We have also forged partnerships with organisations that connect with young people in a variety of ways including Young Scot, whose support has been invaluable.

We held a highly successful interactive event celebrating music and lyrics in conjunction with Young Scot last year and another on crime writing with Ian Rankin the year before. Visitors were surveyed after these events, and feedback was gathered by interview, and during the event itself, through hand-held electronic devices given to the audience. The results proved overwhelmingly positive. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, 40% were first-time visitors and 81% said they would definitely return to the Festival.

Encouraging a younger audience is proving to be an incredibly liberating and inspiring process. In June we will launch our all-new, relaxed, cabaret-style evening events for the 20-something crowd, with some the greatest names in cult and indie prose and poetry. So stay tuned: this is only the beginning.