Watching brief

There were two events which highlighted for me that things were developing in the Northern Ireland arts sector. Firstly, when the Arts Marketing Association (AMA) Conference came to Belfast in July 2004 it brought me (and, I imagine, a lot of other arts marketers) to Belfast for the first time. The conference revealed not only a city that was building and imagining its way out of a dark past, but also a sector planning a new future. The conference was part of the launch of Audiences NI, the audience development agency for Northern Ireland, and was part of a plan to deliver twenty-first century arts organisations, equipped with the technology to enable them to thrive, and an audience development agency to help them on the journey. The second event was when the Network Summit came to Belfast in 2007. The summit is an annual gathering of all the audience development agencies, and although it happens lower on the radar than the AMA’s event, for me it was no less significant. More than 50 delegates from audience development agencies across the UK travelled to Belfast to take part in the two-day conference.
Changing times
The Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) played a key role, recognising the significance of these events for the development of the sector here. ACNI continues to place audience development at the heart of its strategic planning. The creation of Audiences NI marked a turning point for the arts sector here and its engagement with audience development as a core business function. I have been with the agency for nearly five years now, and in that time have acquired a beautiful Belfast-born daughter, a great organisation with a dedicated staff team and board, and a few grey hairs.
Audiences NI’s membership has more than tripled from 15 to 48 in the past three years. Twenty-two box office systems throughout NI now have a Daily Data Extractor installed, enabling us to stream live data direct to Vital Statistics for analysis and compilation. Last year we developed a training programme in partnership with the AMA, Arts & Business and CultureNorthernIreland. Audiences NI is now the AMA’s strategic training delivery partner for Northern Ireland, bringing a selection of speaker tours to the region. The organisation has also delivered ‘The Audience Audit’ report, which is based on data drawn from 22 arts organisations across Northern Ireland. The report shows that the arts are enjoyed by people from all walks of life in NI, exploding the myth that they are the preserve of an elite minority (AP194).

Benchmarks to beat
The ‘Retain and Gain’ project, in partnership with Katy Raines of Indigo Consulting, aimed to help organisations retain more of their customers in order to gain more financially. It was designed to increase organisations’ awareness of Customer Relationship Management and to give them the tools to build loyalty amongst key segments of their audiences. The project has quantified and benchmarked current audience loyalty with a view to increasing the long-term financial value of customers, and involved in-depth interviews and data analysis with 12 arts organisations across Northern Ireland. Audiences NI recently presented the first ‘Black Book Report’, the findings of a new annual benchmarking project for venues across Northern Ireland that use the Patron Edge box office system. The report compiles key statistics for each of the six participating venues (Alley Theatre, Burnavon, Down Arts Centre, Island Arts Centre, Lyric Theatre and Strule Arts Centre), and creates a series of benchmarks for these venues to compare themselves against. Run annually, the report will allow participants to monitor how effectively they’re using their box office system to capture audience data and how well they are performing year on year, and will help them to target their marketing budgets more effectively. In 2009/10 the project will be extended to include those venues using the ENTA system.
This autumn we are launching a new initiative in a response to the current economic climate. ‘Test Drive the Arts NI’ is an online project following the model originally developed by Andrew McIntyre at Arts About Manchester, which will allow arts organisations to fill potentially empty seats with new, first-time attenders, and also aims to achieve a political goal: enabling arts organisations who partner with Audiences NI on the project to achieve their Programme for Government (the NI Executive’s plans and priorities for 2008/09 and beyond) target of a 2% increase in audiences. As a sector and as an agency we still have some way to go. We will continue to work to develop the evidence base, both to better inform the work of our members, and to make the case to our funders and politicians of the value both of audience development and of putting audiences at the very centre of everything the sector does.