The New Audiences Programme has been supporting and encouraging experimentation and discovery among arts organisations for the past five years.
New Audiences aimed to:
- tackle the barriers which stop people engaging with the arts
- increase the range and number of people participating in the arts
- create new opportunities for people to become involved in the arts in different spaces and places
- allow learning and sharing of experiences between organisations to improve audience development practice.
Projects supported by the Programme were hugely diverse in subject matter and size. The largest grants were in excess of £200,000 for national audience research, while the smallest were around £500, enabling small arts organisations to involve local people in creative events. The aims of the Programme were formulated so that they would support the aims of many arts organisations: how to bring new audiences in; how to give people that vital first chance to experience the arts as a participant or audience member; and how to encourage them to keep coming back.
New Audiences was born into a climate of suspicion on the part of some arts organisations, a fact acknowledged by the Director of Audience and Market Development at Arts Council England, Phil Cave. ?Some may have felt that the Programme was a numbers-driven exercise ? that it was not interested in depth or quality of experience,? he said. ?There was a feeling that it may focus simply on ?good news? or success stories. However, numbers are not the whole story, as we readily acknowledge. Our real wish is to find out what works and what doesn?t, and what we can do to support wider artform and audience development.?
Joining up
It was not only individual organisations working in isolation that were able to benefit from New Audiences funding. Partnerships of all kinds ? some more unlikely than others ? were created in a spirit of experimentation as well as through a desire to link up different areas of expertise and knowledge. Perhaps most importantly, partnerships gave access to different groups of people who were potential audience members and participants. Partners on projects have included travel companies, sports facilities, hotels and DIY superstores, as well as the more obvious schools, colleges and community groups.
The need to risk
New Audiences has supported demonstrable successes, which Essential Audiences will be looking at over the coming year. The projects have had a wide range of impacts, from changing practice on the ground to influencing policy at local, regional or national level. However, it is not always the successes that are of most interest. What went wrong is as important as what went well ? and the prevailing ethos of honest evaluation was essential to finding this out.
Research
The Programme will be drawing on a variety of research reports and evaluations, and will be reporting its findings in full to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in late 2003. The report will include details of how the programme funding was spent and what happened as a result. Arts Council England will be highlighting examples of good practice and some of the lessons learnt through documenting and sharing this work.
Research supported by the Programme included action research and self-evaluation by participating organisations. Independent national research was carried out with a series of important aims:
- to gather evidence to inform policy and advocacy initiatives
- to assess the impact of projects on audiences and on organisations
- to identify the characteristics of successful initiatives, as well as approaches that did not work and the reasons for this
- to develop measures of success.
National Research teams Aspirational Arts, Cultural Intelligence, De Montfort University and the consultants Gerry Moriarty and Helen Jermyn will be reporting in detail on various strands of the Programme.
Action research
The spirit of New Audiences was to enable organisations to take the plunge into a very immediate form of action research. Piloting new approaches and testing ideas were two principles at the heart of the work. The research element of New Audiences was not only about audiences and marketing, but also about artistic practice. Work in new settings, using new technology or creating new types of art require research and development in themselves.
The term ?action research? is used in the arts funding system to mean research carried out through practice. Projects are set up to enable specific research questions to be explored. Examples could include artists researching a new idea or way of working through their own practice, a venue measuring the efficacy of schemes to bring new audiences in or a performance company developing work for children for the first time.
Arts organisations have recognised the usefulness of action research in creating opportunities to try out something new, and to learn from their own practice, participants and audiences. The legacy of pilot projects initiated by New Audiences should be of real value in the longer term, pointing to new ways of developing an organisation?s wider aims.
Eastern Touring Agency, which has been involved in many New Audiences projects, recently identified their action research programme as ensuring ?that momentum remains at the cutting edge of practice?. They go on to say that ?evaluation, documentation and the wider dissemination of results is key. [It] exists alongside other? strands of work, wherever possible adding value?.
Organisations evaluating their work
Understanding why one project worked better or produced a more successful outcome than another, and identifying the learning points thrown up by the process, depends not only on looking at where you are but also where you have come from. This can be as simple as counting the number of new audience members gained through a project and comparing this with the existing audience. Yet it could also mean looking at more complex issues such as widening a traditional audience base, developing new internal and external relationships or assessing the ways in which a project is changing the practices of the whole company.
Although short lead-times and the need to develop an action research project alongside other ?core? organisational work can sometimes make evaluation difficult to plan, organisations have commented on its importance in improving their practice and shaping their activities.
Richard Whitehouse, of Aspirational Arts, pointed out that the co-operative approach which developed through their work on evaluation became an enormous bonus. ?Sarah Bedell and I have found that where we have been able to adopt a group approach, i.e., partners share experiences and learn from each other, everyone has gained,? he said. ?As well as creating an important feeling of being part of a network, it also helps to break down a key problem, which is one of perception: that evaluation is extra work rather than an invaluable business planning tool which helps you focus on what you?re trying to achieve.?
Dissemination
The Programme?s final dissemination phase aims to link existing evaluation work to learning that will help the wider arts sector.
Findings emerging from the accumulated body of evaluation and research testify both to the challenges presented by such an overtly developmental programme, and to the tremendous learning opportunities it offers.
The New Audiences Programme website ? http://www.newaudiences.org.uk
Arts Council England has created the New Audiences website to document the Programme. Accessible immediately, the website will develop and change throughout the year. There are currently over 200 completed projects archived on the site, and by March 2004 all the 1,500 projects will be available. A range of support material is already present on the site and will increase over the coming year.
news update ? information on current projects and research
project archive ? edited reports from organisations? final evaluations
publications ? a list of New Audiences-funded and related material
background ? an overview of the Programme?s aims and structure