• Share on Facebook
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Linkedin
  • Share by email
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Linkedin
  • Share by email

Should the starting point for audience development be the social agenda and the needs of potential audiences, or the desire to make the arts more widely available because the arts are ?a good thing?? asks Heather Maitland, who presents the first in a series of articles giving different perspectives on this controversial subject.

What?s in a name?

Most people would agree that ?audience development is a planned process which involves building a relationship between an individual and the arts.? But although the term is being used widely within the arts community, there is no shared idea of what it means in practice. Why? Because your definition of audience development depends on who you are.

Objective driven

If you are an education worker you will probably focus on developing the individual, looking at the artform as a whole, and this very likely involves people participating in the artform. If you are an artist you will probably be interested in developing people?s understanding of your work, and the number of people involved isn?t crucial (though more is, on the whole, better). Marketers look for results that directly benefit the organisation ? and this nearly always means attendance, though occasionally participation.

Does this fuzziness about audience development matter? Perhaps not. Audience development is about building relationships between the arts and people so it should be tailored to fit the particular people and the particular art. Attempts to find a single working definition are actually unhelpful. What matters more is that an organisation?s audience development focuses on its objectives, whether artistic, financial, social or a combination of all three.

Contradictory priorities

So, how important is audience development? Well, all subsidised arts organisations have a responsibility to attract a bigger and broader audience for their work so it is very important. But it?s not as simple as that. Arts organisations often find it difficult to resolve the contradiction between this priority and the need to get enough income to balance the books and enough attenders to justify putting on the event, artform or activity to stakeholders (or, indeed, to justify the very existence of the organisation itself). We tend not to think through the tensions that exist between our organisation?s different objectives and this is why some audience development projects fail: because their outward objectives are social but their real objectives are financial.

The arts educate and enlighten us, make us feel good about ourselves, offer us possibilities for personal development and much more. But our stakeholders now have a different agenda - social inclusion - which aims to fulfil more basic needs. The more rash our claims to be able to help the homeless, feed the hungry, stop people thieving and turn youngsters into responsible (and arts attending) adults, the more arts funding is available to us - which encourages us to be not altogether honest about our activities in order to keep our arts organisations alive. Arts projects are made to ?look like? audience development or social inclusion activity in order to win funding which is not otherwise available. Maybe this is one of the reasons why these projects often don?t work. The compromises currently being made by organisations seeking to achieve multiple objectives with single projects and approaches have a significant negative impact on the outcome. This places into question the levels of money, staff time and energy invested in such activities.

Compromising claims

Audience development that effectively promotes social inclusion is not something that you can do to people. It?s something you help people achieve for themselves. The starting point is not the art, but the needs, interests and experiences of the audiences and participants themselves. Effective social inclusion projects all engage the energy, commitment and leadership potential within communities and ensure that those communities have ownership of those projects. There are cultural organisations that have the clarity of purpose, resources, skills and knowledge to make their social inclusion projects really work. Hackney Museums, for example, have reached their annual target for attendance at their new Museum of Immigration within three months of opening. They?ve put local people at the centre of all their decisions, including handing over their acquisitions budget to people from different community groups.

But when we claim that everything done by every arts organisation contributes to social inclusion, we compromise the excellent work these projects achieve. We also relegate our organisation?s artistic and financial objectives to second place and that is seldom appropriate. Audience development projects that seek to achieve artistic and financial objectives are entirely valid (unless we are pretending they are doing something else), springing as they do from our desire to make the arts more widely available because we see the arts experience as inherently good. They are also more likely to be sustainable from within the organisation?s own resources because they give a far higher return on investment. But, because the art is the starting point, they cannot also make a significant impact on social inclusion.

What works is right

Perhaps our fuzziness about the term ?audience development? does matter after all. Having a single term to describe fundamentally different approaches encourages arts organisations and funding bodies to prescribe a single ?right way? of doing audience development and a single set of benchmarks for the assessment and evaluation of projects. This is doing audience development to people. What works is doing what?s right for the art and what?s right for the people involved.

Heather Maitland is an arts consultant and author of ?A Guide to Audience Development?, published by the Arts Council of England.
t: 01949 843161; e: hmaitland1@aol.com