Merger talks fail to bear fruit as Audiences North East announces its closure
Audiences North East (ANE), the North East region’s audience development agency, has announced its closure at the end of March 2012. Like the UK’s other audience development agencies, the company will lose its regular funding from ACE at the end of the 2011/12 financial year, and although ACE has pledged to provide strategic funding for audience development, ANE blames the timetable for this, and its lack of certainty, as undermining its long-term viability.
A registered charity, ANE has provided cultural sector organisations with strategic and tactical support to develop their audiences since 2004. The decision for an orderly close down of the organisation was taken by its Board following Arts Council England’s policy decision no longer to fund audience development agencies through its national portfolio funding programme. Services that will be lost to the North East through the agency’s closure include professional development workshops, online promotion through whatsonnortheast.com, opportunities to take part in audience development initiatives, quantitative and qualitative audience research and free advice on marketing and audience development. ANE’s subscription scheme for cultural organisations and freelances will continue until the organisation closes. Announcing the decision to close, Philip Bernays, Chair of ANE, said the agency’s knowledge and understanding of audiences in the region will be “sorely missed”. Chief Executive Alison O’Hara, who had been in discussion with other agencies about a proposed merger (see AP 242) and told AP at the time that the agency was “working hard to ensure that there is continued high level support for cultural organisations within the North East”, said: “The organisation was set up to provide high quality support to the cultural sector, in a region where unprecedented investment in culture and the arts has changed the landscape for good, and created huge challenges and opportunities for both audiences and cultural providers… ANE is satisfied that its seven years of activity will leave a lasting legacy in cultural organisations.”
Seven of England’s eight audience development agencies have now announced strategic action in the wake of ACE’s funding cut, with only Cultivate, the East Midlands agency, having made no announcement thus far.