Disconnected Bodies

“Art without discovery moves nobody; creation must be made accessible for consumption”.

Disconnected Bodies are leading arts marketing and audience engagement consultants that support clients with the audience challenges they’re facing.

With close to two decades of experience and recgonised by Arts Council England as innovators in the field, we have guided national and international clients to widen reach, create impact and gain audience recognition.

Our expertise can support the growth of current and new potential audiences. We provide clients the following –

• Audience engagement advice.
• Audience engagement planning.
• Marketing planning.
• PR support.
• Bespoke audience research.

www.disconnectedbodies.co

Our Approach

We provide you overarching arts engagement or marketing advice, oversee audience research projects and guide on practical planning support that identifies, explores, understands and plans to reach an audience. This includes overseeing PR for a singluar project or brand building.

We look to cultivate your audience, taking out the guesswork, with our services designed to meet the requirements of both independent artists and arts organisations of all sizes, including the meeting of ACE Project Grant and NPO engagement criteria if necessary. 

Current Clients include – 

• Arts Council England 
• The British Council
• The National Maritime Museum

Sandbox – the industry's only audience psychology toolkit.

We are the developers of the audience toolkit 'Sandbox' – a set of industry-leading frameworks and models designed to provide a complete understanding of arts audience psychology and engagement.

Sandbox’s value lies in the ability to simplify the complex dynamics of arts engagement, allowing cultural organisations to better influence engagement behaviour through the use of the most comprehensive audience profiling available and a fresh approach to an audience’s participation journey. 

Developed in collaboration with psychologists, sociologists, arts professionals and over three thousand audience interactions, Sandbox is genuinely becoming a game changer for the wider cultural sector, only available through Disconnected Bodies. 

For more details, included the practical uses of Sandbox, please visit our website –  https://disconnectedbodies.co/sandbox/

Our Services

Audience Engagement Road Map. 

Providing medium to large organisations with arts marketing and audience engagement planning that formally organises the identification and exploration of intended audiences. The objective is to provide insight and guidance for those seeking to develop the audience engagement aspect of their work. 

The development of an AERM is a straightforward process that encourages a wider vision of participation, clarifies audience objectives and provides an actionable plan that takes the uncertainty out of audience engagement. 

A comprehensive AERM supports strategies for change with its completion being a clear indication of organisation’s health, encouraging artists whilst reassuring collaborators and funders by demonstrating commitment to access and inclusion. Alongside realistic revenue forecasts, an AERM can also support funding bids.

Audience Profiling

A structured overview document that provides you an accessible introduction to audience identification and planning. Designed to be user-friendly, the document is easily understood and is the ideal first step in ensuring a project reaches its intended audience. 

Audience profiling sets the foundation for effective implementation of engagement planning and allows for projects with limited resources, including staffing and budget, to achieve the audience reach and depth of experience they aspire to. 

Using our audience engagement expertise, knowledge of audience psychologies, and partnership with Arts Audience Insights CIC to call upon past research, we look to fill a skills gap in your team and/or work with you to address the challenges you may be facing in reaching audiences.

Grant Support – Audience Participation Planning

Audience participation and public engagement documentation to support grant funding up to £100,000.

ACE state that all Project and Culture Recovery grant applications must be supported by ‘strong audience development, marketing or communications planning’.

Fully realised audience participation documents, to support an application, work to demonstrate strength and vision; encouraging and reassuring the funder. By clearly demonstrating your commitment to audience engagement planning alongside realistic access and inclusion forecasts; these documents include planning to fulfil the requirements of ACE Goal 2 and Equality Objectives. 

Grant Support – Public Engagement Strengthening – For rejected Project Grant applications.

Section re-write and supporting documentation to strengthen project grant applications that have been rejected due to public engagement sections being 'comparatively weaker'.

From our experience many applications are being rejected due to public engagement sections being comparatively weaker. In order to address this weaker link and allow for the application to be re-submitted in a stronger position we've developed our Public Engagement Strengthening offer.

Designed as a hassle free option, you're provided with a full supporting document outlining those audiences you wish to reach, how you'll go about doing this, the value they'll receive from your work and the experience you intend for them to have. 

In addition, we offer a full re-write of the public engagement section of your application, written in such a way that overcomes the challenge of conveying a project's public value within the tight character limit. Both the re-write and supporting document clearly address ACE's feedback and their wider audience engagement targets.

Pablo Colella
Director, Lead Practitioner
Email: [email protected]

Visit: www.disconnectedbodies.co