Last week I went along to Wolverhampton Art Gallery to hear about the Arts Council’s new national campaign for the arts – due to start in April 2010. Here’s the opening presentation that was delivered by Julie Eaglen, Arts Council WM’s Audience Development Officer.
The standout point from the presentation for me is this bit:
… despite the significant efforts of arts organisations and the Arts Council to broaden audiences – and there has been, and is, some really excellent work going on – our statistics show that there has been no significant shift in the profile of people who engage with the arts over the past three years.
This means that we can’t simply continue doing more of the same; it’s not working. We need a new approach
You can read the presentation to see how this is to be achieved (and from the tone of language used, it has to be achieved), but in a nutshell there’ll be:
- a programme of arts engagement activity
- a large-scale broadcast, media and marketing campaign
- targeting of an identified group of 12.8 million people who currently have some interest in the arts but have expressed an inclination/desire to do or see more
- a new national arts web portal
Locally, the programme is being coordinated by Audiences Central. Each region has been asked to pick a hot-spot to focus their activity on and in the West Mids it’ll be the Black Country. It’s hoped that the rest of the region will benefit from a ‘halo effect’ from this activity and from the national media campaign.
On this last point, the idea is to develop a brand and kitemark that venues, promoters, organisations, etc will want to apply to their work in the same way that many food producers have voluntarily taken up the 5-a-day brand.
Success will be measured via the national Taking Part survey and the Active Peoples survey (for local authorities that use an indicator called NI11 – hopefully that’ll mean something to someone).
I’m not sure what the budget for the national campaign is but, after much talk of ‘limited resources’, it transpired that the amount of cash available for the West Mids (and therefore the Black Country) is £200,000 over two years. Consequently there was much talk about partnership working and the reliance on organisations finding a benefit in piggybacking on the national campaign.
In the meantime, the Arts Council have set up a website at Hello Art where you can find out a little more and sign up for future updates. It’d be also be worth following Audiences Central for updates about the West Mids focus.
Finally (and because someone asked me to keep count):
- Mentions of The Big Picture – 7
- Mentions of the 5-a-day campaign – 7
It’s great that there’s a real determination to make it happen, and I think it’s a smart move regionally to focus on the Black Country. But a little part of me dies when I hear that the solution is another logo on the flyers and another website. Is this not the type of thinking that’s been driving failure to engage these past three years? Even ‘Hello Art’, the speech bubble device and the crazy web 2.0 UGC holding site feels like rehashing the same old stuff for the same old people.
Other positives include a ruthless target-driven focus on semi-receptive audiences via mainstream media. Less good: a ‘one stop shop’ website featuring ‘themed lounges that allow the user to enter a virtual arts world’. I don’t see how the initial objective naturally leads to that method.
My idea? Package up arts experiences in threes like Collateralised Debt Obligations. If you want to see A Christmas Carol and We Will Rock You, you are forced to sit through Katya Kabanova too. Either by law [joke], or via clever pricing incentives. A website that did that might be quite interesting…
Going after semi-receptive audiences seems like a good move and yes, the web stuff seems ill-conceived at this stage – I’m still not sold on the concept/execution of Scene Central and that was being talked up as being the main web presence for the West Mids.
What gets me is that ‘going out and having a good time’ should be considered such a hard thing to sell to people. After all, this lot – http://thefuntheory.com/ – can apparently make walking up stairs and using bins seem fun.
But it has to work the other way as well Jake. No point in having a system that positions ‘high’ (subsidised) culture against ‘low’ (non-subsidised) culture. Those who are off to see a bit of Operatic Otello in a Digbeth warehouse next week should get free tickets to Snow White on Ice at the Alex next year.
I think the good folk of the Black Country would welcome some facilities rather than a campaign aimed at telling them the cultural experiences they value, that makes meaning for them are somehow second rate. I thought Postmodernism dealt with all this?
NB: NI11 = ‘The percentage of the adult population in a local area that have engaged in the arts at least three times in the past 12 months.”
Dave
Agreed. My examples pointed to a trading up from ‘low’ to ‘high’ brow, but I’m not sure that’s what I really intended. The main thing is to convert people who attend something once or twice a year to attending three times a year (or more). I think that pairing could be between obvious crowd-pleasers and less obvious ones though.
Chris
Well, you are competing against ‘staying in and being miserable’.
I’m not going to comment on Scene Central, because it might come across as sour grapes.