These informal meetings are the first stage in a process to develop a Visual Arts Strategy for the West Midlands and will feed in to the Working Groups.

The TPWM Steering Group has identified Artist Support and Development as a key priority for the Strategy. The purpose of the meeting is to look at how we do this for the West Midlands and to outline progress to-date.

This is a free public event, if you are unable to attend views are welcomed through the feedback page of the new Turning Point West Midlands website .

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