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Audience development.

We believe that audience development is most successful when it is part of an integrated strategy; the whole organisation has to understand your audiences and play a role in growing them.

A good audience development plan is grounded in the belief that the community you serve is equal in importance to the collection items you are home to and the knowledge you share. We help you to scale up ambition through the people who bring your museum to life, fostering a shared sense of belonging and impact, alongside sustainable return.

1

Be clear on the purpose of this project.

Why do audiences need to grow? What is the strategic context of audience development at your organisation?

2

Establish audience need and market opportunity.

Clarifying who your audiences are, what people want from you and what there is space in the market for.

3

Understand audience motivation.

Getting into the detail of why people care about you, what they value and who would benefit most from what you do.

4

Using data, with judgement.

Combining audience insights with relevant and robust data sources, we provide a holistic view of how people interact with your offer and in what ways this could grow.

5

Perform an audience value matrix assessment.

Objectively review audience value - your value to them and their value to you. Assess the overall sustainability of your audience mix.

6

Deliver an experience audit.

Reviewing your proposition fully from your audience’s perspective, aiming to optimise the experience to better serve them.

7

Review operations.

Considering what is working and what could improve regarding communications, systems and processes.

8

Consult your community.

Via creative workshops and one-to-one conversations, consult representatives of your current and potential audience.

9

Integrate strategies.

Integrating commercial and audience development for a growth-plan that aligns the need for both financial resilience and audience relevance.

Make your action plans realistic and inspirational - something your team can believe in and bring to life.

CASE STUDY

National Football Museum

We delivered a clear and engaging audience development plan for NFM, ready to be owned and actioned across the museum's team. Our work included consolidating audience data and insights (identifying who is engaged and who is missing) and considering external influencing factors (including funder requirements and KPIs, local and national cultural and marketing strategies, and the activity of competitors and partners). A key part of our work was prioritising actions – offering evidence and guidance on how to balance the need to engage local residents (who visit for free) with the need to generate revenue (considering who most engaged with the full mix of revenue sources, from ticket entry to secondary spend alongside special events and membership/donations). We ran an in-person cross-team consultation workshop to interrogate evidence, knowledge and ideas, and created new highly pragmatic audience ‘personas’ based on need and motivation, to guide future action and decisions.

The final document was not your standard strategy or report, but an enjoyable-to-read working reference tool for the leadership and team to use both day-to-day and for strategic planning

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