What we do
What’s the point of a life without goosebumps?
Audience development is about the relationship between programming, marketing and education in cultural organisations. It is a planned and proactive process which aims to retain, increase and develop attendance and participation in cultural activities.
As well as encouraging current attenders to come more often, and to broaden the range of cultural activity they engage with,
audience development is also about connecting with people in the community who have felt distanced or excluded from cultural activities.
Although there is a financial imperative for cultural organisations to survive, audience development recognises that making meaning is equally important.
Everything we do is aimed at getting more people more engaged in arts and culture and our work is both customer-facing and business-to-business. There are five keys ways in which we want to make an impact:
- Providing leadership in the sector
- Representing the public perspective
- Developing, holding and disseminating audience development knowledge and insight
- Developing audiences by working with arts organisations and their partners
- Innovating and exploring new ideas
To deliver on these aims, we develop and deliver large scale audience development projects. Past projects have explored how to benchmark and encourage audience loyalty, the roll out of the Arts Council’s Family Friendly Toolkit, and Maximise – an action research project that sought to develop new audiences for black and minority ethnic art.
"I view ANE as a highly proactive organisation which works effectively to provide information and services for what is a diverse group of organisations."
ANE network subscriber