The Audience Agency can support you from the first shoots of an idea through to implementing a strategy with insights, expertise and partnerships.
We can support you to…
- Rethink your creative or cultural strategy
- Evidence social and/or economic impact in your locality
- Build the case for a new service or development
- Make a case for funding or investment
Get in touch to discuss your needs with our experts
Our Four Phase Approach:
- Insights and Assets Mapping
- Community Consultation
- Informing the Strategy
- Evaluation and Assessing Impacts
1. Insights and Assets Mapping
To lay the foundations for you project, you'll need to identify, quantify and categorise what’s already happening, who’s involved, where the gaps are, and what the potential might be. We use a mix of local cultural asset and resident engagement mapping, comparator research, and strategic policy development sessions to define and refine your approach.
- Cultural asset mapping: Bringing together a view of the cultural and creative assets – tangible and non-tangible – in your area. Categorising and analysing who they are, what they do and who they engage – all packaged up in a dataset that’s accessible online and can be updated.
- Resident cultural engagement: Drawing a complete picture of your population in the context of their actual and potential engagement in culture and creativity – designed to bring added context to the asset study and reviewed in view of local strategy and policy. We have population and cultural engagement data to draw on and our UK population segmentation Audience Spectrum bring an extra depth of insight.
- Comparator studies: Gathering up an evidence base of relevant examples, through desk research and interviews, which will enable places to identify opportunities and approaches to suit them.
- Policy and practice: Acting as a 'critical friend' at the outset through strategic conversation, we can help you place your plans in the context of the latest policy thinking at a local and national level, and bring our experience of what has worked in different places nationwide.
Get in touch to discuss your needs with our experts
2. Community Consultation
Understanding your community's ambitions and visitors' motivations is vital to bringing them with you on your placeshaping journey. Our people-centred approach tests out possibilities and opportunities with a wide range of stakeholders to help inform your approach.
- Local stakeholders: Conducting one-to-one interviews, group discussions or creative workshops (in person or online) with a broad spectrum organisations, agencies, creatives or key individuals – designed to suit the people consulted in an accessible and purposeful way.
- Residents, communities and audiences: Holding interviews, discussion groups and creative workshops to understand perceptions of, attitudes to or behaviours regarding culture and creativity, in order to find out where creativity happens across your area – from everyday participation of all kinds to more formal engagement.
- Visitors: Recognising that the visitor economy can be an important part of local economic development, we can harness our insights to understand the motivations and movements of regional, national and international visitors – both through new research and drawing on existing insight.
Get in touch to discuss your needs with our experts
3. Informing the Strategy
With a good foundation of insight and the buy-in of your stakeholders, we can facilitate conversations to help focus priorities and objectives. We can help you to develop a people-centred approach, be that to shape specific creative strategies, or integrate with wider policies such as inclusive growth, skills and jobs development, or social integration.
- Collaboration and partnership facilitation: Designing sessions that enable all voices to be heard and identify common goals and the opportunities. We work with a a well established network of sector and regional partners to deliver strategies that are fit for purpose.
- Engagement strategies and co-designed programmes: Taking a user centred approach to progressing your audience development strategy – integrating digital, community engagement, and co-creation practices. Helping you design programmes and activities that are representative and inclusive.
- Research: Rising to the challenge if your process throws up more questions than answers. Our full service, mixed method, expert research team can work with you to find the best way of finding the solutions – whether with communities, stakeholders or by analysing existing data.
Get in touch to discuss your needs with our experts
4. Evaluation and Assessing Impacts
A strong evaluation framework will measure and articulate the cultural, social, economic and environmental outcomes of your place project. We specialise in approaches that bring sectors together, embed learnings back into your strategies and support future collaborations.
- Designing an evaluation framework: Co-designing a framework following our best in sector Evaluation Principles – through discussions and workshops, in collaboration with stakeholders. Starting with a theory of change or logic model approach, we deliver a practical and embedded evaluation that all stakeholders can deliver on – from collecting monitoring data, to outcomes and impacts.
- Delivering evaluation: Harnessing our full service offer to help you collect data – quantitative and qualitative, analyse it, report on it and present it to stakeholders. We’ll design the process, reporting or outputs to suit your stakeholders so that they are engaged with the learnings and findings.