A look back at some of the more exciting announcements, impressive achievements and inspiring projects of the year just past.
A new prototype app to gauge your organisation's digital competence and advise on how to improve it.
The Audience Agency (TAA), BBC, The Space, Nesta and others have joined forces over the past 18 months, exploring ways to help improve understanding of digital metrics.
Connect | Design Thinking for Audience Development
Our innovative twin-track pilot programme, run in partnership with Goldsmith's University and Erasmus+, brought together students and practitioners from across the creative industries.
Roadmap | Positive Action Recruitment
Increasing workforce diversity in the cultural sector is key to ensuring a vibrant and resilient future. This recruitment toolkit for the cultural sector has been co-created with The British Museum complete with tips and templates to get you started.
New Series | The International Agent
Introducing 'The International Agent'. As well as looking at our own projects, this new quarterly flags international opportunities, reports on in-the-field audience engagement work and offers up useful tips and discoveries from overseas collaborations.
Case in Point | The V&A Museum
Working with a London museum to understand the impact that their new contemporary entrance and more accessible exhibition space has had on improving visitors' experiences.
Case in Point | Enhance
We have been working with Extant, the UK’s “leading national organisation for the development and delivery of opportunities for visually impaired people to engage with the performing arts”, to evaluate the impact of their innovative Enhance pilot program.
The Audience Agency partners with Activity Stream
The Audience Agency embarks on a new partnership with Activity Stream, bringing together two organisations with a mission to help arts organisations implement better decision-making using data.
Feature | Can the arts tackle digital exclusion?
New research highlights how cultural organisations could play a key role in demystifying the internet to non-users, writes Katie Moffat.
Snapshot | Last Christmas
Christmas Shows and Pantomimes attract quite different crowds from much other theatre. This snapshot takes a light look back at the profile of the festive audiences of 2018 and how they tended to engage with this great British tradition.
Report | Evidencing Libraries
Arts Council England commissioned The Audience Agency to understand the extraordinary reach of public libraries and especially how audience research and data are accessed and used by library practitioners.
Feature | The moral case for making money
Patrick Towell explains why underpaying or under-employing your workers can never be in an organisation’s long-term interests and suggests how you can start thinking more sustainably about the big picture – for everyone’s benefit.
Case in Progress | London Borough of Culture
The Audience Agency is the official evaluation partner for the Mayor of London’s London Borough of Culture.
Case in Point | British Museum
Working with the British Museum to create a Roadmap resource, complete with tools and templates, that can be used by organisations across arts, culture and heritage to diversify their recruitment practices.
Report | Creative People and Places: Digital Engagement & Opportunities
Insight and practical recommendations for how CPPs can harness digital tools more effectively.
Case in Point | Services for Data Haters
Harnessing user-centred design to understand how to to make data more accessible and valuable across the arts, culture and heritage community.
Audience Report | Audiences for Visual Arts
Visual artists and curators create spaces where communities can face challenging ideas constructively.
Feature | Why European collaboration is worth fighting for
While some in the UK may believe we have little to learn from European collaboration, Anne Torreggiani and Jonathan Goodacre have found cross-border networks to be a force for innovation and change.
Case in Point | Create Church Street
Working with Westminster City Council to evaluate the regenerative impact of a programme of artistic projects designed to engage, inspire and unify the local community.
Feature | Creative processes at the heart of Placemaking
The place in which a cultural organisation finds itself can determine how it thrives, survives or even dies, but many organisations are now taking the lead in helping places reinvent themselves. Anne Torreggiani explores the rise of place-shaping.
Case in Point | Building an open source CRM for the Cultural Sector
Golant Innovation worked with Artsadmin to create KIWI - a CRM designed specifically for the cultural sector.
Case in Point | Peterborough Presents
Working with Peterborough Presents to evaluate and evolve its Creative People and Places action research programme into an active model for social representation and creative change.
Case in Point | East Durham Creates
How a Creative People and Places participant combined Audience Finder and Audience Spectrum insights to build an audience representative of its local population.
Case in Point | For the Love of Words
Working with writer and performance poet Louisa Adjoa Parker to evaluate her ACE funded prison and community based spoken word project.
Resource | Libraries Taskforce Resource Pack
A Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport commissioned resource, designed to assist libraries in evaluating their cultural engagement activities.
Feature | Making the tea or changing the game?
Anne Torreggiani explains why participating in an EU-funded Erasmus programme has prompted her to re-evaluate the ability of interns to act as a source of new ideas and fresh thinking.
Case in Point | English Heritage Online
Working with English Heritage to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of their online curatorial content.