by Flying Geese Consultant, John Holmes
Introduction
Our strategic work with Culture in Common saw us create a detailed situational analysis of arts and cultural audiences and provision in the New Forest, which later informed the team how to reach low and medium engagement audiences along with strategic recommendations for programming. Culture in Common is the Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places programme in the New Forest.
Situational analysis
To create the detailed situational analysis of arts and cultural audiences and provision in the New Forest we first of all conducted desk based research, gathering and analysing publicly available data (such as Census 2021 and Audience Spectrum, etc) on audience profiles combined with a variety of other data sources made available by the by Culture in Common consortium members (Active Lives data, behaviour reports etc).
We combined this desk based research with market research, audience insight and stakeholder interviews to complete the analysis.
Audience Development consultancy
The situational analysis informed the creation of our audience development strategy and a series of recommendations which later fed through to inform the new programme and cultural strategy for Culture in Common and the New Forest.
Key, was the identification of four clear target markets for the Culture in Common team to target. These four segment spanned three key localities across the New Forest.
Legacy and Impact
Our expertise in knowing which data sources to choose to inform the situational analysis enabled the Culture in Common team to have access to (often complicated) top level data. We interpreted this data in an easy to understand way and made it relevant to their organisation and what they wanted to achieve.
Our experience in gathering first-hand, bespoke data through interviews and surveys gave the team confidence that our recommendations were relevant to the communities that that they hoped to target. Our easy going and approachable style enabled us to dig deeper with our community research, so that we could fine-tune our recommendations and offer Culture in Common a series of ambitious, yet realistic and exciting, recommendations for engaging with their audiences.
Our audience development strategy later informed and guided programming recommendations that were taken forward to provide brand new arts and culture in the New Forest.
Marketing support and delivery
We worked closely with the team to support, manage and deliver the implementation of our short, medium and longer term recommendations. As a brand new organisation, Culture in Common were at the very starting point in their journey. Read more about it here