Audience
Development:
strategies, campaigns and tactics

There is a lot of debate about audience development, what it is and why we do it, but currently very little in the way of publications or published guidelines.
Arts organisations are defining audience development by doing it. We can learn a lot from looking at how other people do it and what they achieved. This toolkit refers to case studies which you will find elsewhere on the site, but of course there are many more on www.newaudiences.co.uk
The bottom line is we all need audiences, most of us need more audiences and believe the work we do should have a wider audience. So, above and beyond our marketing strategy, we need a plan to develop the audiences we already have and find and retain new ones.
This toolkit aims to give you a one-stop guide to tackling your organisation’s audience development needs, highlighting the musthave tools, offering information on the process and flagging up possible pitfalls. It is a big topic, so there are also handy references to more reading you can do.

What do we mean by audience development? Definitions
Don’t get bogged down in definition, but use the common themes from these examples to establish the fundamental principles.
What matters is how you apply audience development tools to the work your organisation does and - most importantly – to the people you want to reach.
Audience development is about making an organisation-wide commitment to engaging with people, whether or not they are currently your audience, and developing long-term relationships of mutual respect and benefit with those people.
Eastern Orchestral Board
The term Audience Development describes activity which is undertaken specifically to meet the needs of existing and potential audiences, and to help arts organisations to develop on-going relationships with audiences. It can