Want to maximise your visitor audience?

Arts Audiences is delighted to invite applications for the new Build Your Audience scheme, which this year will concentrate on helping arts organisations with their cultural tourism efforts. This project is part of Arts Audiences ongoing work with partner Failte Ireland which included a cultural tourism briefing day in November 2010.

If you are keen to attract domestic and international visitors, but are not sure how to set realistic goals for your organisation and what to do, this scheme is for you.

In brief:
Do you need help to identify, communicate with, and build your visitor audience? Wondering how best to reach domestic or international visitors? Or how best to work with the tourism bodies and your local amenities?Wondering if you should you use traditional marketing techniques or new media?
In this pilot scheme, Arts Audiences will provide free audience consultancy in this area to 3 organisations. Participating organisations will assist in documenting the process and results, which will be publicised to make learning outcomes available to the wider arts community.

The Scheme

Arts Audiences recognises that even the most creative and productive of organisations can struggle with knowing what a visitor audience needs in the way of information, and how best to reach and persuade them.
The “Build Your Audience” pilot scheme will assist three organisations, from any discipline, with any remit, in work which focuses on:

• Targetting and setting goals for visitor attendance
• Strategies for communicating with that audience, including working with tourism promotion and local partners
• Implementation of strategies and documentation of results.

The three organisations which are selected will be provided free of charge with the services of Annette Nugent, marketing consultant, to assist them in:

• Scoping the project they wish to implement and setting realistic and achievable targets in the short and medium term
• Devising the implementation strategy which has the best chance of achieving the target
• Supporting the organisation through the implementation phase
• Assisting the organisation to assess the results

Annette is a senior communications executive with 15 years experience working in the culture and tourism sectors, and has been working as a freelance consultant since January 2005. She works with cultural clients to ‘amplify’ their communications impact, building strategies, developing marketing plans and PR campaigns, and advising on audience research and development.

In order to maximise learning, brief case studies of all 3 consultancies will be published online (sensitive data can be withheld from publishing).

Submitting:
Arts organisations are invited to submit projects for consideration which are focussed on a targeted approach, and are achievable within the coming five months. Applicants are requested to submit their ideas under the following headings;

• What do you think you want to achieve in 2011? Know more about visitors and how they behave? Know more about the tourism landscape?
• Why? What are the challenges you face in this area? Is the summer a difficult time? Would you like to work more closely with others?
• How do you think having the support of a consultant can help?

Submissions should be sent as a single A4 page word document (or similar) attached to an email, to ucarmody@templebar.ie on or before February 11^th at 5pm.

Assessment:
Submissions will be assessed by Una Carmody (Director, Arts Audiences), Annette Nugent and an external assessor.
Projects will be assessed based on the following:

• Applicant organisations or individuals must have been in receipt of Arts Council funding in the calendar year 2010 – of any type including project funding
• The area or practice which you wish to focus on must be transferable and be capable of producing outcomes of interest to others working in the arts
• You must be prepared to work with us to document your experience and at a minimum we would expect this to mean a minimum of eight hours input from you.
• The panel will seek to achieve a regional spread in the projects selected, and a spectrum of artforms and types of organisations.

Successful participants will be notified no later than February 25^th.

Queries:
If you have any queries, please post a comment here and we will answer as soon as possible.