Mix It Up Project Report: Building New Audiences - Multicultural Arts ...

Mix It Up Research Project 2006
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Centre For Leisure Management Research
Five Strategies for Developing New and Diverse Arts Audiences
We each had different perceptions of what is success and we need to sit down and work out a
common definition of success for such a program. Is success bums on seats? Is it bringing in
new audiences to the Arts Centre, even if the hall is not always full? Is it finding new ways of
working? Is it engaging new communities? Is it developing new ways of working so that we
can develop a national model of diversity? (Administrator, the Arts Centre)
It [Mix It Up] brought a lot of young people into the Arts Centre who had never been before and
that was a huge success. (Administrator, the Arts Centre)
This engages with new people. (Administrator, the Arts Centre)
Audience development is a much-discussed topic in arts marketing. Recently, resources have been targeted to
increase audiences, broaden audiences and enrich experiences. Mix It Up is one such program of audience
development. Mix It Up provided a platform for developing audiences for multicultural arts programming.
Audience development has been defined variously, to mean cultural inclusion, extended marketing and audience
education (sometimes called ‘cultivation of taste’). Cultural inclusion targets people least likely to attend (such as
low income people), and reaches out to them primarily for social purposes. Extended marketing identifies
potential attendees or lapsed attendees and using the same product offering, caters to that market primarily for
financial and artistic purposes. Audience education targets existing audiences, introduces them to different art
forms and genres primarily for educational purposes (cf Kawashima 2000; Walker-Kuhne 2005). Mix It Up used
all three types of audience development. This section of the report deals only with audience inclusive strategies
used in Mix It Up. The next section of the report deals with extended marketing and audience education under
the main heading of the stakeholder study.
The results of the audience studies conducted on Mix It Up audiences, show that Mix It Up was successful in
extending the audience reach of the Arts Centre. To summarise, five strategies for creating diversified audiences
are suggested by the quantitative results on audience needs and wants. They are complimented by qualitative
data from the stakeholder interviews, where appropriate, so that a well-rounded perspective is obtained.