From March to June 2001, South West Arts Marketing worked in partnership with Birmingham Arts Marketing and 11 visual arts venues (four in Bristol, seven in Birmingham) in a pilot initiative to determine if regular visual arts attenders would travel to another city to experience quality visual arts.
The objectives were to:
The project consisted of reciprocal direct mailing campaigns using databases of known visual arts attenders. Each city produced a promotional brochure, which was mailed to the named 5000 visual arts attenders in the database of their partner city, accompanied by a letter inviting them to visit the city and the venues featured. There was also a wide range of value-added benefits as incentives offered by the venues and SWAM and BAM negotiated travel and hotel offers and discounts for local restaurants and nightclubs.
Prior to the initiative, little was known about loyal visual arts attenders in Bristol. The Bristol venues allowed SWAM to map and profile their regular attenders and discovered that there are only four distinct postcode sectors unique to a particular gallery amongst their collective top ten postcodes.
Who are these people? Many of them fall into the Acorn Type 21 category – Prosperous Enclaves, Highly Qualified Executives. The demographics show below average levels of children and old people, above average levels of 15-44 year olds and over three times the national proportion of single, non-pensioner households. This group is highly educated, 81% of those in employment work in the service sector and there is twice the national level of professionals.
Most importantly, there is such a crossover of attendance between galleries it demonstrates that loyal visual arts attenders are indiscriminate in their consumption – an attender for a contemporary exhibition will also be enticed by something more traditional.
During the initiative itself it was important to find out:
Two systems were devised to capture this information:
Vouchers – participating venues offered vouchers for a wide range of value-added benefits such as free catalogues and postcards and discounts at local restaurants and nightclubs. These acted as both incentives to travel and as a useful means of monitoring visitor activity.
Questionnaires – both cities created branded evaluation postcards as self-completion questionnaires so that people could take them away to complete at their leisure. Completed cards were entered into a prize draw as an incentive.
In addition, Bristol Tourism and Conference Bureau undertook to monitor the Art4Bristol calls and note any change in enquiries from people living in the target area.
Following the initiative we undertook two further pieces of evaluation – telephone surveys and mapping. The objectives for these elements were to understand motivation to travel and barriers to attendance. What would have converted non-attenders to attenders?
The most quoted prompt for participating in the initiative was the mailing followed by the incentives. Reasons for not coming included: did not receive the letter or did not remember the letter; too far away; too busy; conflicting commitments; children to look after; bad timing; wouldn’t go alone; only visit places where know people; lack of time.
The Henley Report into consumer trends looks at change’s in people’s lives and how these will affect the way they interact with the arts. Key findings are that people’s disposable income is rising and, for the first time, we are spending more on leisure than on food. Despite being cash-rich, people are time-poor. People are working longer hours and the UK has the longest working hours in Europe. People in the higher income brackets are the most affected. They also traditionally form the core of arts audiences. There has been a massive increase in media output over the last ten years and consumers are becoming more demanding.
The implication for the arts is obvious –we are not just competing for money and access but for time. We need to think about how to offer value-for-time, for example through flexible opening and programming times. These were perceived by the respondents as key factors they took into consideration when deciding whether to participate in the Art4Bristol initiative.
Bristol venues said they particularly valued the initiative because of:
Bristol venues saw this as a first step into the collaborative forum. All the participating venues are keen to take this further and other consortia have since emulated the print format.
Future audience development initiatives could include:
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