Apparently …
Statistics produced by CHILDWISE, a research agency specialising in children and young people. If you’re interested, their trend data report drawing on data from 1997-2009 is available to buy from www.childwise.co.uk
What a feel good factor!
Not usually a publication that we trawl for the latest insights into culture and the charitable sector, but yesterday the Daily Mail reported on the findings about two research papers from Harvard University and Newcastle University which suggest that charitable giving can make you “mentally tougher, physically stronger and more popular”. Read more on their website here.
It’s good to know that it’s not only us here at AL that are championing Organisational Change as a transformative way towards improving relationships with audiences. I’ve just come across ‘All Together: A Creative Approach to Organisational Change’ a report from think-tank gurus -Demos, that had been following the Royal Shakespeare Company as they embarked on a three-year organisational change process that successfully introduced ‘ensemble’ as a way of working throughout the company. The internal transformation process led to a significant change in fortunes for the RSC both financially and achieving critical acclaim with their audiences. You can download the report and see how they did it, find out just what ‘ensemble’ really means and how you might try implementing it by downloading and reading the free report.
Hi, I’m Josie, I’d like to share some recent findings from the world of arts and health research – which is what I used to do before arriving at Audiences London…
In an eye-catchingly titled article, ‘Cultural participation – A Matter of life and Death?’, Mark O’Neill, Director of research at Culture and Sport Glasgow considers recent international research that shows cultural participation makes such a difference to people’s mental and physical wellbeing, that people live longer as a result. The research began in Sweden, but its findings are being confirmed and developed all over the world.
Encouragingly for arts marketers (and anyone else too busy to go to the cinema), it’s not a use it or lose it situation:
‘like physical fitness, regular participation in culture helps maintain wellbeing, and requires regular engagement to realise the benefits. And like sport and physical activity, the benefits can be achieved by starting participation at any age, and recovered after a period of inactivity.’
He concludes:
‘…there is a strong ethical dimension implicit in this research. If engagement with culture enriches people’s experience to the degree that it creates healthier, more flourishing lives, then the issue of access is critical… The obligation to people whose background does not include the cultural capital required to begin the engagement with formal culture is also clear: this is a key justification for public funding.’
That’s all from me, I’m off to take my culture pill!
The first IT4Arts seminar of 2010 kicked off with some really interesting content about how companies and organisations are trying to provide cultural content online. We heard from:
A fascinating and educational day! If you become a member of IT4Arts you can download the presentations for free from their website, and joining is free!
We helped Emma, Roger and Hetty with their work exploring new writing within smaller scale theatres in England, and the impacts of changes in funding since 2003. It’s now published on the Arts Council’s website (www.artscouncil.org.uk/publication_archive/new-writing-theatre/).
Congrats guys!
I recently attended the Market Research Society Code of Conduct Roadshow. Unfortuntately there was no Bruno Brookes but in his place Barry Ryan, the MRS Standards & Policy manager, told the assembled throng all about changes to the Code of Conduct which will be coming into force in March 2010. So, for your enjoyment, here’s a quick rundown of the main points:
As a member of the MRS, and any research we at Audiences London are involved in is required to uphold the Code of Conduct, so we’ll be going with the above guidance. Even if your organisation is not a member, we’d recommend following their guidelines, as they outline best practice in the research sector pretty comprehensively. And if you are a member, Barry’s available on the MRS Codeline to answer any tricky questions!
If you’d like any more info, have a look at at the MRS website.
It’s not going to be an astounding revelation to any of us but Nielsen’s latest Global Online Consumer Survey shows that word of mouth is the most powerful form of communication when it comes to getting people to trust your brand. No fanfares there.
What I think is interesting is the second highest result in this league table of “trusted sources” – ‘Consumer opinions posted online’. The opinions of strangers posted on online forums and review sites are now incredibly powerful portals for gaining consumer trust, and there’s not a thing the brands can do about it! Although I do wonder if this will provoke some corporations into trying to infiltrate the message boards… My advice? Focus on good CRM and values that you believe in and stick to and let the quality of your product shine through, and this fits perfectly well with cultural organisations too. The consumer (audience) is king!
Latest research commissioned by Arts and Business with City University is a study into donor motivation – interesting reading offering evidence to help grow our donor and friend schemes. This may not seem like news to those immersed in this area of course… but does advocate for development and marketing teams working closely together on understanding their existing audiences to identify potential donors.
This is a good starting point for us, as Audiences London has been invited to the next Membership Management Forum meeting on 21 September at the Photographer’s Gallery. Hopefully a great opportunity to talk about the sorts of audience information that would be might be useful for identifying potential friends and donors and where to find it. Following on from The Good Agency’s presentation at the MMF conference earlier in the year.
The other day Hannah was helping me update our database; what fun doing returns from a big mailing, but so important – how annoying is it to be sent two copies of the same thing, and how useless to your organisatsion to send information to the wrong address! It’s important for us to log the borough of companies we’re communicating with for reporting purposes and I do notice that this isn’t always recorded. So I showed Hannah a tool which can help identify this. In fact I was a bit taken aback to find that I was the only person in the AL team who seems to be using The Museum of London’s Postcodes Project to do this!
If you select the “Places” tab from the menu on this minisite, you can view boroughs by postcode. It’s not fool proof, as some postcodes cross more than one borough, but it is incredibly useful; especially when you’re needing to report on this sort of thing for your funders! There are lots of other fun tools to utilise too, such as themed tours and an oppportunity for you to submit your own stories about your area.
