Engage Audiences: Call to Action on Audience Development

Partners of the EU-funded Study on Audience Development - How to Place Audiences at the Centre of Cultural Organisations have launched a call to action, looking for cultural organisations that have undertaken the transition towards a more audience-centric approach, that are worth disseminating and sharing at European level. The aim of the Study on audience development – How to place audiences at the centre of cultural organisations is to provide successful approaches and methods in the area of audience development to be disseminated among European cultural organisations. These approaches and methods will be used as a basis for selection criteria in future calls for proposals launched by the EU's Creative Europe programme. The study aims to equip cultural leaders with skills that will enable them to increase their audience focus internally towards internal gatekeepers, programmers, boards of directors, communication and artistic departments, advisory committees and other decision structures, as well as externally towards public authorities, patrons, sponsors, friends schemes, etc. In this respect, the recently-launched call to action aims to collect a number of European best practices to be further investigated in order to explore and point out the key success factors and the main organisational impact that the work with audience development, as a strategic goal and long term organisational process, has had on cultural organisations. Due to the focus of the research, priority is given to cultural organisations and/or activities that reflect and meet the following criteria:

• Small and medium-sized European organisations (no more than 50 employees)
• Organisations with an internal work function or with staff specifically addressed to working with audience development
• Organisations that have well-defined objectives and goals related to audience development strategies, and furthermore have the capacity to describe the main results achieved (but also unexpected failures) through an evidence based approach

The most relevant and noteworthy cases will be selected and deeply analysed by the research team (also through further personal interviews) and they will be published in the final report of the study. The study is coordinated by Fondazione Fitzcarraldo, in partnership with Culture Action Europe, ECCOM and Intercult. The call to action is open until 15 April 2016. For additional information, please visit http://engageaudiences.eu/call-to-action/