however good dinner was

With the opening of applications last Friday for Arts Council England’s new £7.5 million Audience Focus commission grants, looking to increase the numbers and breadth of people engaging the arts, I was reminded of 1998 and the launch of another new grant pot, New Audiences.

New Audiences was launched with ministerial support from Tessa Jowell, with a grant pot to £20 million it looked “to encourage as many people as possible, from all backgrounds and every walk of life, to participate in and benefit from the arts.” The programme ended after 5 years with an estimated impact of 4.7 million attendances.  I say estimated as the evaluation report for the scheme, still available here and worth reading for those who have not, is forced to be cautious with its findings as:

“..the quality of evaluations varied widely.  Although all organisations were provided with the Partnerships for Learning (by Felicity Woolf, Arts Council England, 1999) document as a guide to evaluation, many projects did not submit high quality evaluation.”

As the sector embarks on a further investment of £7.5 million are there any lessons we can learn from the past?  Andre Gide famously said “Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.” Which conversations from the past might avoid the repetition of previous mistakes?

The first and most obvious lesson is that if we are going to do projects that can inform and develop our understanding of audiences nationally, we must evaluate them well.  In 2003 Audiences South reported on the £1.7 million invested in the South East region through New Audiences.  The report asks for a “change of mindsets” it suggests that “Too often in the arts and in particular during the New Audiences Programme, evaluation is seen as a document of the ultimate impact of a particular project. While this can be useful and indeed demonstrate accountability, it does not use the full potential of evaluation.”

It goes on to quote the previously mentioned “Partnerships for Learning” a quote worth repeating now as we look to invest again in audiences. ““There are many issues to consider when setting up an arts project, and evaluation needs to be discussed from the very beginning, along with practical details of a project. Evaluation needs to be programmed into the project timetable, so that time is allowed for all the stages of the process.  You also need to include evaluation in the project budget. Effective evaluation costs time and money.”

The Audiences South report went on to suggest such large investments into the sector needed to have proper partnerships, specialist support and support to assist organisations in creating capacity for change. All perhaps future topics for a blog, but returning to Gide, if there is one conversation from the past that we should stop repeating it must be understanding the value and need for well managed, well funded, properly embedded, informative evaluation.

And to start the new conversations from a place of knowledge here is the summary of the common factors that hindered audience development success from the last £20 million invested in new audiences:

• lack of appropriate project management skills
• lack of contingency budget or time to deal with unexpected crises, such as the loss of core staff
• lack of resources to continue and build on project successes
• lack of planning to ensure that relationships built with new audiences could be sustained
• lack of information captured on new attenders
• communication difficulties with project partners due to failure to define partnership roles and responsibilities early on in the project

 However good dinner was, no one likes it repeating.

James Gough, Vice Chair of Audiences UK and currently Interim General Manager for the  Newbury Corn Exchange and Creative Producer with Parrabbola.