Audience development plans

More and more frequently site managers are required to produce an audience development plan (ADP) in order to get a better idea of existing audiences as well as who is missing and why. This can help justify expenditure and raise money for new work. An audience development plan has become best known as a requirement when making a grant application to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). Acting as consultants, Sensory Trust has been involved in producing audience development plans as part of HLF grant submissions for a diverse range of successful projects.

So, what is an audience development plan? It lies alongside an access plan as part of a HLF fundraising bid. Whereas an access plan deals with site features, an audience development plan deals with people – your current visitors, your non-visitors and potential visitors. Both plans are essential to a successful bid, but there is good reason to put particular emphasis on the audience development plan. It is a more accurate indicator of the likely success of any project. By focusing on the people who use your site and on those that are excluded, a tailored set of recommendations can be developed that is much more likely to achieve an improvement in visitor numbers than the recommendations arising from an access audit alone.

Sensory Trust have recently worked with Sheffield City Council to produce an ADP and access plan for the restoration of Weston Park, a historic urban park in Sheffield. The work involved looking at current accessibility and how the park could be made more inviting and usable by local communities such as the staff, patients and visitors of the nearby children’s hospital, university students and local older people.

The Capital Woodlands project is an initiative of Trees for Cities focused on a series of ancient woodlands in London. We produced an ADP and access plan for six woodland sites in Greater London, talking with local communities and site managers to address some tricky issues. For example, how do you encourage local people to use woodlands that are currently monopolised by quad bikes and fly tipping? There are no easy answers but one thing is clear – any work to rejuvenate these spaces and broaden the range of visitors will begin with an audience development plan.

Shorne Wood is a Kent County Council country park. The audience development plan involved consulting with local community groups and using tools we’ve developed such as sensory mapping and place mapping. These give people the chance to share their views about why they do or don’t use the site and what changes they would like to see.

Congratulations to all three for their success in securing significant HLF grants to support future work.

We are currently working with the National Arboretum at Westonbirt to undertake consultation activities and will be reporting on developments in due course.

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