Audience Development Plans

Besides the fact that these are a requirement for many funding applications to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), creating an Audience Development Plan (ADP) is beneficial to any organisation that manages public open space. It encourages site staff and management to think about potential visitors; people that are conspicuous by their absence or under-representation. People who are not talking about how great the site is, are not buying tickets for on-site events, are not visiting with family and friends or involving themselves in the volunteer scheme.

The essential element for creating an ADP is to engage with local community and disability groups. Years of experience have enabled the Sensory Trust to develop an effective mixture of techniques to engage the widest audience and enable people to share their ideas and concerns about the site. Numbers are kept to a manageable size to allow everyone the opportunity to participate and give their opinions. Wherever possible we select locations that people are familiar with and in which people feel more at ease. Examples of locations we have used include on-site meetings (either outdoors or indoors), community buildings, residential homes, day centres, private houses and places of worship.

All our ADP’s include recommendations for ongoing community involvement; particularly non-users and under-represented groups as well as the standard recommendations on techniques to monitor and evaluate audience development.

We are pleased to say that all the projects that we have produced audience development plans for have been successful in their funding bids.

Fee guideline for creating Audience Development Plans:  £10k – £20k

Reviewing Audience Development Plans

We will also review an ADP at any stage of its creation, comment on its strengths and advise on where it can be improved. Costs for this service vary depending on the scale of the Audience Development Plan and at what stage we review it.

Case study: Capital Woodlands Project, Greater London

The Sensory Trust carried out community consultation to develop access and Audience Development Plans for six woodland sites in the Greater London area, as part of the planning stage of an HLF bid by the Capital Woodlands Project.

Targeted groups included local disability groups, minority ethnic communities, older people, ‘friends’ groups, youth groups and schoolchildren. We engaged with approximately 600 people over the course of the project using a range of inclusive engagement techniques. The Place Mapping tool was one such technique used as it works well with a wide range of ages, visitor profiles, user activities and levels of connection with the sites. This is a flexible technique that allows people to express their current relationship with a site (whether as a member of staff, user or non-user) and their wishes for developing that relationship (through a wider range of activities or improved maintenance plans, for example) through the use of words, pictorial symbols, drawings placed onto a basic site map. Besides the evaluation tools we also carried out on-site questionnaires with woodland users on site, such as dog walkers, parents with children under five, and retired people.

The project was successful in receiving around £1m from the Heritage Lottery Fund in December 2005.