Audience Development Plans

An Audience Development Plan (ADP) encourages greater consideration of potential visitors, particularly the people that are conspicuous by their absence or under-representation.

The essential element for creating an ADP is to engage with local community and excluded groups. Years of experience have enabled the Sensory Trust to develop effective 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 ADPs 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.

ADPs are sometimes a requirement of funding applications and we are pleased to say that all the projects that we have produced audience development plans for have been successful in their funding bids.

We can also review an ADP at any stage of its creation, comment on its strengths and advise on where it can be improved.

Examples of our work

Mote Park
Client: Maidstone Borough Council

We were commissioned by Maidstone Borough Council and worked with landscape consultancy ACTA to develop an access plan and audience development plan for Mote Park, Maidstone, Kent. This helped secure funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund to support renovation and access improvement works to the park.

Capital Woodlands
Client: Trees for Cities

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. We engaged with approximately 600 people over the course of the project using a range of inclusive engagement techniques. The project was successful in receiving around £1m from the Heritage Lottery Fund in December 2005.

Weston Park
Client: Sheffield City Council

Working for Sheffield City Council, Sensory Trust produced an Access Plan and Audience Development Plan for Weston Park, the first municipal park to be created in Sheffield, for their HLF bid to restore the physical layout of the park to its original 19th Century design. The project was awarded just over £2m by HLF in March 2006.