Culture Republic Podcast

Culture Republic’s series of Learning Week events took place over the first week of November 2016. Matt Lehrman is a globally recognised audience development expert, motivator and strategist. This is a live recording from Edinburgh’s Dovecot Studios Wednesday 2 November of Matt’s talk, The Imperative of Innovation. It is followed by a Q&A. Learn more about Matt Lehrman on our website https://www.culturerepublic.co.uk and on his website Audience Avenue http://www.audienceavenue.com. Tweet him @MattLehrman. Thanks to Matt for sharing his talk in the podcast!  Find Culture Republic online at https://www.culturerepublic.co.uk, on Twitter @culture_public and on Facebook. Presenter Ashley Smith Hammond is on Twitter @AnAshleyAbroad. Our audio production by Eva Gnatiuk. Use the hashtag #CRpodcast to let us know you’re listening. Our in and out music was created by Drew Hammond of Mesura Music – you can find him on Twitter @DrYouHammond. The Culture Republic Podcast has a new series in the works. Subscribe to have it drop automatically into your feed. Please help us spread the word by rating and reviewing this podcast and share it on social media. Find us on Soundcloud, iTunes or Stitcher. The Culture Republic Podcast by www.culturerepublc.co.uk is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The Culture Republic podcast is all about how Scottish arts and culture are engaging with different segments of the Scottish population. March’s episode looks at how the arts are connecting with Scotland’s racially and ethnically diverse communities. This episode features interviews with: Natasha Gilmore, Artistic Director of Barrowland Ballet. The company is on Twitter @Barrowlballet and online at http://barrowlandballet.co.uk. Adele Patrick, Lifelong Learning and Creative Development Manager, Glasgow Women’s Library. The library is on Twitter @GWLkettle and online http://womenslibrary.org.uk. Danny Boyle, Parliamentary and Policy Officer, Bemis. They are on Twitter @bemis_scotland and online http://bemis.org.uk. Thanks to all of them for giving their time to share their stories. Learn more from the following resources flagged in the interviews: The Scottish Refugee Council – http://www.scottishrefugeecouncil.org.uk. BAME Boost – Scottish network for black and minority ethnic creative professionals –on Twitter @BAME_Boost. The Glasgow Ward Area Factsheets from Glasgow City Council https://www.glasgow.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=18820.   Audio production by studio engineer Barry Reid of SPAD –on Twitter @barryspad.  In and out music by Drew Hammond of Mesura Music – on Twitter @DrYouHammond. Additional music in this episode (in order of use): Jazz? by J. Blasco https://www.jamendo.com/track/39558/jazz (CC BY SA 3.0) Intersection by Citisyn https://soundcloud.com/citisyn/intersection (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) La chamber des nuages by Pompougnac Daniel https://www.jamendo.com/track/492216/la-chambre-des-nuages (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) Travelling without moving by Ironicbudda https://soundcloud.com/ironicbuddha/travelling-without-moving (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) Ruts by Sunny Sandals https://www.jamendo.com/track/1319127/ruts (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)   Find Culture Republic online at https://www.culturerepublic.co.uk and on Twitter @culture_public. Presenter Ashley Smith Hammond is on Twitter @AnAshleyAbroad. Use the hashtag #CRpodcast to let us know you’re listening. Please help us spread the word by rating and reviewing this podcast and share it on social media. Find us and subscribe on Soundcloud, iTunes or Stitcher. The Culture Republic Podcast by www.culturerepublc.co.uk is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This month we look at how Scottish arts organisations are connecting with young people. Ageing is something we all do, so it cuts right across other kinds of categories like race or ethnicity, income levels or geography. Working with young people means reaching out to people who are growing up and becoming more independent, but there are still other people – teachers, parents, social workers – who have a strong influence on how they make decisions. This episode features interviews with: James Coutts, Communications and Marketing Manager at Youth Theatre Arts Scotland – a Scottish development organisation helping to build the community of youth theatre practice and empowering Scotland’s youth theatre sector through the projects and services. Robin Baillie the Senior Outreach Officer at the National Galleries of Scotland who reflected on the UNTITLED project, which was inspired by GENERATION: 25 years of contemporary art in Scotland. UNTITLED started in June 2014 and worked with young people in Leith, Alloa and Irvine to create their own contemporary art, which is on display at the National Portrait Gallery now – May 2016.  Credits Thanks to James Coutts at Youth Theatre Arts Scotland and Robin Baillie at the National Galleries of Scotland for sharing their stories. Reach them on Twitter @NatGalleriesSco and @YTArtsScot. Audio production by studio engineer Barry Reid of SPAD. In and out music by Drew Hammond of Mesura Music.  Additional music (in order of use): Eracilon - Over water (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)  Eracilon - From here and there (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)  Nick Gordy - Unattainable stars (CC BY-NC 3.0)  Clairox - indifférence (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)   Culture Republic is on Twitter @culture_public and presenter Ashley Smith Hammond is on Twitter @AnAshleyAbroad. Use the hashtag #CRpodcast to let us know you’re listening. Please help us spread the word by rating and reviewing this podcast and share it on social media. Find us and subscribe on Soundcloud, iTunes or Stitcher. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.

January’s Culture Republic podcast looks at how Scottish arts organisations are serving audiences with disabilities and what you can learn from some of the great practice that’s taking place across the country. Despite the standard wheelchair iconography it’s important to remember that disabilities are not always visible. To make sense of who we are talking about when we talk about disabled people, Culture Republic recommend the legal definition in the Equality Act (2010). It states that a person has a disability if: “they have a physical or mental impairment and the impairment has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on the person’s ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities”.  This episode features interviews with: Jodie Wilkinson, Public Engagement Co-Ordinator for Glasgow Film Theatre and Esther Currie, Marketing and Communications Manger for Macrobert Arts Centre.  Key points from this episode: Disability is more than wheelchairs and a lot of disability is invisible. Don’t be scared to tell people what the situation is at your event or venue – highlight what you can do/offer and be honest about what you cannot. An organisation’s openness to learning and listening makes a big difference to good practice. Being more accessible benefits everyone – not just those with disabilities. Check out the Culture Republic resource pack linked to this episode, a downloadable guide around audiences with disabilities, which can help you get started or improve your own practice in this space.   CREDITS Thanks to Jodie Wilkinson at Glasgow Film Theatre and Esther Currie at Macrobert Arts Centre for sharing their stories. Reach them on Twitter @glasgowfilm and @macrobert. Audio production by studio engineer Barry Reid – on Twitter @barryspad. In and out music by Drew Hammond of Mesura Music – he is @DrYouHammond on Twitter. Culture Republic is @culture_public on Twitter and presenter Ashley Smith Hammond is @AnAshleyAbroad. Use the hashtag #CRpodcast to let us know you’re listening. Help us spread the word by rating and reviewing this podcast or sharing it on social media.  

This month the Culture Republic podcast is looking at audiences who are experiencing social exclusion in Scotland. Poverty and deprivation have been part of Scotland’s social and political mix for centuries, especially in the West of Scotland, where historically poverty has been most endemic. Social exclusion is more than just poverty. The Government’s Social Exclusion Unit defines it as what “happens when people or places suffer from a series of problems such as unemployment, discrimination, poor skills, low incomes, poor housing, high crime, ill health and family breakdown”. In the context of this complexity, it is important for organisations to understand local patterns of exclusion because it will strongly impact how and why their people connect with their work and organisations. There is a lot of information available via the Scottish Government’s Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) resource that anyone can use. This month Culture Republic talked to Rob Gallagher from Impact Arts, a community arts organisation that uses the arts and creativity to enable and empower social change and Kate Wimpress from North Edinburgh Arts, an arts venue in Edinburgh’s Fourth Ward. Both of these organisations have been working with socially excluded communities for decades. Across both interviews a number of key themes arose, including: the necessity of working in partnership with other agencies and third sector organisations; removing barriers to access or participation including cost, physical access / transport and significantly building confidence to remove the emotional barrier to participation. What came through strongly was the importance of long term commitment to building relationships – with audiences and partners. The issues related to social deprivation are so complex that a one-off intervention is likely to have a limited success.   CREDITS Thanks to North Edinburgh Arts and Impact Arts for sharing their stories. Reach them on Twitter @northedinarts and Impact Arts @impact_arts. Audio production by studio engineer Barry Reid – on Twitter @barryspad. In and out music by Drew Hammond of Mesura Music – he is @DrYouHammond on Twitter. Culture Republic is @culture_public on Twitter and presenter Ashley Smith Hammond is @AnAshleyAbroad. Use the hashtag #CRpodcast to let us know you’re listening. Please help us spread the word by rating and reviewing this podcast or sharing it on social media.

This month Culture Republic looks at how Scotland’s artists and arts organisations are engaging with older audiences in Scotland. Older people (aged 65 +) is the segment of Scotland's population which is growing the fastest. Older people have specific needs in terms of communication, programming and practical support. Because poor health is correlated with age, it can be a barrier to arts attendance or participation. To make sense of the pattern, we work with a classification between ‘third age’ arts participants who are fit and well and ‘fourth age’ participants who have more significant additional support needs.  This episode features interviews with Louise Crichton from Culture Republic our in-house expert on ageing audiences; Martha Pollard from the Scottish Poetry Library on the Living Voices project and Emma Young from Dance House on the Still Dancing performance group.      CREDITS Find out more about Scottish Poetry Library at http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk or on Twitter @byleaveswelive Find out more about Dance House at http://www.dancehouse.org or on Twitter @dancehousegla Find out more about Culture Republic at www.culturerepublic.co.uk or on Twitter @culture_public Audio production by studio engineer Barry Reid – @barryspad In and out music by Drew Hammond of Mesura Music - http://www.mesuramusic.com      

This month we’ll be taking a look at family audiences in Scotland. Families are, of course, a broad category with lots of internal diversity but at its core what we’re talking about is mixed age groups of adults and children attending or participating in an arts experience together – people younger than 16 and it’s usually the adults who make the ultimate purchase or participation decision. We wanted to find out from arts organisations what its like in real life to try and connect effectively with family audiences. What are the practical challenges? What can other arts organisations learn from the things that they are doing right – and sometimes the things that they have done wrong. To do this we talked to Louise Dingwall from Platform in Easterhouse and Amy Briggs from Starcatchers. To get some context we start with Scotland’s population. Scotland’s Census shows that young people – those under age 16 – made up 19.2% of the Scottish population in 2001, and this decreased to 17.3% by the 2011 census. According to the National Records of Scotland: The population is about 5.3 million people. In 2013 there were 56k babies born in Scotland representing just over 1% of the total figure (p18) The population overall is aging. By mid 2014 there’d been a 3% decrease over the past 10 years in total number of children under 16. (p5) Since the mid-1970s, there has been a trend towards women having children at older ages. This is partly due to a steady fall since 1970 in women aged under twenty becoming mothers.  To get an idea of how people live and what they do, at Culture Republic we use Mosaic Scotland, which is a tool that segments Scotland’s 2.4m households based on demographic characteristics, lifestyles and behavior. According to this tool, just over 20% of the households are likely to have children at home – around 523 thousand households. We can then marry this data with other data to get an insight around arts attendance patterns. Culture Republic collects box office data from across the country and this can give us a picture of the booking patterns for family audiences. This is box office data only so it misses out a lot of non ticketed arts attendance – like going to the museum and community or participation events – but it is still very useful for an indication. We looked at ticket purchases in fiscal year 2013-14. Our ticketing database in that period was drawing together 35 box office feeds for 48 organisations. In that year there were 745,182 tickets sold to the three Mosaic Scotland groups most likely to have children in the household. So, in our dataset this made up about 20% or about a fifth of the marketplace. If we then look at their booking patterns we could see that: 70% of them only booked tickets once a year, but 15% booked tickets twice a year – and this is worth paying attention to because repeat bookers generate disproportionately more revenue for an arts organisation. When they did book, about 35% tended to book early –at least 28 days in advance. This pattern can, and does vary across the country and from venue to venue. If we return to the Culture Republic box office dataset, we can look at one more pattern. Instead of looking at types of households, we can look at purchasing patterns for types of programming. We’re again using the FY2013-14 data and this time looking ticket sales for events coded as children’s or family – this equalled about 295k tickets sold and yielded over £2m in revenue for Scottish arts organisations. In this group repeat bookers were even more important. Repeat bookers bought 162k tickets – or approximately 55% of all of the tickets sold. And this yielded £961k – 47% of the total revenue for family and children’s events. This loyalty can add to the challenge of programming work for family audiences – which develops when families have more than one child and work is produced for a particular age range.     CREDITS   Find out more about Starcatchers at www.starcatchers.org.uk or on Twitter @starcatchersuk  Find out more about Platform at http://platform-online.co.uk or on Twitter @PlatformGlasgow  Find out more about Culture Republic at www.culturerepublic.co.uk or on Twitter @culture_public  Audio production by studio engineer Barry Reid – @barryspad.  In and out music by Drew Hammond of Mesura Music - www.mesuramusic.com    

This podcast is about how the arts community in Scotland is reaching out to different sections of the population. Each month we’ll be taking a look at a different audience segment sharing what we know about this group as a subsection of the population, as arts attenders and their broader lifestyle patterns. Because we work closely with arts organisations we get to see great examples of work that is created with specific audiences in mind and organisations who are experts at reaching out and connecting with the people to whom their work matters most. In the coming months we’ll be looking at how Scotland’s cultural community is serving family audiences, aging audiences, disabled audiences and socially excluded audiences. We will explore stories from the perspective of the artists, programmers and marketers who are working to get to know their audiences better, make meaningful connections with them and reach new audiences. At Culture Republic we think there’s a real value to the rest of the sector in helping share this work. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and we know that people are keen to learn from each other. This podcast is designed to help you do just that. So if you’re a programmer, engagement officer, outreach officer or artist and you have a story to share please get in touch. CREDITS If you want to learn more about Scotland’s audiences you can find more on our website www.culturerepublic.co.uk or tweet @culture_public. Audio production by studio engineer Barry Reid –  @barryspad. Music by Drew Hammond of Mesura Music www.mesuramusic.com.