What is audience development?
Audience Development isn’t a term that is regularly found in archival literature. The evidential role of archive services – providing access to records needed for the management of people or corporate bodies – means it is often presumed that this provision of access is sufficient for a successful service. Audience development seeks a different relationship between the archive service and audiences.
Two definitions of audience development that may be useful are:
“…a planned, organisation-wide approach to extending the range and nature of relationships with the public, it helps a cultural organisation to achieve its mission, balancing social purpose, financial sustainability and creative ambitions.”
The Audience Agency
“The term audience development describes activity which is undertaken specifically to meet the needs of existing and potential audiences and to help arts organisations to develop ongoing relationships with audiences.”
Arts Council England
There are some key characteristics of audience development. It is a planned task that reaches across all activities of an organisation, from collection development, to front of house, to website and social media and the building itself.
The aim of the activity is to change the relationship with stakeholders, listening and discussing with them and taking action in response. Importantly it involves talking to those that don’t use your services as well as those that do. This means that audience development can widen the scope of your audience, diversifying the demographics and increasing numbers. The process of researching and consulting people can help to develop a community that services can work with to develop engagement activities, aid collection development and support advocacy.
Essentially, audience development is a planned way to tackle some of these issues of diversity and numbers of visitors. It isn’t just about the outreach staff or the searchroom, it’s about learning about your users and non-users, making changes to drive users and make change. All of the actions help the organisation to deliver its wider purpose.
Audience development is not only applicable to public archive services. Business and other mainly internally-focused archive services can use the same techniques and tools to diversify and increase the use of their archives internally and externally. Wider use of archives internally is a key tool for advocacy, raising the profile of the service, developing a community and demonstrating the value of the archive service to the organisation.
Why does it matter?
Archive services are generally understaffed and under resourced, so it is understandable to question the worth of audience development. But as well as diversifying audiences, audience development techniques can make your service more relevant:
- Increasing inclusion can make your service more relevant – delivering for a small section of your community can make your service seem less relevant
- Raising visibility can also increase the relevance of your service – working with audiences raises your visibility both externally and internally
- For publicly funded organisations, audience development and its resultant changes demonstrate the public purpose of the archive service
- Audience development supports advocacy
- Enable you to manage resources. Most archive services have limited resources and we need to get the best returns for our investment of time and money. Audience development techniques can help manage these resources, helping services to target their work where they can have most impact and where they can help to deliver core aims.
The National Archives describes the benefits of audience development as:
- your service and the community form an ongoing and mutually beneficial relationship
- your service is of high quality, appropriate for the community and leads to more positive outcomes for local people
- individuals feel empowered and able to influence service planning and delivery
- your archive is sustainable and progressive