There are several ways to undertake audience development, but they all tend to follow these three steps:
- Understanding your audiences
- Remove barriers
- Create changes and programmes to respond
These steps can be broken down into several key steps:
Understanding audiences
All organisations are different, and will find themselves in different situations at various times. Its vital therefore to start with understanding where your archive service is and what the priorities are of the wider organisation. This will enable you to identify the goal of your audience development. You may want to use audience development to reach specific communities, to develop the range of engagement in certain areas or to advocate for your service. Understanding the goals of your audience development will influence who you target and how.
Your next step should be to look at what you know about the people that already use your archive service – your current audience. Look at what you already know about your users and how they use the service. Who are they? Why do they use your service? How do they use the service and why?
You should think about who your ‘rivals’ are. Archive services will inevitably have unique collections, but they can still have competition. This can commonly be competition in the form of other sources or information, such as online digitised collections. Potential visitors or volunteers will also have other activities or causes competing for their time.
You also want to understand what motivates people to use your service and to engage with the activities you provide. This information will be invaluable in enabling you to speak to non-users and planning for the future.
Having thought about your current users you next need to identify who you will want to target through your audience development. Often archive services talk about archive audiences being everyone. Services might be provided for everyone, but archive services do not have the resources to explore and develop a response to all groups of people. Creating untargeted engagement programmes tends to meet the needs of few people and often attract only existing audiences. We therefore need to prioritise the audiences we want to reach, ensuring that the resources we use are best spent and have the greatest impact.
Identifying target groups for audience development can be tricky and this is helped by segmenting your potential targets into groups. These groups could be based on various characteristics. They could be connected by their geography, e.g. people living within 30 miles. The groups could be defined by their demographics, e.g. young people aged 18-24. You could target a group with a community of interest, e.g. family historians or steam train enthusiasts. You might also want to target a group of people with similar motivations.
The Leeds Vernacular Archive, at the University of Leeds,, developed a project which explored dialect, in partnership with a series of rural museums across the country. Their description of their targeted audiences included the following, for example:
Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture Target Audiences:
- Existing museum audiences
- Teachers of A-Level English
- Cross-generational family groups that include a grandparent
- Academics and researchers
- Descendants of The Survey of English Dialects (SED) respondents
- Volunteers – local and remote
- People with deep roots in and/or an interest in ‘the locality’ of each museum
Learn about target audiences
It’s a useful first step to draw up pen portraits of each audience group. This might involve assessing what you might offer to this group, what their interests are and how they might engage. After you have undertaken consultation and research you will be able to add drivers and barriers to engagement to these pen portraits and to develop these descriptions further.
Following your consultation you will be able to bring together an overview of the target audiences which includes:
- Who are they?
- What do they want?
- What is stopping them engaging?
- What will drive them to you? – activities/collections
- How will they benefit?
- Who can help us to reach them
Action
Having identified your target audiences for development and gathered an overview of these, the key next step is to respond to your findings about these targets. These responses might be through small changes such as a new sign on the door, or they might be bigger changes such as moving a service or making ongoing changes to your offer.
To ensure that you respond directly to your audience research, its beneficial to develop a clear action plan which ties actions to target audiences. Start from your objectives for audience development and clearly describe what you want to achieve for each audience group. Take each finding from your research and respond directly. For example, families with children under 12 may find out about activities from Facebook – so promoting family activities on the archive service Facebook page and on pages for local residents would be a direct response.
Your actions should:
- Remove barriers to access
- Respond to audience needs
- Respond to audience interests
- Drive engagement
Your plan should be detailed, give a clear timeframe and consider partnerships. Often there are groups already working with your target audiences that will be able to work in partnership with your service.
Audience development planning & Archive Service Accreditation
Audience development is vital to achieving Archive Service Accreditation. In the 2018 edition of the Accreditation Standard, the connections are as follows:
Requirement 3.2.1: ‘The archive service understands the community it is established to serve, and has effective methods in place to gather information on, analyse and evaluate existing and potential stakeholder needs and interests.’
Requirement 3.2.2: ‘The archive service has documented plans to continuously improve access and engagement in response to the identified needs and interests of its community. The plans are actively implemented and reviewed.’