Earlier this week I spoke at the National Craft and Design Directors and Curators Conference, held in Melbourne as part of the State of Design Festival. I met lots of interesting and passionate people and I was delighted to be able to be part of their conversations and workshop sessions.
I had been invited to address the group on this year’s theme: The company we keep: audience engagement. My talk: Who, How and How Many?, was intended to give an overview of issues surrounding audience development: the difference between audiences, visitors and participants (at least how I see it), audience profiles, visitor identities, models of participation, barriers to engagement, and how social media can fit into an audience development strategy.
For those that are interested, a PDF version of my presentation has been uploaded to Slideshare:
The presentation was intended to be a bit of a toolkit, identifying resources that might be useful. It was also a way of introducing some common vocabulary that we could all use during the Workshop sessions during the conference.
As always, I am indebted to Nina Simon and her excellent Museum 2.0 blog. It has so many great ideas I was able to include in my presentation and I just hope my own particular take and spin on things was able to add some value. (I always put a plug in for Nina’s book, the Participatory Museum, so maybe I repay the favour by promoting a sale or two . . .).
Another resource I drew upon in this presentation was Morris Hargreaves McIntyre’s Culture Segments audience model. But more on that in a future post.