MARKETING
AND AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT

Our work in Marketing and Audience Development supported Torbay’s organisations and creative practitioners to grow audiences for arts and heritage, helping residents feel connected to and proud of Torbay and helping visitors share our sense of what makes this place unique. This means building Torbay’s reputation for excellent creative and cultural programming and improving access.  

We want Torbay to be on the map as a great cultural centre, brilliantly communicated. growing the area’s reputation for innovative, community-driven arts and heritage in unusual places and spaces and to help our cultural venues to thrive. We also need to get better at celebrating under-utilised cultural assets such as our UNESCO designation as a Global Geopark and the internationally famous Agatha Christie heritage.

We commissioned marketing, communications and audience development expertise to support the profile of Torbay’s culture and heritage. We developed three core projects:

The Shorely

The Shorely was a digital culture ‘guide’ for Torbay communities and intrigued visitors, bringing together contributors from the creative corners of Brixham, Paignton and Torquay. Specially curated, it provided an ‘insider’s guide’. Although funding for this concluded, the archive of inspiration films remains available on our Shorely YouTube channel

The 99

The 99 was a ‘non-audience’ research project. Amongst residents in Torbay, there was relatively low awareness of, and attendance at, some venues, activities and events across Brixham, Paignton and Torquay. The 99 project brought together a panel of 99 non-attending locals to be immersed in Torbay’s cultural offer during 2018. They ventured into an unfamiliar world and we joined them for the ride, using established research methods to find out what they really thought. At the same time, we brought together as many culture sector organisations as we could into one room, to build partnerships and collaboration. The research revealed key findings on how we can better reach, motivate and sustain mass audience attendance to venues and events across Torbay: discover what the research has told us.

Audience Evaluation

Whilst discovering and reflecting on how to engage those who do not typically attend, we also sought to understand more about our existing audiences. We supported individual organisations across Torbay to understand their own visitors, so that they can focus and hone their offer, marketing and fundraising plans. Combining this information into a Torbay-wide picture helps make the strategic case for future investment. Audience development experts from South West Museums Development worked closely with event organisers and venue managers during 2018 - 2020, resulting in the significant Torbay Great Place Audience Evaluation report.

This project delivered the following objectives:

• More residents felt that creativity, culture and heritage is ‘for them’

• Residents and visitors were able to find out about culture in Torbay more easily

• Torbay’s culture and heritage is more widely known, and increased its reach in terms of audience numbers and audience diversity

• Cultural practitioners gained and made use of insights into local audiences.

Wonder Associates was commissioned to deliver The Shorely and The 99 for us.

South West Museums Development was commissioned to deliver the Audience Evaluation project. You can contact Victoria Harding and her team on [email protected]

July - August 2017: Commission marketing and audience development consultants
August 2017: Develop digital engagement strategy
September 2017 - end 2019: Launched and regularly published The Shorely
January - November 2018: Develop and deliver The 99 project
November 2018: Publication of results of The 99 - download The 99: Final Report
November 2018: Launch of Audience Evaluation project
March 2020: Completion of Audience Evaluation project and final report
Between August 2020 - January 2021: Evaluation, following the end of the Great Place Scheme, published in 2021