Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr McCausland): We have with us today Margaret Henry, the chief executive of Audiences NI, and Eileen Mullan, the chairperson of Audiences NI. Welcome to the meeting. I invite you to make an opening statement.

Ms Eileen Mullan (Audiences NI): Good morning, Chair and members. Thank you for the opportunity to be with you today, following on from our written submission to the inquiry earlier in the year. I am the chair of Audiences Northern Ireland. I am joined today by Margaret Henry, who is our chief executive.

Our approach today is to set the scene and context in relation to Audiences NI, which I will do. Margaret will then discuss some of the key programmes and activities we undertake to increase and diversify audiences across Northern Ireland. We want to outline how the development of the projects can continue to meet the access and social exclusion challenges the sector faces. We also want to take a broader sector view and identify two key areas that Audiences NI feels can help the sector to break down barriers and reach audiences. We would be delighted to take questions afterwards, and we would welcome a healthy exchange.

We are Northern Ireland's only audience development agency for the arts and cultural sector. We are a strategic partner of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. We work to support the sector in its audience development activities. Over the past 10 years, we have supported members from across the arts and cultural spectrum and the region as a whole. Currently, 121 members are assigned to Audiences NI. We support them to increase, broaden and diversify audiences. That is done in a number of ways, including training in marketing, audience development skills and practice; research and data into audience attendances and where additional audiences can be found; research into the barriers that stop people attending, and ways to mitigate those factors; and practical, collaborative projects working across clusters of arts organisations to help them to reach those who do not attend the arts.

Audiences NI firmly believes in partnerships and collaboration with not only our members and funders but key community and voluntary organisations across the region. One of our partnerships is with Age NI. We work with it to meet the agenda around older people's voices being heard, community participation, inclusion, and addressing loneliness and isolation. We are also working on a project with Extern to facilitate homeless people to be able to tell their story via the arts.

That is the context and background of Audiences NI. I will now hand over to Margaret, who will look at the two initiatives that Audiences NI feels it contributes to inclusion in the arts. We aim to further develop them in the 2015-16 period.

Ms Margaret Henry (Audiences NI): We have just published the Audiences NI Northern Ireland audience review, in which we look at ticket sales for arts events across 32 organisations, including the Millennium Forum in the north-west, the Market Place in Armagh, venues in Belfast like the MAC, the Lyric and the Crescent, and festivals such as the Belfast Festival at Queen's, the Open House Festival in Bangor, the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, Féile an Phobail, and a number of others. It is interesting to note that, in 2013, over 1·3 million tickets were sold by those organisations, generating almost £20 million in revenue; 1·3 million tickets is the same as filling the Ulster Rugby Kingspan stadium 72 times, and £20 million of revenue equates to an eye-watering 33 million chocolate bars — not good for your waistline. This trend is increasing year on year. In 2013, it was partly due to the highly successful City of Culture year in Derry/Londonderry, but we are also seeing increases from those organisations across the country.

There is no doubt that demand exists for what those and other arts organisations do. However, at Audiences NI, we and our members recognise that barriers still exist for some communities, so I would like to outline some initiatives that we have undertaken to help address the social exclusion challenge.

Test Drive the Arts NI is an initiative that Audiences NI began in 2004. So far, over 22,000 people have availed themselves of free tickets using unsold capacity from venues and organisations — 105 organisations currently — across Northern Ireland and covering a range of art forms. One recent example was a person from north Down who became aware of Test Drive the Arts through work that we did with Project 24 based in Bangor. That person attended a jazz event at the Strand Arts Centre in east Belfast and fed back to us that they did not know that Northern Ireland had opportunities to attend live jazz, and they also thought that the Strand had closed down. Test Drive the Arts opened up a new art form and a new venue, benefiting the audience attender and the emerging venue, which will now form a customer relationship with that test driver.

From Test Drive, we have learned what is preventing certain communities from attending. We have discovered that people often feel more open to attending as part of a group — potentially a group that they are already involved in at a local community level. So, Audiences Northern Ireland wants to extend Test Drive the Arts to allow groups, as well as individuals, to have that free test drive experience and then move on to avail themselves of the many community ticketing schemes available across our venues and organisations.

Through Test Drive, we have also learned that family events are a great way for people to access the arts, and they often find that an easier route. We would like to have a Test Drive strand aimed at families in super output areas to offer them a free arts experience as a way to get to know the arts organisations and art forms and as an easy way to sample what is on offer.

Finally, we are approaching the new super-councils in order to work with their community development teams to road test, drive out and embed it even further into the communities that they work with across the new council areas. As an example of that, I was delighted to be at the launch of the Colin Community HUB yesterday. Minister Storey launched that HUB, and the Test Drive the Arts kiosk is now on site in the community for them to access those tickets and experience those arts events.
In addition to Test Drive, we developed a deeper initiative project called Hitch Hikers Guide to the Arts, which we piloted in 2014. Over a period of three to four months, we took a group of 26 people to a range of arts venues and events. That group comprised people from the older community, people from the homeless community, people who were new to Northern Ireland and for whom English was not their first language, and people living in sheltered accommodation. Through their experience, we ensured that they had a welcome from each venue to help them feel comfortable in the new venue that they were attending. Audiences Northern Ireland gave them support with some information before they attended each event; we documented their experience both before and after through photography, video and interview; and we did evaluation and a fun award ceremony at the end.

At the beginning, we identified from that group a lack of confidence; a lack of being able to access the information in the ways that they were able to in order to find out what was on; not wanting to go alone; and also the issue of transport, which I know has come up at the Committee already. The issue of cost was also raised. After the experience, the group told us that they were now much happier to attend, and a number of them still meet up and keep that group going in order to be able to attend arts events more regularly. One of the community workers working with some of the older people who took part said that she could see an absolute difference in their cognitive function as they engaged with those arts events and discussed and debated afterwards among themselves how they felt about what they had experienced. We had a group that were experiencing not only new things but, in many cases, new parts of their city, as the pilot initiative took place across Belfast.

We now have a demand to roll this out, subject to funding. We have interest from a number of men's sheds projects, including one in north Belfast, and we are talking to some community groups about a pilot project in Derry/Londonderry.

In conclusion for this part, Test Drive the Arts and the deeper spin-off project like Hitch Hikers offer concrete ways of bringing people in the sector together to build on their own individual work to help to reach audiences that have barriers to attendance. The tracking, evaluation and project management that Audiences Northern Ireland undertakes helps to make these projects viable and helps them to demonstrate the case and the learnings.

Moving on from these two initiatives, I want to outline two elements that we in Audiences NI, through consultation with our members and with audiences, feel would really help to deliver the aim of social inclusion and make a real difference to access to the arts. First, we ask for a joined-up approach to the arts across government, arm's-length bodies and the new super-councils. It is clear that, to build on the work that is already being done by arts organisations in partnership with a range of community organisations, there needs to be a clear Executive strategy. It has been well rehearsed at this Committee that the arts have a value, both in themselves and in contributing across a range of areas, be it the economy; supporting tourism; creating jobs; health and well-being; education; understanding and building united communities; embracing new cultures; and enabling a progressive and civil society. To do this effectively, there is a need for a coherent view across Departments of the role that the arts plays in each particular remit. To have a joined-up approach would mean greater overall impact and clarity for arts organisations on what is required and which areas to focus on. We also ask that underpinning the strategy would be the desire for a sustainable funding model beyond annual, and I appreciate that that is said in the current very challenging funding climate. To enable meaningful relationships, people need to know that the projects can be developed, enhanced, changed and evaluated on a minimum one-to-three-year period. We welcome the reference to a strategy in the DCAL budget consultation document and hope that the findings from this inquiry and involvement from the sector will be used to shape the strategy to ensure that all communities, especially those excluded, can have the opportunity to experience arts activity.

I now want to talk a bit about digital. The latest Ofcom communications report states that Northern Ireland is becoming a nation of gadget lovers, with the number of people owning smartphones reaching 55%, while tablet ownership has leapt to 45%. Alongside Wales, we have the greatest rate of tablet ownership, and I see a number on the table. Elsewhere in Northern Ireland, we still rank as the best in the UK for super-fast broadband availability, and 2G and 3G coverage is improving. People in their teens and 20s will become the people who are in their 40s and 50s and the older generation, and the arts needs to be meeting their needs now to secure the audiences of the future.

Last week, in Duncairn arts centre, we held an event entitled Driving Digital in which 50 arts organisations plus speakers from across the UK looked at what digital can offer the sector and, crucially, at what it can offer current and potential audiences. The discussion on the day centred on two things. Digital allows arts organisations to deliver in a number of areas. It allows them to create content, to distribute that content and, of course, to do marketing and audience engagement, plus evaluation of their work. To do any of this, you need investment in time, people, infrastructure and skills. Two barriers to the arts that are often cited are, as we have said, cost and feeling intimidated about going into an arts venue. Digital can help to meet both of those barriers.

Last week, we heard about an initiative called National Theatre Live, which you may be aware of. It gives access to the best quality productions from the National Theatre, which cost upwards of £50 and require a trip to London, to audiences in Northern Ireland and elsewhere for between £8 and £15 through the cinema network. We have also recently heard about the Globe Player, which gives access to all of Shakespeare's plays from as little as £3·99. In addition, many arts organisations are making their work available digitally so that people who are unsure about or are unable to enter the physical space can look at the work and engage online. The Tate Gallery is a shining example of offering resources for all ages. You can go at your own pace and learn as you go, and you need never actually go into a Tate Gallery to enjoy what they have to offer. For many people, this is an easier way to overcome those barriers. There are many other examples, and Audiences NI is supporting the sector to look at best practice and implement some of those ideas.

The other way that digital can help with access is through data. Whether we like it or not, data about what we do, when we do it and what we think about it is held on all of us. The arts need to be able to access audience data for individual organisations, but also collectively across the range of activity available. Having this information, we will be able to segment and target our audiences more effectively to make sure that we are reaching as many people as we can with increasingly limited resource. It is impossible for all but the biggest organisations to do this effectively, so Audiences NI aims to develop its own current data capture analysis over the next year and beyond to make this data available and usable. Box-office systems help, of course, but we need to find a way to know about people who are attending free events and events such as community festivals, which are often their main access to the arts, to make sure that we can identify and meet their needs across the sector.

The DCAL strategy proposed in the consultation should take into account a digital plan for the arts, as referenced in the Arts Council of Northern Ireland's five-year plan, and should work with the Arts Council, Audiences NI and the sector to make this happen. This would align to the work carried out by DETI and fits with the Executive's innovation strategy.

In conclusion, we recommend a joined-up Executive strategy for the arts, underpinned by a sustainable funding model. This should be developed in partnership with the Arts Council, councils and the sector, ensuring that digital capacity, data and Test Drive the Arts development is at its core to ensure that the arts can reach all audiences and tackle social exclusion. Thank you.

The Chairperson (Mr McCausland): Thank you. Before I open the floor to questions, I want to clarify something. You have 121 members. Are they nearly all venues?

Ms Henry: No, it is a mix. We have a lot of venues, but we also have theatre companies, such as Prime Cut Productions, Tinderbox and c21; and we have a range of dance companies, such as Echo Echo, which is based in Derry/Londonderry. We also have galleries, such as the Golden Thread, and the Ulster Museum is a member. So, they really cover the range of venues and producers of the arts as well.

The Chairperson (Mr McCausland): Do they pay a fee for membership?

Ms Henry: Yes. We have a tiered membership. Depending on the size of the organisation, they pay a fee, and then they get a package of membership benefits including access to our training, taking part in our audience review, which I referenced earlier, etc. That is how it works at the minute.

The Chairperson (Mr McCausland): I have a question about the issue itself. You used a phrase about somebody; you said that, "they did not know", which, I think, is part of the problem with all of this. I read newspapers, use the Internet, watch television and listen to the radio, but, time and time again, there are events that I find out about after they are over, or I go to an event and look around and say to myself that there should be far more people here. They did not know. It seems to me that the issue is substantially around communication. That is only part of the issue, though, because that applies to middle-class and well-to-do communities as much as to working-class communities. Do you have any thoughts on the general issue of communication and its shortcomings?

Ms Henry: I agree. There is a lot of noise out there, as we all know, and arts organisations are competing constantly to get their message through with all the other messages that are going out to people about things that they can spend their time and money on and the choices that they can make about how to spend their free time. There is no doubt that the arts have a real challenge to get their message to break through.

We have been looking at a couple of things to help with that. The first thing goes back to the point about data. Just throwing a lot of things at the wall and hoping that something sticks is not a recommended form of communication. Being able to target your communications to particular interests, groups and audience-types is a much more effective way of doing that, and the organisations that have been able to do that have seen the most success. That is why the data that we provide and being able to segment those audiences will help people to see that Facebook may not be the way to reach a particular audience and that, therefore, they still need to produce fliers or go into communities and do presentations, as opposed to the approach for a different audience where social media may well be the right method. There is something in targeting.

The other thing is that we have been talking to Culture NI, based in the Nerve Centre, about how we make that communication more effective. It has been undergoing a review itself and is about to launch a new approach. Again, the question is this: how do we work with something there that is absolutely set up to bring information forward to people who want to access it and how do we communicate the availability of Culture NI and make sure that it is working? So, there is a range of things.

We find that engaging with the media can often be quite challenging for arts organisations, and we recently ran two days' training to help people to understand what you need to have to get your story into the media and how you need to sell the story about your event to cut through all the other people who are coming to the media. We are also trying to reach out to the media and, by coming to our events, help them learn more about the wealth of activity and the range and breadth across the arts sector and let them see that there are plenty of stories in communities, as well as across the sector, that they can work with. So, there are a number of aspects to getting that message out, and we certainly feel that we are trying to work on them as we move forward.

Mr D Bradley: Morning. Thanks very much for your presentation. You mentioned towards the end the need for a strategy for the arts. What do you think should be the main planks of that?

Ms Henry: We would like the main planks to be how the arts, as themselves, can be valued but also how the arts can continue to make real contributions to the different areas of life across Northern Ireland. Within that, we want to see a real vision for how the arts and cultural sector can contribute to Northern Ireland as it changes and develops; a vision that all of the sector, the funders and the community groups can coalesce around. Within that, it is really important to bring in the digital plank. I really feel that there are opportunities that we are missing out on as a sector and as a country around digital that could really power the sector forward. The most important thing in a strategy would be that every Department across the Executive has, within its own remit, a role and a vision for how the arts can contribute, and, by working together, we could get real traction on that and really start to make an impact and a difference.

Mr D Bradley: This Committee has done a number of inquiries. The Committee for Culture, Arts and Leisure in the previous Assembly mandate looked into the contribution of the arts and so on and the economic and artistic value. It did not seem to do a lot beyond the report itself. So, with the strategy, will we be retracing steps that we have already taken?

Ms Mullan: Whilst we can have the best strategy in the world, it will only become real if there is ownership across it, and the Executive functions need to embrace how the arts impacts. You look at social development, health and well-being, the environment and the engagement of our population in the arts and culture and how that rolls out in their everyday lives. That needs to be the intrinsic core of any strategy so that the people can see the impact and value to individuals and communities across the whole of Northern Ireland.

Ms Henry: You are right that a lot of consultation and inquiries like this have been undertaken in the past. The Arts Council consulted extensively with the sector when it was putting its own five-year plan into place. I was at a recent event in the Lyric that the Committee ran, and the same themes are coming up time and time again. I feel that it would be a worthwhile exercise to go back over that work, which should not be lost, and bring that back into a strategy that the sector, as well as the Executive, own. I think that would really help to move things forward.

Mr D Bradley: If each Department is a contributor, is there not a danger that the contribution of that Department to the arts will be merely a tick-box exercise and that the arts tick box might be at the bottom of all the other tick boxes?

Ms Henry: That is one of the potential benefits of going through the strategy process, if you like. You can fully rehearse the importance of the arts within those different remits, really get it out on the table, and have an open and honest debate so that there is clarity for the sector about where the arts sit within the different remits. There is no doubt that, when I have spoken to MLAs who have been involved in different initiatives, right across all areas, there is an absolute recognition of what the arts bring. However, I do not think that there is a joined-up approach to bringing that together fully to see the impact and to value it for what it can be. There is no doubt that joining it up will make a better impact than the smaller tick-box exercises that may currently exist.

Ms McCorley: Go raibh maith agat, a Chathaoirligh. Thank you for the presentation. It was mentioned in the presentation that it has not been possible to gather information on outdoor events and local festivals. Given that those are more likely to be in the communities that you are trying to reach and encourage more, what plans do you have to try to rectify that?

Ms Henry: That is a big thing for us to work on, and we absolutely do have plans. We are working with different groups and organisations that are carrying out some big community-type festivals and events over the next one to three years. We are talking to them about how we can put proper research and evaluation in place, whether that is working with the people who are looking after the event health and safety and security to get a sense of numbers — which is part of the picture — or working with those groups to see how we can carry out research and gather data on the day during the events themselves. Just talking to people who are there, finding out who they are; how they heard about it; where they have come from; what their motivations for attending are; whether they attend other events; and if not, why not?

Particularly with the Creative and Cultural Belfast projects, which Belfast City Council has been funding, we are going to pilot gathering information and data for those organisations. The other area that we are looking at is where people go to venues that are free, most notably art galleries and museums. Again, we are talking to those organisations about embedding their own staff — and us giving them support — a culture of talking to the people who come in the door. There are easy ways that they can start gathering that information in a systematic way, which some of them are already trying to do, to be fair, but some of them just cannot do it at the moment. Both with Creative and Cultural Belfast and with the visual arts galleries, we are looking at how we get at those people who go to things that are free and at the community festival level.

Ms McCorley: A lot of the festivals and outdoor events are ticketed.

Ms Henry: Some of them are, yes.

Ms McCorley: A lot of them are. You would imagine that it would be easy enough to get ticket sale information.

Ms Henry: Ticket sale information is not a problem. However, with Mela, for example, or Culture Night, which now happens across Northern Ireland, people go without having to book in advance. It is about getting out and talking to those people to find out why they have come etc. That is the kind of thing that we need to look at.

Ms McCorley: Yes, there are those events, like Sunday afternoon events in the parks, for example, that attract huge numbers when the weather is good. That might be some people's first step into the water, because people are more likely to bring children to those events.

Ms Henry: Yes.

Ms McCorley: Can I just say something else, if you will indulge me? You said that people are more likely to go if they are part of a group, and I believe that that is true, but, where groups do not exist, how can we encourage people to come together as groups?

Ms Henry: That is what we did with the Hitchhikers initiative. That was not a group that already existed. We asked our community contacts, "Can you bring four people? Do you have one or two people who would come?" So, we built a group up ourselves. That is one way that we can do that. The other is that, with Test Drive, if you apply as an individual you get two tickets, so at least you can bring a friend or partner or anybody you want. We are trying to think of ways, where groups do not already exist, of bringing groups together. The members of the Hitchhikers' group, who did not all know one another before they started, formed quite a strong bond by the end of the experience.

Ms McCorley: I have one final question. Given the connection with mental health and poor health in general, have you thought about — maybe you have done this — trying to find ways of encouraging people through the health service? They could be encouraged in different ways such as, when they go to the health centre, the doctor saying, "There is a free event on."

Ms Henry: We were out recently on road shows with the health trusts, which have been doing work on what is available generally. We have gone to road shows and spoken to practitioners, community nurses, health centre managers, etc to help them to spread the word. Another organisation that we are having conversations with is Libraries NI. Libraries are free facilities. People often find it easy to access their local library for a whole range of services. How do we get the word about Test Drive out through libraries as well? Finally, we are working on a project with an emerging writer and company. It is a piece about acquired brain injury that they have been developing and are working on in partnership with Cedar. We are helping to support them in their audience development plan and to reach audiences with that piece. That is a specific project, but we are working with the wider health trusts as well.

Mr Dunne: We are all delighted to be here. It is useful to get out and about to see the big world and how other communities operate. We are very impressed with what we have seen and heard here today. Thank you very much for coming. As a new member of the Committee, I am still on a learning curve. You mentioned the Bangor Open House Festival. How do you assess that in relation to outreach and trying to bring people in?

Ms Henry: What the Bangor Open House Festival did was fantastic in many ways. It is not just the fact that it was very successful in selling its events; that is only a small part of the story. It was also successful in taking the music that it had on offer into places that were non-traditional arts venues, whether that was people's homes, out and about on the streets of Bangor, local sporting clubs that they worked with, or, indeed, Bangor Abbey. That was bringing the arts into community spaces that people may already be going to for other reasons and, therefore, felt very comfortable about going to and, in fact, were attracted to by the quirkiness of what was on offer. It also worked very well with the local business community, which could benefit from the increased number of people in and around festival time. The work that it has done is a good example of what can be achieved when you work with your local community in a festival-type approach.

Mr Dunne: It has great potential to build on, has it not?

Ms Henry: Yes, it has. The work that it does is fantastic.

Mr Dunne: You mentioned children and engaging with young people. What more can Audiences NI do to engage early to get young people to realise what the arts are about and get them to grow up in the arts rather than trying to get them to adapt to them later on?

Ms Henry: Sure. We are there to support, amplify and build on the work that our members do, and some of our member organisations are already working in that area. For example, Replay Theatre Company works with children, literally from newborns right the way through the age groups. DU Dance, which is a professional dance company, does a lot of intergenerational work bringing children, young people and older people together to create dance pieces. We work with it and support it in training and skills development around audience development and engagement.

We are always open to forming partnerships with organisations. When we decided, for example, that we wanted to work with older people, we formed a partnership with Age NI. Younger people are definitely something that we would like to look at. It is just a case of building that into the further work plan. We have had some initial discussions with Barnardo's, for example. We have also worked with schools and further education colleges to let them know about Test Drive and the wealth of events that are on. There is definitely more that we can do. The digital developments that we have talked about will also help to bring young people in a bit more than they already are.

Mr Dunne: Good work. Someone mentioned Men's Shed. I am aware of one in Holywood that is trying to develop.

Ms Henry: Yes, they are springing up everywhere.

Mr Dunne: How do you assess them in relation to the arts?

Ms Henry: They are a great example of a group that is trying to meet community needs, in this case with groups of men. For the men who come together in Men's Shed initiatives, it is about different experiences, learning, developing and working together as a group.

The arts are just one of the offerings that can be made through a Men's Shed group. If you want to bring to the arts people who have not been before, going with a group that you have already signed up to is an easier way of doing it.

Mr Hilditch: Thanks for your very useful presentation. Looking through the presentation, and the examples and pilots that you mentioned, it is very Belfast-centric. You gave us some examples in Londonderry, but can you give us a flavour of your work in the rest of the Province?

Ms Henry: Our members are from across the sector. For example, when we talk about the visual arts work that we are doing and learning more about audiences that come into a free environment, we are working with visual arts organisations across Northern Ireland. Whether it is Clotworthy House, Antrim, or the Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown, we have been in contact with all those visual arts organisations to involve them in the project.

Similarly with Test Drive, which has 105 organisations, such as Roe Valley, which we work very well with. We work with the Ardhowen Theatre, Enniskillen on Test Drive initiatives. We do a lot of work with the Flowerfield Arts Centre in Coleraine. We have been bringing together the new Causeway Coast and Glens venues to help them to work out how they position the new, expanded and enhanced arts offer that they will have. That covers Moyle, Ballycastle, Ballymoney and all round that area. We are working with them to see how they come together in the new super-council with a newly expanded audience catchment area and how they can target that offer effectively.

We definitely are working right across Northern Ireland where we can, and that is something that we want to increase over the next year.

Mr Hilditch: Thank you. Last week, the Arts Council was before the Committee. A survey was produced on people's lifestyles and how they have changed over the years in relation to work patterns and what not. People just do not have the time for the arts, which probably surprised some people. Do you have any ideas about how to deal with that?

Ms Henry: You are absolutely right that time is a big challenge for people to attend the arts. Whatever community people are from, everybody is incredibly busy. There are innovative and clever ways of doing that, which is taking the arts into communities. That cuts down on travel time and you can fit it in with whatever else you are doing in your daily life.

Digital also offers an opportunity. If you cannot be at a particular event at a particular time because you are busy, maybe you can access it later in your own time. We have seen how that has revolutionised broadcasting. There is an opportunity for the arts as well to do that.

You are absolutely right that time pressures definitely exist nowadays, but there are clever ways to help us to meet that challenge.

Ms Mullan: There is also an onus on venues to think smarter about their deliveries. I do not live in Belfast, and if I want to go to an event in Belfast, I prefer to do it straight after work and not wait until 8pm. Having a 5.30pm or 6pm slot for something and a smaller and smaller window is more beneficial for me so that I can get home.

At my local council level, I can engage with events in a different time slot, whether during the week or at weekends. The venues have to think a bit better about how they programme and engage their audiences. They cannot expect us all to be there at 8pm or 9pm.

Mr Hilditch: That is a good point.

Mr Humphrey: Thanks for your presentation. Margaret, you made the point about a joined-up strategy for the Executive, local councils and the sector. I very much agree. How can that be achieved? Have you had conversations with the new so-called super councils on that issue?

Ms Henry: We certainly have. As you know, they are all at different stages of transition. I met one yesterday, I am meeting a couple more next week, and will be meeting some more in the new year. There is no doubt that, as their own arts strategies emerge, between them they are trying to join up as the 11 new councils. They are very keen to work with the Arts Council, with ourselves particularly on audiences, and with the Executive to make sure that at every level — from community level up — there is a coherence running through the approach to arts and culture. There is an openness to doing that. Many of them do not have their final arts and culture plans in place, so now is a good time to have those conversations.

Mr Humphrey: They will have to be more than open to doing it; it is essential that they do it, given the economic climate in which this country finds itself and the cuts that are coming down the line. If they do not look at working in a much more collaborative way, people will look at organisations and simply say, "There is duplication here."

How is your organisation funded?

Ms Henry: We are funded in three main ways, and we have some other smaller funding streams. Mainly, we are funded through a service level agreement (SLA) with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, where we are its strategic delivery partner on audience development. We also have an SLA with Belfast City Council, which, again, is on a number of audience-development projects. As referenced earlier, we have some income from our membership through the membership packages that they buy. We also get a small income from putting in tenders for, and delivering, training events for other organisations and sectors. We also get a small amount of support from some trusts and foundations. However, the main funding streams are our SLAs with the Arts Council and Belfast City Council.

Mr Humphrey: The Belfast City Council arrangement is the sort of thing that other councils, and I say this as a former member of Belfast City Council, need to be looking at if they are serious about the arts.

Ms Henry: The conversations I am having with them are on that approach.

The Chairperson (Mr McCausland): I have a final observation. For different art forms, there will be different sizes of audience. So, very modern and progressive jazz may have a different size of audience from traditional jazz, for example. There are latent audiences out there who do not hear about an event or who cannot get to it. However, if venues are to be successful, viable and sustainable, is there not an onus on them to provide events and performances that are tailored to suit audiences. For example, I once went to a play — I will not say where it was, but it was in Belfast — where the entire performance was in the dark. You could not see anything; you sat in your seat in the dark for about an hour. When I came out, I was not a great deal wiser than when I went in.

Mr Humphrey: Did you do a review of it?

The Chairperson (Mr McCausland): There was nothing to review because I could not see it. That probably was not going to attract the largest audience. Is there not an onus on venues to look at whether they are providing things that would draw bigger audiences? Are there areas of society that we are not touching?

Ms Henry: I have worked in a venue and at a festival, and I think that the vast majority of arts organisations try to have a balanced portfolio. The ones that know their audiences — many of them do a lot of work to know who their audiences are — are absolutely trying to provide things that they know will work, whether that is the popular family Christmas show —

The Chairperson (Mr McCausland): They know who their audiences are, but do they know who their audiences are not? If certain groups are not there, why are they not reaching out to them with products that will appeal to them?

Ms Henry: A lot of them do know who their audiences are not as well and are trying to reach out, whether that is through live presentations or through their outreach and audience development work going into the communities. You recently had a presentation from the MAC, which is one of the newest arts centres in Northern Ireland. There is a body that came from a very small arts organisation — the Old Museum Arts Centre — and had to exponentially increase the number of people that they brought into their venue to make it sustainable. They absolutely had a plan for who they knew they could attract and a plan for who they knew they were not attracting in their previous formation. They went out and worked through a number of initiatives and plans in both programming and the community engagement activity that they were undertaking to make sure that people were either coming into the MAC or were engaging with the MAC in their own community.

There is good practice out there. Organisations are under a lot of pressure with funding, time and resource, and that is not necessarily going to get any easier. So, it is up to support organisations like Audiences NI to help them find out even more about the people who are not coming and what they can do to increase numbers, whether that is by bringing people to existing provision — there is a case that people would come — or by developing and changing their programming and outreach work to reach those new audiences. The sector is acutely aware of that.

The Chairperson (Mr McCausland): OK. Thank you very much for your presentation. We wish you well in your work.

Ms Henry: Thank you.