Call to action

We are looking for cultural organisations that have undertaken the transition towards a more audience-centric approach, that are worth disseminating and sharing at European level.

The aim of the “Study on audience development – How to place audiences at the centre of cultural organisations” is to provide successful approaches and methods in the area of audience development (AD) to be disseminated among European cultural organisations. These approaches and methods will be used as a basis for selection criteria in future calls for proposals launched by the Creative Europe programme.

The study aims to equip cultural leaders with skills that will enable them to increase their audience focus internally towards internal gatekeepers, programmers, boards of directors, communication and artistic departments, advisory committees and other decision structures, as well as externally towards public authorities, patrons, sponsors, friends schemes, etc.

To do so, we are now launching an open invitation to collect a number of European best practices to be further investigated in order to explore and point out the key success factors and the main organisational impact that the work with audience development, as a strategic goal and long term organisational process, has had on cultural organisations.

Due to the focus of the research, we are looking for cultural organisations and/or activities that reflect and meet the following criteria:

  • Small and medium-sized European organisations (no more than 50 employees)
  • Organisations with an internal work function or with staff specifically addressed to working with audience development
  • Organisations that have well defined objectives and goals related to audience development strategies, and furthermore have the capacity to describe the main results achieved (but also unexpected failures) through an evidence based approach

The most relevant and noteworthy cases will be selected and deeply analysed by the research team (also through further personal interviews) and they will be published in the final report of the study. The research team reserves the right to mention interesting and innovative cases, although not forming part of the very core of the case studies deeply analysed in the final report.

Every applicant organisations agree and allow the publication of the findings in the European Commission Final Report.

The applications have to be submitted by the 15th of April.

SUBMIT YOUR ORGANIZATION