UCF initiates a round table on "Audience Development"

The Ukrainian Cultural Foundation continues to develop two new competition programs, as discussed earlier. By engaging experts from various sectors, the UCF held a round table discussion for the " Promotion of Culture and Local Development" programme.

Participants of the meeting included: Olesia Ostrovska-Lyuta, General Director of "Mystetskyi Arsenal", Daria Badyor, editor of the Culture section of Livyi Bereh website, Olena Staranchuk, curator of the Pictoric Illustrator Club, Natalia Kryvda, UCF expert, professor of the Department of Ukrainian Philosophy and culture of TSNUK, Kateryna Rai, curator of art projects, Inga Vyshnevska, director of consulting company Solutions for People, Valery Ionan, founder of QUADRATE 28 marketing company, representatives of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation.

Questions for discussion related to LOT 1 of program "Audience Development" whose mission should be to increase the audience of cultural product beneficiaries and participants in the country's social and cultural life, and to support projects that could become the basis for developing (expanding) the audience of the cultural product and/or institution in general.

The said LOT objectives include:

• facilitate the accessibility of cultural products to audience interested in culture indirectly and require additional motivation, consumer triggers to become regular users of the cultural product through research and identification of factors that influence participation in/engaging in cultural activities;
• support the development of educational programs for potential consumers of cultural products to improve their literacy in the field of culture;
• promote the use of marketing approaches for the audience development for products of cultural, creative and audiovisual sectors.

As part of LOT "Audience Development", the project result can be:

• audience research;
• awareness-raising campaigns;
• PR-campaigns.

After presentation of the program work draft, the round table participants discussed the duration of the projects’ implementation of within its framework and their own experience in the audience development. According to Valerii Ionan, two months is enough for the implementation of projects, "this is more than enough for the implementation of any project. Preparatory stage - 2-3 weeks, then 2-3 weeks for implementation. There will still be time at the preparatory stage to make certain work, logos, creative messages."

Olesia Ostrovska-Lyuta shared the experience in the audience development: "It is necessary to understand what cultural event means for Kyiv citizen (let's take it separately, because it's a city where life is more intense). What is cultural life in general, who in the family is responsible for it? Our hypothesis is that it is a woman who involves children in the cultural life. Do children like it? This is another story. But we leave huge audience of people behind. Almost everyone comes with someone to us, it is obvious, that visiting exhibitions is part of a social life. If the projects are complicated, address socially important topics, they often have low audience traffic. Probably, agreeing that the topic is important, people do not want to invest their time, their emotions, their efforts in something that is traumatic. It's difficult for normal people to discuss their injuries. This means that people associate cultures with something entertaining."

Elena Staranchuk believes that educational, awareness-raising activities should be conducted with the audience: "We understood that it is necessary to explain any project. We travelled around the regions, gathered communities of people in the regional libraries, explained them the topics addressed, first showed the pictures, and then began to talk about media literacy - a rather complicated topic. The most important experience was that when you talk to people, they are following your mind. After that, we realized that we needed to organize more public spaces, to involve people more in an interactive way in our project. Natalia Kryvda supported this thesis, and also emphasized the need to involve schoolchildren in the culture: "For me, the audience development is awareness-raising (I would not say that it is education, but awareness-raising), research, promotional campaign. I would suggest for the cultural community to develop projects aimed at raising awareness of this newly-born audience and educate it". Kateryna Rai raised the issue of lack of specialists in the field of audience development.

According to the round table results, it was suggested to simplify the interpretation of "audience development" concept in the LOT description, review the restrictions for the applicant to apply only once a year, the risks of short-term implementation of international cooperation projects were discussed, etc.

The Ukrainian Cultural Foundation is going to present the program "Promotion of Culture and Local Development" this August-September and announce a call for projects.