Introduction

Ever wondered what’s the most cost-effective way to grow your organisation’s audiences, visitors or participants? Or how you can increase attendance for ‘difficult’ work? You’ve probably got the answers buried somewhere in your organisation.

Buried Treasure is a workshop led by Heather Maitland, Arts Consultant, offering an essential foundation for anyone working to develop audiences or visitors.

If you were unable to attend this workshop, the following worksheets will outline some of the ways you can:

  • collect valuable information to profile your audiences / visitors,
  • find out what your audiences / visitors are like, so you can find more of the same,
  • use information to talk to the right people in the right way,

The starting point of publicity is a set of tasks like producing a leaflet or writing to the local paper. The starting point of marketing is thinking and planning. This is what makes it so effective

Marketing involves standing back, taking a hard look at what your organisation does and who it does it for, then working out exactly what strategies you need to follow to achieve your goals. This planned approach to your work means that you can concentrate your limited resources of time and money on the things that will get your organisation to where you and your colleagues want it to be.

We need to work out what strategies we need to follow because the difference between success and failure is not whether you carry out marketing activities well but whether you have chosen the right things to do. It’s the difference between being efficient and being effective. The one thing that will guarantee marketing failure – and even the failure of our whole organisation – is following the wrong strategy really efficiently.

We need data so that we can decide what are the right things to do. Data also helps us to put our decisions into practice by allowing us to talk to the right people, about the right things, in the right way, at the right time.

Read the brief examples, decide what you think are the right things to do to resolve each marketing challenge and then click to find out Heather’s thoughts on the issue.