Leading Change: Audience Diversification in the Arts

Sep 03, 2024
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Leading Change: Audience Diversification in the Arts is a multi-year research partnership between Deakin University and Creative Australia. The project aims to provide practical solutions and strategies for arts organisations seeking to diversify their audiences.

Leading Change recognises the need for many organisations to adapt to changing times, and to expand their audiences to include more people from culturally diverse backgrounds, young people, people with disability and regional, remote and outer-metropolitan communities. The project also recognises the fact that many arts organisations would benefit from assistance in this work and seeks to provide this support with various tools and recommendations.

The first stage of the project began with an organisational survey through which arts organisations could assess their readiness to the kinds of programming, business and organisational adaptations required to undertake this work.

The next stage of the project brought eleven arts organisations together with five industry experts and an organisational change consultant to test and develop new forms of organisational practice to support audience diversification.

Findings and recommendations from these two research stages are published in the Changing organisations to diversify arts audiences reports on this page.

Key findings

  • Programming decisions are the organisational decisions least likely to be influenced by the aim of diversifying audiences.
    • Arts organisations require ‘Dynamic Capabilities’, that is, the capacity to work beyond organisational structures, and to network with diverse communities.    
  • Organisations can be reluctant or uncertain to look outside their organisational structures for new ideas, information, support, or collaborators.
    • Arts organisations require ‘Social Networking Capabilities’, that is, the ability to move beyond institutional expectations, to adapt and reconfigure organisational practice.  
  • Staffing changes often interrupt a commitment to audience-centric practice, particularly when a single staff member carries responsibility for working with communities.
    • Arts organisations require appropriate ‘Business Improvement Processes’, that is, strategic processes and business practices that commit staff and resources to audience diversification.  

The project also developed a model of audience-centric practice, comprised of 8 tasks, that arts organisations can use as a guide for their own adaptions and experiments in this field: 

  1. Recognise need for change
  2. Identify target audience
  3. Research audience and their barriers to participation
  4. Programming is responsive to target audience
  5. Develop relationship and multiple connections with target audience
  6. Gain broad organisational commitment to audience diversification
  7. Undertake evaluation and reflective practice
  8. Change the organisation’s usual way of operating.

The Leading Change project was supported by an Industry Advisory Group, including: Wesley Enoch (Chair), Jamie Lewis, Catherine Jones, John Nolan, Veronica Pardo, Fayen d’Evie, Seb Chan, Jeremy Smith, and Peter Ross.

Phase One report (PDF)

Phase Two report (PDF)