MUSEUM IRELAND 2020
Flip-it: From production-led to audience-driven Fiona Bell
Audience development has a bad reputation, or
A shift in mindset
at best, suffers from an image problem. We say
By habitually bringing great ideas to life before
the words, and sometimes point to a beautifully
thinking about who might want to take part, we
worded and formatted plan that has sat on a shelf
cannot grow our audiences. We need to put people
since the last time a funder asked for it. But it is
first, centring on and responding creatively to
not an activity or a project, and nor is it a series of
their needs and behaviours, before curating
time-bound actions that, if blindly followed, will magically produce those longed-for audiences. Spoiler: it doesn’t work like that. Sorry.
Browsing the stacks at the Linen Hall Library, Belfast. Credit: Thrive
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