Traders in the Area Supporting the Cultural Quarter CLG Presents TradFest Outline Strategy Document 2024-2026
Who Are We?
Traders in the Area Supporting the Cultural Quarter t/a TASCQ or Temple Bar Company is a community established non-profit company limited by guarantee, which was set up in 2003, initially as a representative, management, curatorial and promotional body for Dublin’s’ Cultural Quarter, Temple Bar. Over the last 20 years however, the company has developed a wide-ranging remit including initiating and curating a variety of cultural events, producing TV shows, managing, and curating outdoor markets, developing successful brands, and providing outsourced curatorial services.
As a result of the wide range activities of the company we have now developed a highly sophisticated skill set. We have also developed an economy of scale whereby we have diversified our income over several sources of income from event production to area cleaning. This has enabled the company and TradFest benefit from a non-traditional arts skillset and as such the company manages the festival as a non-profit entity using its business and commercial skillset. The company has raised over €15 million over the last number of years through strategic partnerships with both public and private partners. We have developed funding partnerships with state bodies such as The Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport & Media, The Arts Council, Failte Ireland Tourism Ireland, Tourism Northern Ireland & Culture Ireland. We have worked in partnership and created cultural content with numerous local authorities, including Meath, Westmeath, Offaly, Clare, Donegal, Wexford, Wicklow, Dublin City Council, Roscommon, Limerick, and Fingal.
We have a strong relationship with several key international Irish Music festivals such as Milwaukee Irish Fest, who run the largest Irish Music Festival in the world others. As well as Centre Cultural Irlandais, Paris, Vestrock Festival, Netherlands, Barre Opera House & Burlington Irish Heritage Festival, Irish American Heritage Center Chicago, Cat Skills Arts Week, USA, Irish Cultural Centre, UK, London Irish Centre, UK, Bearcreek Folk Festival, Canada.
We also run an international Traditional & Folk Music showcase event with support from Culture Ireland which focuses on promoting emerging traditional and folk acts. This is one of the flagships showcases for traditional and folk musicians supported by Culture Ireland.
All Arts Council investment in the festival is used to support the non-commercial aspects of the festival, specifically areas such as interdisciplinary programming, the support of emerging artists, and it unpins our entire EDI programme, a loss of support or a reduction of support in this area would inhibit the festivals’ ability to deliver on these key objectives.
Our Values
• Excellence: A commitment to excellence in everything we do from marketing to programming
• Inclusivity: We believe that TradFest is for everybody, and we strive to provide quality cultural content for everyone from all backgrounds, races, orientation, abilities
• Fairness: We believe that all artists, and creative professionals should be rewarded fairly and equitably, and that women and men artists get remunerated equally. Equally we believe that audiences should be able to attend our shows either for free or for a fair ticket price even for large internationally renowned artists. We try and accommodate those with children at the lowest possible cost.
• Collaboration: We believe that there is no monopoly on creativity, and we actively encourage collaborations with artists, creatives, and advocates to continually change and improve TradFest
Executive & Board Competence Relevant to Service Provision
We have an experienced board of directors with strong backgrounds in the areas of marketing, business, arts, and public affairs. Our board includes former Government Minister Noel Dempsey, (Chair), former Dublin City Council & Fingal County Council CEO Dr John Tierney, and former head of Tourism Ireland Europe, Finola O’Mahony. Our executive team has extensive experience in public affairs, event management, marketing & communications as well as management and administration. Our cultural credentials are impeccable and key members of our artistic team include RTE broadcaster, musician & former Culture Ireland Chairperson Kieran Hanrahan, Oscar nominated actor and director and Fingal resident Stephen Rea and former senior producer for RTE Radio One, Aidan Butler. We also have a full team of cultural administrators, programmers, and digital marketeers. In addition to our board and executive, we also have a strong community liaison team with whom we collaborate closely with. These include the events team in Fingal County Council, the City Recovery Team in Dublin City Council, The Ark, Childrens Cultural Centre, The Seamus Ennis Arts Centre, Pavee Point, Irish World Academy of Music & Dance at University of Limerick, UCD School of Music, Fingal Tourism Network, Ablefest, ‘Our Balbriggan Group’ and Dublin Pride.
TradFest,
Live Music & Broadcasting Technical & Administrative Background
In addition to TradFest, the company have organised & programmed live music events in New York, London, Berlin, France, Norway, and Switzerland in association with the Department of Foreign Affairs, Tourism Ireland, and Culture Ireland. TASCQ have been involved in the production of live and recorded music events since 2006. During that time, we have run 19 live festivals, employing thousands of Irish and international artists and production crew.
In partnership with Scanarama Productions we have curated and provided high quality digital musical content for RTE/TG4, The EBU, (Europe), SBS Australia and WNET/PBS (USA). We have also provided content to Tourism Ireland for their ‘Press the Green Button Campaign’ broadcast on digital billboards around the world including in Times Square, New York, Westfield, London Shopping Centre, Via Dante in central Milan and Sydney. While the Department of Foreign Affairs broadcast our content for their St Patrick’s Day & Christmas campaigns in 2020, 2021 and 2022. Our filmed ‘Tribute to Derek Mahon’ with Stephen Rea was included as part of the Culture Ireland ‘Seoda’ Initiative in 2021.
Equity, Diversity & Inclusion
We place equity, diversity & inclusivity (EDI) at the heart of everything we do. In 2021 we appointed a full time EDI Officer & Researcher to assist us in developing an EDI audit & strategy. We have audited our festival in terms of gender representation and have published a detailed report - entitled ‘Sounding Equity- An Analysis of Gender & Representation at TradFest. This report is publicly available on our website and has been widely circulated. We are taking all necessary steps to ensure our productions represent all people who contribute to our vibrant ecosystem. We also believe that all artists and creative workers must be adequately compensated and have a strong track record in this regard.
Experienced Musical Content Providers to National & International Broadcasters.
In addition to developing and curating TradFest - the festival, we also have a long and fruitful association with RTE Radio and TV, having co-produced multiple radio broadcasts & live streaming concerts over the last 12 years. This includes ‘TradFest - The Dublin Castle Sessions’, ‘TradFest- The Fingal Sessions’ and the internationally successful distributed TV Show ‘Ireland in Music”. We have a strong working relationship with WNET in New York with whom we work to distribute our TV programmes across North America. This enables us to promote the TradFest brand to a wide international audience through the PBS partnership. In addition, through our partnership with Fingal County Council, we produce TradFest- The Fingal Sessions, which is shown on prime time RTE 1
television. This greatly expands our audience base and helps promote the overall TradFest brand to the widest possible national audience. These shows are not funded through the festival and remain separate from our TradFest income & expenditure.
In 2022 and 2023 with support from the Arts Council of Ireland Capacity Building Fund we produced 3 seasons of podcasts entitled Talking Trad which focussed on three distinct themes; (1) My People with Steo Wall- this focused on traveller musicians and their impact on traditional and folk music (2) Trad Elle; this was hosted by Libyan Irish musician Farah Elle and examined issues relating to new Irish communities, their relationship with the tradition and what Irishness means in terms of Irish traditional music (3) Women of Note in which musician and broadcaster Aoife Scott explored the many issues and barriers faced by women musicians.
These podcasts have developed pathways into the festival with each of these artists being employed as ‘Artist Curators’ within the festival, whereby each artist curates a headline shows focusing on intersectional areas of representation. The projects are designed to be scalable within the festival to create a model for artists’ career progression at TradFest. Further information can be seen in section 3.3 ‘Artist as Curator Scheme’ In the Overall Festival Objectives 22024-26.
This achievement would not have been possible without the support received via The Arts Council Capacity Building Fund. This investment has empowered these artists to cultivate networks and skills, which they are now actively contributing to the broader festival ecosystem.
Overall Festival Objectives 2024-2026
Though the following sections are organized into separate segments, they are all interwoven complementary elements which should be viewed as contingent upon one and other for the overall success of our strategic action plan.
1.1 Place Making Places & Spaces
TradFest began life as TradFest Temple Bar, an event based in and funded exclusively by the Temple Bar Company within the geographic region of Temple Bar (as defined by the Temple Bar Act 1991). Over the last 20 years this vison and spread has increased as the festival has grown from an event with 500 attendees to a festival with an audience of more than 24,000 people annually. The festival brand has evolved from Temple Bar Trad to TradFest, signifying the demographic and geographic boundaries, growth and spread. Our maturation has been enhanced significantly by Arts Council Funding. The festival has now grown across Dublin City Centre; from the Pepper Canister to the National Stadium, from St Patricks Cathedral to Collins Barracks. From 2024-2026, in association with Fingal County Council, TradFest will extend throughout the Fingal region, the largest growing area of the state, ensuring wider demographic reach and increased access to high quality cultural experiences.
TradFest has always worked with significant heritage buildings, both historical and contemporary. This offers a unique opportunity for audiences from all walks of life local, national, and international to engage with and appreciate our rich cultural heritage. For many, it provides an unparalleled experience of enjoying live traditional and folk music in spaces not typically associated with such events, thereby broadening cultural horizons, and deepening their appreciation for Ireland's historical legacy. As Farell (2014) outlines, traditional music performances operate within ‘in between’ spaces. ‘These ‘authentic’ yet liminal spaces are porous (Benjamin 1986), in that the social activity and performances interact with the building and animate and remake historical, cultural, and the political memories through music... these textures of place are not just evident in the built or material environment but also in the sound and powerful musical associations (Tuan 1973; Adams et al. 2001; in Dillane & Raine 2018, 241). The recontextualization of heritage via the TradFest experience serves as a temporal link, bringing the past into the present and allowing for creative place(re)making
which blurs the line between tourist and local. The breadth of venues and genres offered by TradFest, particularly the mixture of dry and wet venues across broad localities, ensures people of all ages, backgrounds, and tastes have a place at our festival. ‘
At TradFest, our audiences are at the heart of all we do. A festival which began as a means of stimulating business in the quietest month of the year, has now become a key social resource relied on by thousands. As such, we conduct an independent behaviours and attitudes survey every year, keeping an open line of communication between the public and our organizers. This allows for audience agency in the construction and design of our cultural offerings, ensuring the events we organize continue to reflect their artistic needs and interests.
Where TradFest strives to be a place for all, we view our role as facilitator and platformer. We rely on partnerships with various venues, cultural organisations, and collectives as critical friendships in arts access and community outreach. For example, TradFest is entering its third year in partnership with Dublin Pride to offer LGBTQ+ audiences dedicated and intentional space under our festival banner. Our dynamic, people-first approach to event co-design and creative placemaking relies on engagement with academic and industry-based research. As Stephen Prichard explains in his chapter ‘Place guarding: Activist art against gentrification’ (2018), top-down approaches to creative placemaking as a tool for urban regeneration can (and often does) run the risk of further dispossessing local marginalised communities. He introduces O’Sullivan’s (2014) concept of ‘place guarding’ or ‘collective acts of protecting existing people and places from the ravages of neoliberalism and policies and practices such as creative placemaking and ‘artwashing’, the use of art as a veneer or mask for corporate or state agendas’ (Prichard 2018, 140). Existing local communities are not just central, but essential to facilitating spatial equity in the city. As such, our people-first approach attempts to balance place guarding and place making via the regenerative power of the arts. This is one of the guiding principles in our commitment to offering free events spanning a wide array of genres and disciplines, across an expansive geographical location. We believe that the arts are a crucial resource within urban human ecology, and they must be equitably approached, designed, and disseminated.
As we continue to partner with a wide array of venues, we are architecturally limited in our ability to ensure physical accessibility at all venues. Thus, we are currently compiling an access guide to all venues at our festival, and we continue to strategize with venue partners on how to better accommodate differently abled people. To prioritize socio-spatial equity in future festivals, TradFest aims to partner with Ablefest and other arts and disability organisations to increase access at our festival, be that through early entry, ‘cool-off’ spaces, temporary accessible bathrooms for heritage venues, etc. We are also looking to expand our virtual offerings, engaging with digital placemaking as a strategy to reach underserved and minority communities both at home and abroad.
Below is a list of action points central to TradFest’s placemaking activities:
1.2 Physical Place/Space
• To continue to partner with the OPW to showcase their heritage properties.
• To continue our policy of place (re)making by choosing significant heritage buildings such as St Patrick’s Cathedral, The Pepper Cannister Church, Dublin Castle, Collins Barracks, The GPO, Swords Castle, Malahide Castle, St Patrick’s Church Donabate etc.
• Increase regional spread i.e. expand into Fingal, from cultural centers to community centres, parish halls, heritage buildings etc. with a focus on accessible venues.
• To increase the overall number of concerts in Fingal from 26 to 50 by 2026.
• To increase our C2DE demographic from 20% in 2024 to 40% by 2026.
• To curate high quality free cultural events and concerts in key public spaces such as Moore Street Market, North Earl Street & the soon to be newly opened Temple Bar Square.
• To partner with libraries to reach a wider community audience across the Dublin City & County Region.
• To examine opportunities for growth within other parts of Dublin through community outreach via critical partnerships.
1.3
Virtual
• To change the festival brand from TradFest Temple Bar to TradFest.
• Website domain change from TradFesttemplebar.com to TradFest.com
• To continue to develop various streamed and televised content showcasing high quality and diverse cultural offerings.
• To further engage with social media as a form of community outreach, a vehicle for dialogue between audience, artist, and organizer, and a hub for artistic growth and intercultural contact and adaptation (Alamri 2018, 77).
2.1 Schools, Outreach, Youth & Family
Youth outreach and engagement is crucial not just for the longevity of the arts, but also well-being amongst children, families, and communities (Broh, 2002; Covay & Carbonaro, 2010; Martin et al., 2013; Metsäpelto & Pulkkinen, 2012). Yet national research like the ‘Growing up in Ireland’ (McCoy et al. 2012) survey shows significant disparities across socio-economic and gender categories, specifically locating a significant gap between Irish and immigrant children’s participation in cultural activities, particularly amongst families whose native language is not English. As Farahni et al. (2021) underscore, disparities in arts participation may exacerbate social inequalities, both academic and non-academic as cultural activities serve to ‘enhance education outcomes and wellbeing’ (p.3). As such, TradFest is committed to bringing arts and cultural opportunities directly to children of a wide range of backgrounds. As we expand upon our family-friendly and child-oriented offerings, we are working directly with local councils and institutions for children like The Ark and the Seamus Ennis Centre. Collectively, we are working hand in hand to bring meaningful arts experiences to children across Dublin City and Fingal. We view our youth and children’s programmes as an expression of our equity, diversity, and inclusion ethos, wherein all people regardless of age must have cultural agency and access to participation. We aim to work directly with children to ensure their creative needs are being met. Below are action points for implementing this pledge:
• Develop an initial educational / schools programme through partnership with the Seamus Ennis Cultural Centre to reach schools outside of the city centre specifically in the Fingal region with a focus on those who would not normally engage with traditional and or folk music.
• To continue to provide family tickets to headline concerts in the National Stadium, these will allow access for up to 6 people to attend for the price of 2 adults.
• To continue to provide majority alcohol-free headline venues for those under 18 and for families with younger children to attend without restriction.
• To continue to work with The Ark cultural centre for children to programme children’s workshops, concerts, and other cultural activities during TradFest.
• To continue to work with secondary schools, to facilitate the attendance of transition year groups at headline TradFest concerts.
• To commission collaboration amongst established musicians and youth music organisations, emphasizing children and youth as both performer and audience per the Arts Council policy for children and young people’s arts.
3.1 Equity, Diversity, Inclusion
TASCQ prioritizes Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) as fundamental guiding principles to our organisation. In 2021, we became one of the first cultural organisations in Ireland to commit to this undertaking via the appointment of a dedicated full-time EDI Officer & Researcher. We have since made significant strides in increasing the representation of women and people of colour within our programming. Our collaborations also continue expanding to include partnerships with collectives who have historically been marginalized, ensuring that TASCQ is inclusive to all.
The heart of our festival and cultural program lies in the celebration of traditional and contemporary Irish culture, drawing temporal connections that bridge our past, present, and future. As such, we are taking the steps necessary to ensure TradFest, Ireland in Music, Saoícht and all our productions, represent all people who contribute to our vibrant cultural ecosystem. Our EDI initiative is underpinned by our belief in the invaluable role of artists and creatives in Irish society. As such, we continue our commitment to fair compensation for their contributions.
3.2 EDI Action Plan:
• Achieve an absolute maximum of 50% men performers across all headline programmes by 2026. We have chosen this strategy regarding gender and representation rather than the common ‘50/50’ utilized by festivals as it infers binary gendered thinking and practice, dispossessing minority gender identities. Further, given the nature of structural gendered inequity within the music industry, women and gender diverse performers are often barred access as young as school age thus affecting the demographics of the performer pool. As we work with partners to dismantle these barriers, we are wary of overpromising and underachieving and this can be demoralizing to already dispossessed groups. By inverting how we account for representation, i.e. capping overrepresented genders, we avoid exacerbating already existing imbalances of gendered power. This is informed by our own research, and indeed across equality research in the music industry, wherein women and gender diverse performers have voiced opposition to gender quotas as reductive strategies that present a facade of progress, rather than real, substantive changes in our operations and decision-making processes.
• To improve gender diversity and representation across all our programme activities, not just headline concerts.
• To continue to work with and expand upon our partnership with Dublin Pride and to provide and expand our programme of events aimed at including members of the LGBTQ+ community.
• To continue to increase the number of Traveller musicians we employ at TradFest and to increase the number of concerts which feature Traveller musicians.
• To continue to work with artist-curators like Steo Wall with a specific focus on developing new interdisciplinary large-scale (audience 500+) concerts featuring wellknown musicians collaborating with artists from the Traveller community.
• To annually publish and update all our gender data / representation for public scrutiny.
• To prioritize research concerning the representation of ethnic minorities and people of colour in our programming decisions, partnering with critical community organisations to ensure opportunities for people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds.
• To conduct an accessibility audit of Tradfest in 2025 in association with leading accessibility proponents such as Ablefest, to assist the festival in developing and implementing an accessibility plan by 2025.
• To continue to provide music therapy workshops to audiences with intellectual or physical disabilities and their carers, such as the pilot workshops we have already developed with traditional musician & senior music therapist Tommy Hayes, there is a significant demand to grow these workshops from one day to over 4 days by 2026 to facilitate larger groups.
• To continue to partner with leading broadcasters such as RTE Radio & BBC radio to curate and broadcast specific TradFest concerts to provide quality cultural content to those who can’t access the festival.
• To use our public and broadcast platforms to feature artists from a wide variety of genres, disciplines, cultural and ethnic backgrounds, abilities, and identities to widen their potential audience base.
• To continue offering workshops and learning opportunities for other arts organisations to engage with EDI data collection, research, and strategizing. We recognize that creating a socially sustainable industry is not a one off, nor an individual task. It is a grass-roots movement towards change that we all have a part to play in.
3.3 Artist as Curator Scheme
TradFest accepts, notwithstanding its experienced curatorial team, that as a festival it must allow for greater curatorial experimentation and collaboration to succeed in its objectives, specifically with regards to equity, diversity, and inclusivity. We know what we don’t know, so we are committed to employing artists from backgrounds and identities that have been marginalized to curate events that can be scaled into major elements of our programme.
This marries Markusen and Nicodemus’s (2014) argument for cross-sector partnership as crucial to creative placemaking with Prichard’s cautions regarding the arts and gentrification by specifically collaborating with community members. Our approach allows for communities to effectively ‘speak for themselves’ whilst using the TradFest platform. These partnerships represent a collection of complementary skill sets, the goal of which is diversity through agency. By employing artists as curators, we allow for inclusion on their terms with our full support. Additionally, the artist-as-curator scheme allows us to build social networks within and between communities, offering organic inroads towards higher rates of inclusion across different demographics.
3.4 Social Networks and the Artist-as-Curator Scheme
The social network model allows us to build scalable pathways within our festival to ensure underrepresented artists can achieve a sense of career progression within TradFest. Below is a temporal and relational sketch of how this played out in regard to our work with Steo Wall:
Through our work with Steo, we have been able to build a relational and scalable pathway towards inclusion, anchored in mutually beneficial partnerships between ourselves and various underrepresented groups. Long-term relationships help to build trust and encourage open dialogue, crucial elements of social sustainability of the scheme. One of the successful outcomes from TradFest 2024 was that one of the Traveller artists, singer PJ Mongan was inspired by our talks on Traveller traditions to learn to play the uilleann pipes, a tradition that it is dying out amongst the travelling community. This is a small example of how TradFest has assisted and contributed to keeping traditions alive and renewed. It shows how pathways for underrepresented artists are being established at TradFest. As other partnerships continue to build, we will be able to map out their progressions and divergences. This is not our only means of engagement with communities that have been marginalized, rather it is a critical partnership to ensure representation and agency are sustained longterm.
4.1 Socially Engaged Practice: Community Commissions & Interdisciplinary Projects
• To create a new musical commission each year from 2024-2026 particularly by engaging local audiences through the development of local cultural narratives. Through successful collaborative making with the local Fingal community and experienced artists Stephen Rea and Niall Martin Ocean Child was developed and performed at TradFest 2024. Ocean Child is based on the local historic tragedy of the RMS Tayleur which perished off the coast of Fingal in the late 18th Century. This created a sense of local ownership and participation with the premiere attracting an audience of 400 people in the local parish church. As an extension of our placemaking strategy, we propose to commission
renowned composer Neil Martin to bring his extensive expertise as a composer, writer, and facilitator to our community projects in 2024 & 2025. We will be working with local community groups, intending to find stories of local historical interest and create new, interdisciplinary work of a standard that can tour nationally and internationally.
• To continue to create and curate new interdisciplinary projects to build on the work we have already undertaken across the following artforms.
• Spoken Word, such as the curated shows with Feilispeaks & Dogogo Harte as featured in Wearegriot (2024) and Saoícht (2022 &2023) with Stephen Rea, Neil Martin, Louise, and Michelle Mulcahy and Felispeaks.
• Visual Arts / Photography/ Traditional Music, such as the ‘I can read the Sky
-2024’ collaboration between author Timothy O Grady, singer Cathy Jordan and traditional musicians Louise & Michelle Mulcahy.
• Hip / Hop Trad Strange Boy@TradFest 2023/24, a blending of hip-hop and Irish traditional music, creating a unique fusion that pays homage to the timeless cultural influences of Ireland.
• Traditional Music / Folk / Punk Rock / Physcodelic Rock / Heavy Metal – The Deadlians (2024) and Bog Bodies (2020 / 2024).
• Traditional Irish Music / Electronic Music featuring Super Ceili (2022/2023/2024)
• Nigerian High Line Music / Afrobeat/ Nigerian Folk Music / Jazz / Traditional Irish Music – Feile Kíla (2022/2023/2024)
4.2 Free Outdoor Cultural Activities
By offering free activities, TradFest extends its EDI policy to ensuring socio-economic equity in arts and cultural participation. Our pledges in this field are as follows:
• To continue to provide free high-quality concerts in City Centre pubs with a particular focus on increasing women performances, and performers from a variety of backgrounds.
• To expand this free pub concert concept (Smithwicks Sessions) into the Fingal region with a view to having at least 20 such concerts in 2025 and 30 by 2026.
• To provide free public outdoor performances across Dublin City Centre including Temple Bar Square and areas around O’Connell Street to help develop these areas as places of cultural interest, particularly for communities who are often overlooked in such endeavours.
5.1 Building Audiences
(See Audience Development Plan)
TradFest continues to build a broad and diverse audience, including increasing local (i.e. Dublin) participation as well as attracting both national and international audiences.
• To grow our local audience to 50% by 2026.
• To continue to attract a strong overseas audience and to keep ahead of the national average.
• To increase overall satisfaction ratings among our audience.
• To maintain our strong national audience.
• To integrate more demographic data questions in our B&A to identify which communities and experiences we are catering to, and who we need to engage with more fully.
6.1 Supporting Emerging Artists & Creating Development & Capacity Building Partnerships
• To continue to foster and support emerging artists through our established showcase concerts and to assist them in developing their careers nationally and internationally.
• To provide lesser-known women and gender diverse artists, those from ethnic and minority backgrounds, and all intersections in between, an opportunity to perform on headline stages as opening or support acts, particularly at large 500 plus audience events. This has a powerful effect on representation across the industry as it can be used as leverage in future negotiations for pay and opportunities. Further, it increases audience reach which, in turn, can increase future earnings and opportunity potential.
• To create an awareness among our contracted headline artists about our policy of supporting and employing emerging artists, women and gender diverse artists, artists from backgrounds that have been marginalized, with an emphasis on intersectionality as a priority.
• To utilize our existing TV productions (Ireland in Music & TradFest Sessions) as a vehicle to promote emerging artists of colour, gender minority and women artists to a much wider national and global audience.
• To continue to bring international agents, bookers and festivals to TradFest to showcase our emerging artists and to provide opportunities for international engagement.
7.1 Sustainability
• Arts and culture also have an important role in shaping and influencing the behaviour of audiences and society which can include their actions towards sustainable travel and practices.
• Arts and culture industry rely on travel to work well from audience travel to touring to commuting, so it is important that we understand our impact and create policies that support the industry to travel as sustainably as possible. As part of our sustainable travel policy, we will continue to promote more sustainable travel approaches to our venues through social media & the website.
• We will continue to reduce our print programme with QR codes for downloadable programmes & choose more sustainable marketing approaches.
8.1 Benchmarking Against Objectives
• We have invested in a bespoke ticketing system which enables detailed data tracking, which will allow us to measure data and numbers regarding regional spread.
• Engage in regular (since 2016) qualitative market research which identifies demographics, and other useful qualitative & quantitative research.
• Digital Marketing Analytics as provided by our digital marketing company.
• Each year we are committed to examining our gender and ethnic representation, casting a critical eye on the invisibility of whiteness and maleness within our genre and industry spaces.
• Engaging with Ablefest as an independent auditor to assess accessibility across all our events.
• To work with artists as curators and programme new shows each year, each year will be benchmarked against the previous year. To have each artist as curator set three-year goals and to review these at the end of each year. This allows for buildable growth in representation and offers curators a sense of career progression in addition to performance opportunities.
• To conduct yearly reviews with all artists and funders to assess outcomes against objectives.