The BCEP family strand is currently made up of 9 organisations:
Arnolfini (lead organisation)
Architecture Centre
Bristol Old Vic
Bristol Hippodrome
Brunel’s ss Great Britain
MShed
Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archives
Bristol Children’s Scrapstore
Watershed
Our main objectives and shared areas of interest are as follows:
• Diversifying audiences
• Increasing numbers of ‘family’ visitors
• Increased impact and reach by working collaboratively with neighbouring arts/cultural organisations- smaller organisations supported by larger organisations.
• Peer learning and support amongst arts/cultural/participation/learning colleagues from partner organisations.
• Support Arts Award offers (as many of these organisations offer Arts Award)
• A shift in perception by the general public to see that the harbourside cultural organisations are places that are open and welcoming for families.
• Long-term, inter-institutional projects, resulting in a more collaborative practice across the city and leading to enhancing and enriching the experiences of family audiences across artforms.
In order to achieve our objectives to date we have collaborated on the jointly delivered projects below:
Family Arts Festival 2014:
Building on the success of last year's Family Arts Festival in Bristol. The Bristol Family Arts Festival network joined together again to create a bigger and better festival for 2014. The Bristol network were successful in securing a small pot of funding from the Family Arts Campaign around the Audience Agency's Test Drive project to encourage new families to participate in this year's activity. The Bristol network decided to allocate funding for joint marketing and promotion, and outreach events as part of the 2014 festival.
To ensure that as many families as possible are made aware of the Bristol Family Arts Festival the Bristol network worked with local illustrator Natalie Hughes to design an eyecatching festival leaflet highlighting the fun filled festival programme. 25000 copies were distributed to schools, nurseries, children's centres, libraries, tourist information centres and given to visitors at participating venues. As with last year, the leaflet encourages families to participate in events at lots of different Bristol venues across the festival period through an incentive scheme (sticker collection) and prize draw.
In order to reach new audiences and in particular target harder to reach audiences, several members of the Bristol Family Arts Festival network are running outreach events in collaboration with community based organisations across the city. Areas targeted are: Redcliffe, Hartcliffe, Easton, Lawrence Weston, Knowle West. Careful measurement of whether these outreach events make an impact in overcoming some of the barriers to engagement regarding access to city centre organisations has been planned.
Please see the Bristol Family Arts Festival leaflet for details of events happening over the Family Arts Festival period.
A case study and evaluation of the 2014 Bristol Family Arts Festival can be found here.
Notes from the regional Family Arts Networks sharing seminar can be found here
Family Arts Campaign and Family Arts Festival 2013:
The Family Arts Campaign is a national campaign that will run until March 2015. One of the key campaign objectives is to enable different local issues to be reflected and ensure that all families wherever they are in the country can access high quality family friendly arts activities.
The idea behind the Bristol Family Arts network for 2013 was to ensure that there was joined up thinking about family audiences across the city and to create an exciting and varied programme of events for the festival. The main focus for this year was on joint marketing through social media, website listings and the family arts festival flyer. As a strong and active network, Bristol Family Arts network were also supported by the Family Arts Campaign in gaining local/national publicity, predominantly through radio and newspaper features.
Arnolfini and Architecture Centre were invited to be part of the South West evaluation group for the festival. Results from local and national evaluations of the festival will be available in March. For the 2014 festival the Bristol network is applying for funding from the Audience Agency to take part in their Test Drive programme to further develop family audiences for the festival. If any other organisations are interested in becoming part of the Bristol Family Arts Festival network please contact Ellie Jeffs ([email protected]) for further information.
Quality of Experience Project:
Quality of Experience is a G4A funded pilot project led by Annabel Jackson (http://www.annabeljacksonassociates.com) and Visual Arts South West. There are 4 partner organisations in the pilot programme: Spike Island, Arnolfini, New Brewery Arts and B-side Festival. The project aim is to explore the Quality of Experience that visitors encounter at arts/cultural organisations, looking at variety of different areas such as: welcome, facilities, programme, interpretation and staff. The intended outcome of the project is to devise a methodology and tool kit for other organisations to use.
At the start of the project each organisation was asked to choose a different focus audience. Arnolfini chose families to fit with their own research and audience development interests, but also in response to the obvious interest in joined up thinking around this audience in Bristol arts/cultural organisations. Annabel Jackson is currently compiling a case study for each organisation, evaluation report and toolkit to guide others through the process.