Director’s note

Julie Tait, Culture Sparks Director, sums up the past year and casts an eye to the future.

Please share your comments below!

Read more…

Annual Accounts 2011-2012

View our annual profit and loss accounts for the year ending April 2012.

Read more…

Discovering data

Events: The Resourceful: Measuring Success in the Cultural Sector; Data Training; Benchmarking Workshops; Segmentation: Making the most of your data; CRM, Marketing & Ticketing; In Conversation with Nick Crosson

The completion of The Source audience research project inspired a range of events throughout the year, tailor made to provide practical and useful support for practitioners at every level.

In June, we provided feedback from The Source project through The ReSourceful: Measuring Success in the Cultural Sector, where we also presented initiatives from Audiences UK and MyCake.org, an online financial management and benchmarking provider for the cultural sector. Throughout May, June and July, we ran a series of Data Training sessions designed for marketing and box office teams in response to The Source findings and entitled Data Control, Data Police and Data Detective.

Read more…

VeloCity Art For A Changing City

Projects: VeloCity

VeloCity is a collective and cultural response to the impact of the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games on the city of Glasgow and its communities, and we were delighted to be involved in the development of the VeloCity Operational Plan, published in April 2012. Read more…

Social media snapshots

Projects: Social Media Snapshots

Since October 2010 Culture Sparks has been collecting and examining Social Media metrics from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube that are constantly being generated by the social media accounts of arts and cultural organisations in Scotland. We are now harvesting metrics from social media accounts operated by 160 arts and cultural organisations, including all of Culture Sparks members, large and small, and other organisations throughout the country. Read more…

Who attends the visual arts in Glasgow?

Projects: Tramway; Glasgow Life; Glasgow School of Art

In November 2011, Tramway launched its Footprints Audience Research report, to which Culture Sparks was pleased to have contributed. We continued to work with Glasgow Life to profile visitors and attendance cross-over between their three key visual arts venues, Tramway, GoMA, and Trongate 103. Read more…

Making connections

Partnerships, conversations, committees and bus tours: 2011/12 saw the Culture Sparks team making connections across the sector, both on the road and close to home.

Keeping abreast of the national agenda, we travelled to the Cultural Hustings event in April 2011 for a horse’s-mouth account of how cultural issues aligned with the policies and priorities of each major political party. In the same month, the team attended the launch of the Creative Scotland Corporate Plan, and Associate Nina Honeyman represented Creative Scotland at the Visit Scotland Expo in Aberdeen. Later in the year, following a series of MyCake workshops, Director Julie Tait and Ros Lamont of The Audience Business, Edinburgh, met with Creative Scotland representatives to discuss cultural benchmarking across Scotland.
Read more…

WhiteNOISE

Projects: WhiteNOISE

WhiteNOISE, launched in January, is a research and development project to define and increase audiences for Glasgow’s visual arts sector that has been created by Culture Sparks and funded by Creative Scotland.

Read more…

The Source

Projects: The Source; Glasgow Venue Reports

The Source is an audience profiling project of national significance, drawing in audience profiling, training needs analysis and box office benchmarking for a wide range of performing arts venues throughout Scotland. Undertaken by Culture Sparks in partnership with The Audience Business on behalf of the Federation of Scottish Theatre, with funding from Creative Scotland and input from over 40 venues, it is the most comprehensive resource of its kind.

Read more…

Get AmbITion

Projects: AmbITion Scotland; AmbITion Phase 2

AmbITion Scotland is a digital development programme that forms a core piece of Creative Scotland’s Cultural Economy Programme, supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland and designed and project managed by Culture Sparks in partnership with Rudman Consulting. It exists for individuals and organisations within the arts, culture and heritage sectors who wish to increase their operational efficiency, business model resilience, and digital artistic output.

Read more…

Who Loves the Arts?

Projects: Cumbernauld Theatre

The Cumbernauld Theatre is a performance venue and centre for creative collaboration. Since its inception as the Cottage Theatre in 1961, The Cumbernauld has seen over 1 million attendances, Read more…

What’s it all worth?

Projects: Celtic Connections

For many arts and festival organisations, economic impact is an important measure of success and a key performance indicator in their year-end reporting.

Read more…

What do audiences really want?

Projects: Dance House; Scottish Opera; RSNO; Eden Court; Mischief La-Bas; Members/Sector Surveys

Culture Sparks’ bespoke audience profiling exercises and marketing/ communications audits can help organisations to get under the skin of their audiences, enabling them to tailor their communications and engagement activities to reach out more effectively to target market segments.

Dance House

… wanted to identify potential areas for communications development. Read more…

Mystery bookers

Projects: The Arches; Ambassador Theatre Group

For those venues that want to fully understand and explore their customers’ experience, Culture Sparks’ tailor-made mystery shopping packages can investigate every element of the customer journey, online and in person. Read more…

Let’s hear it for digital development

Projects: Hear Glasgow; National Museums Scotland

Throughout the past year, Dianne Greig has been at the forefront of a digital revolution at Culture Sparks. we’ve been working with the team at Hear Glasgow! to assist children and young people in Glasgow to have the best possible range of opportunities to engage in music making, in formal education as well as through other opportunities and self-directed activities. Read more…

Growing strategies that work

Projects: The Hidden Gardens; Tron

‘ … Without joining Culture Sparks and receiving this support as an organisation, we would to have had the knowledge or capacity to progress …’

Amanda Patterson, Director, The Hidden Gardens

We welcomed the Hidden Gardens as new members of Culture Sparks in 2011, and worked closely with them to develop effective new approaches to their profile raising and management activities. Read more…

Audience profiles for the performing arts

Projects: BBC SSO; National Theatre of Scotland; Aberdeen Performing Arts; Scottish Dance Theatre; Eden Court; RSNO

“Thank you so much for the report on our drama audiences – the depth of information was, and will be, really useful.”

Astrid Shearer, Cultural Services Marketing Manager, Falkirk Community Trust (National Theatre of Scotland ‘Reasons to Dance’ project)

Drawing together box office data, research outputs and profile information from Mosaic Scotland and other sources, Culture Sparks continued to work with a range of performing arts companies and venues to develop understanding of audience composition and behaviour, locally, regionally, nationally, and further afield. Read more…

Delivering AmbITion

Events: Spring Training Programme 1 – 3; Names and Faces; Webcast Seminar Series; Digital 2012

A busy event programme delivered in partnership with leading experts is an integral part of the AmbITion Scotland agenda, and this year the sector-wide appetite for training on all things digital remained as strong as ever.

The Spring Training Programme consisted of three events: ‘The Big Guys: Making the Most of Google and Facebook’, ‘That’s Rich! Using Rich Media Tools’, and ‘Get Smart: Free Tools for Operational Effectiveness’, repeated due to popular demand.

Read more…

Our team

Last but not least is the Culture Sparks Tea  mmm – none of this would be possible without it.

Julie L Tait, Director

Charlotte Wilson, Senior Partner (Maternity leave from June 2011)

Dianne Greig, Senior Partner

Jo Cowper, Senior Partner

Kirsty McKenzie, Senior Associate

Albert Kawmi, Associate

Ashley Smith Hammond, Project Manager, AmbITion Scotland

Ela Zych-Watson, Project Administrator

Jim Law, Associate Partner (from June 2011)

Nina Honeyman, Associate

Alison Johnstone, Associate (from June 2011)