Flo Carr, Associate Director, Indigo speaks to Tom Bilson, Head of Digital Media at The Courtauld about the Digitisation Volunteer Project – the largest and most diverse public inclusion project The Courtauld has ever run.

Results from the 2023 Heritage Pulse survey on the theme of volunteering. The questions covered management, retention and the areas where heritage organisations rely on heritage most.

In this session recorded at Digital Heritage Lab’s Digital Skills Day, Stephan Stockton MBE looks at how digital tools can help small to medium sized heritage organisations support the volunteering journey from recruitment and training through to ongoing management of volunteers.

In this session recorded at Digital Heritage Lab’s Digital Skills Day, Kate Knowlden shares her experience of working on the Museum of East Anglian Life’s ‘Search for the Stars’ project, which is using remote-working digital volunteers to help transfer the museum’s 40,000 paper-based object records over to its online collections management system. Kate highlights the ... Read more

In March 2020 Hereford Cathedral had just embarked upon the public engagement phase of their Eastern Cloisters Project (ECP) when the impact of COVID-19 meant that all their planned work had to be cancelled. In this case study,  Abby Jones explains how the cathedral adopted a new digital approach to their audience engagement activities including ... Read more

An Arts Working Group and Ticketsolve toolkit that supports the return of volunteers for venues, theatres and arts organisations 

A series of guides, toolkits and templates released by The Arts Working Group and Ticketsolve to aid planning and operations towards re-opening following the coronavirus pandemic.

A useful guide by Creative Scene sharing their work on creating community ambassadors to increase audiences from segments of lower engagement, build audience capacity at neighbourhood venues and increase data collection at events.

A guide to best practice written by Creative & Cultural Skills to accompany Arts Council England’s ambition to promote a diverse and skilled workforce in the cultural sector. Updated Autumn 2021.

The Jerusalem Project saw The Common Players Theatre Company, in partnership with Exeter Northcott Theatre and local promoters, bring Jez Butterworth’s award winning play to the West Country on tour. This report explains the audition/casting process, the relationship with promoter partners, the make up of the audience and their reaction to the piece. In addition, ... Read more

Open-City is an independent, not-for-profit organisation that aims to be at the centre of creating better places – and a better city. With a limited budget and no specific marketing role within its team, this case study describes how Open-City delivers a marketing campaign and plan, which is shared by all staff and volunteers.

The toolkit and guidelines for audiences at outdoor events and festival aim to provide a framework to measuring and evidencing the impact of an outdoor event. The guidelines provide practical advice for audience research at un-ticketed cultural festivals and other events in the following sections: research principles, data collection methods, evidencing success, estimating audience size, questionnaires and surveys, working ... Read more

An evaluation and case study of a large-scale, mutlidimensional arts tour and education project. Torbay Council brought an award-winning, interventionist work of public art, RedBall UK, to the streets, enriching cultural tourists’ experiences and allowing visitors to see familiar places in a new light.

In Touch was an innovative Cultural Heritage volunteering programme delivered by Manchester Museum and Imperial War Museum North (IWM North) in partnership with Trafford College and Salford City College and funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). The model focused on personal and skills development for a specific group of socially-excluded people who are significantly ... Read more

This paper provides a short overview of the HLF-funded Pre-Raphaelite Experiment, where Manchester Art Gallery trialled new ways of engaging audiences with historic collections through user-generated interpretation. The year-long programme brought families, community groups, schools and volunteers together to re-evaluate one of the city’s highly valued but potentially insufficiently-understood cultural assets. In a significant departure ... Read more

This brief guide explains what crowdfunding is, what the benefits are for voluntary arts and crafts groups and gives some tips about how to use WeDidThis effectively.

Case study looking at engaging volunteers for National Parks. The aim of the project was to ensure long term and sustainable engagement between new audiences and National Parks. The project recruited volunteer champions who were given personal development plans, training and given specific activities to carry out. Benefits for the champions were clearly outlined. Learning from ... Read more

Liverpool hosted the European Capital of Culture in 2008. This report seeks to explore the impact of being a Liverpool 08 volunteer, in particular the ways in which being involved affected their cultural interests and levels of participation in cultural activity. It explores whether volunteers’ personal aspirations have been met, and what changes they have ... Read more

This presentation offers a model for volunteer engagement in the cultural sector based ‘Mosaic’, a National Parks project. Describing the process of their ‘volunteer champions’, the author argues that elements of the model could be adapted to the cultural sector, such as recruitment and induction, personal development plans and group leader visits. The project aimed to ... Read more

Understanding and marketing to rural audiences for large- and middle-scale venues.