A cultural ambassadors scheme: does it work?
A cultural ambassadors scheme: does it work?
By
Melanie Brooker
Jessica Silvester
The CBSO launched a Cultural Ambassadors scheme to persuade committed audience members to attract new audience members by using pyramid selling, personal contacts and peer-to-peer selling. This report details the objectives, the planning and running of the scheme and the results and lessons learnt.
We thought that the Ambassadors would be concerned about any questions that their potential guests might ask them about the CBSO, and that this was likely to be one of the biggest barriers to both persuading our supporters to become Ambassadors in the first place and to the Ambassadors being able to convince their friends or colleagues to give the CBSO a try. We overcame this by briefing the Ambassadors with the answers to some of the most likely questions. For example:
• Classical music is elitist – No, it’s not. We have mixed audiences of many ages and backgrounds. You don’t need to dress up to come along. The reason that the orchestra wear black evening dress is that it is simply a smart uniform and, just like school, a dress code makes life much simpler.
