How Birmingham Contemporary Music Group delivers a family friendly offer

By Nancy Evans

SUMMARY

BCMG created a family friendly policy that in turn enabled the organisation to strategically enhance its family and youth oriented programming. Out-of-school creative participatory workshops for young people conclude with sharing opportunities for parents and friends. Families are offered front row seats at concerts, and have a specially designed concert programme with specially briefed stewards, more audience participation (before, during and after the performance), more flexible ticketing and a range of other innovations.

The concerts have generated an entirely new audience for BCMG’s work which has been retained and extended. Now we have this new audience we have realised we need to do more for it and have created Families@4. This new series of concerts, starting in April 2009, will take place in the daytime of BCMG’s regular concert days and will present, in an informal way, one or two pieces of music from the evening concert.

Very important to the success of this work was the engagement of the entire BCMG team in the process of drawing up our Family-Friendly policy. For us it has been a mixture of small adjustments to what we were already doing as well as creating whole new programmes. Even small touches are much appreciated.

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Engage Engagement Families Family friendly Participants Participation Strategic Young people

Resource type: Case studies | Published: 2013