Representing and celebrating the diversity of Britain’s youth. #ADA

Representing and celebrating the diversity of Britain’s youth. #ADA

By Sian Davila

SUMMARY

A blog by Sian Davila, Marketing Manger, National Youth Theatre of Great Britainas part of her joint Fellowship with Joe Duggan, Head of Communication, NYTGB at the Audience Diversity Academy (ADA)

Hello, I’m Sian, the Marketing Manager at National Youth Theatre of Great Britain. Joe Duggan, the Head of Communication at National Youth theatre of Great Britain and I are Joint Fellows of the Audience Diversity Academy.

Equality and inclusion are at the core of our charitable aims and we are committed to working to removing barriers that might prevent young people from accessing our opportunities. We want our company of UK-wide young talent to represent and celebrate the diversity of Britain’s youth in all its forms and alongside our nationwide auditions and interviews we run targeted programmes to create access routes into our membership for young people with characteristicsthat are currently underrepresented.

So far on our journey as Joint Fellows, we have taken part in group seminars with Fellows from other organisations across the United Kingdom. Most notably for me, I took away key learnings from the Seminar on ‘Scrappy Working to Engage Diverse Audiences’ hosted by Rachel Grossman.

I particularly found useful the notion of setting up small, achievable experiments in order to test the waters with new methods of communicating with audiences. I think the focus on the iterative process of experimentation –this idea of –what can we learn today that will be useful for tomorrow, is something that I can use within my own work as Marketing Manager.

We are working towards increasing our visibility and developing stronger methods of communicating to the public and communities the work we are already doing with diverse audiences and young people from all backgrounds. We recently had a session with our mentor, Consultant Mel Larsen, which took the form of a chance to ideate and explore new ways of connecting with specific communities.

Mel shared with us the concept of finding where people congregate and encouraged us to do some research on Russel Brunson.To share some of the ideas, we talked about finding social clubs or groups, pre-exiting mailing lists, brand ambassadors and discussion groups on social media channels.

Going forward, and ahead of our next call with our mentor, we will be experimenting with some new content-led promotions, providing resources for young people looking to get involved in the creative industries. For example a downloadable PDF with myth busting about who can or how can young people get in to theatre and a ‘how to prepare for auditions’ checklist.

We look forward to continuing our journey with Audience Diversity Academy and embedding our learning to reinforce the work we are delivering to young people for a wide range of backgrounds across the United Kingdom.


Sian Davila, Marketing Manger, National Youth Theatre of Great Britain

Resource type: Articles | Published: 2020