Using a business planning model for audience development

Seminar: Not Another Toolkit...or 'how strategic marketing can change your (organisation's) life'

This seminar discussed MLA’s proposed new national framework for supporting museums, libraries and archives through a business-planning model of audience development. It presented a case study from the South West Pilot, which centred on rethinking service provision, based on a better understanding of audiences, current and potential.

Martin Thomas:
A note first about the title of this seminar - it refers to a comment from the Chief Executive of SWMLAC that we should talk about something that is truly engrained and embedded, rather than another ‘toolkit’, which has become a rather commonplace idea.

The South West set out to test a strategic marketing methodology and this pilot process was designed to try it out in real-life situations. The intention was to move from a theoretical idea of business planning and to look at how we could have a process for changing service provision and thus make something genuinely sustainable.

The projects undertaken by SWMLAC are designed to accommodate and complement related work in other regions.

Strategic Marketing is an approach to planning that strengthens relationships amongst users (current, lapsed and potential). It is about embedding a process across the full range of an organisation’s activities

The Strategic Marketing Process involves:

• Finding out who are your users/who are not
• Finding out what people think of the service
• Prioritising target groups
• Changing the service in line with their needs
• Finding ways of targeting current, lapsed and potential users
• Evaluating these changes

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