Welcoming families with baby steps #ADA

Culture Coventry is the trust that manages three of Coventry’s visitor attractions. Coventry Transport Museum, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum and the Lunt Roman Fort. The Old Grammar School and Coventry Archives are also part of Culture Coventry. Between them, the attractions proudly tell Coventry’s unique history. 

Three projects crystalized from discussions within the marketing team and with our mentor, Auriel Majumder as part of the Audience Diversity Academy. Because our organisation covers multiple sites and thus faces a variety of challenges. We are aiming to tackle these one at a time:  

We have noticed that the Coventry Transport Museum, while re-developed five years ago, can, at times, be an uncomfortable space for families. In contrast, the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum has a robust policy and openly promotes breast and bottle-feeding to its audience. Our audience focus is strongly moving towards families rather than singling out history buffs and car enthusiasts. To get the ball rolling we have invited fifteen parents and their little ones to explore the gallery together mid-November, gather ideas, and collect their impressions in a survey. The invitees are part of an innovative, nationwide movement which offers makers, artists and mothers a space to develop their skills and support each other.  

From there we are planning to share the results with our senior leadership team to see where we can take the project.  

And in the next blog posts we will be focusing on how we want to reach BAME audiences through filming artists within the Coventry Biennial 2019, and how to gather LGBTQ+ experiences via crowd sourcing responses to grow our collection.  

Joy Corcec  (Communications Officer) and Imogen Lloyd (Digital Marketing Officer)  at Culture Coventry