We sit down with the brilliant Kate Carter, Director of Audiences at the Edinburgh International Festival. Kate shares the experiments that EIF have been carrying out around their audience experience, particularly for classical concerts.
You can now buy Catchup Passes to watch recordings from the first Digital Works Conference. Passes cost £75 and are available until 9th August 2024: thedigital.works
We sit down with the brilliant Kate Carter, Director of Audiences at the Edinburgh International Festival. Kate shares the experiments that EIF have been carrying out around their audience experience, particularly for classical concerts.
You can now buy Catchup Passes to watch recordings from the first Digital Works Conference. Passes cost £75 and are available until 9th August 2024: thedigital.works
Hello and welcome to the Digital Works podcast, the podcast about digital stuff in the cultural sector. My name's Ash and in today's episode episode 52, we speak with Kate Carter. Kate is the Director of Audiences at the Edinburgh International Festival. I sat down to chat with Kate about some experiments that they were carrying out with the audience experience. It was really interesting to hear how this piece of work came to be, how it was perhaps only possible because of the alignment that Kate managed to achieve with the new artistic director of EIF, the lessons that they've learned and what this holds for the future. Enjoy, hi, kate, nice to speak to you this morning.
Kate:Thanks for having me.
Ash:I want to start, as I always do with these chats, with a bit about your background, because we first met when you were working at Scottish Ballet. You were Director of Brand Audiences and Digital there, which is a fascinating job, and maybe we'll get onto that. I enjoy that mix of responsibilities, but you're now at Edinburgh International Festival, you're the Director of Audiences. Maybe let's start with that. What does that role encompass? What is your focus at EIF? And then maybe what is your journey looked like, getting you to this point?
Kate:My role at the festival.
Kate:There was a new title created when I was coming into it, so that always has the sort of fun of being able to shape it a little bit and it's quite a broad remit.
Kate:So I've got four teams which have all evolved a little bit as well in the two years that I've been here, as we've tried to kind of grapple with the strategic challenges and you know just where we are in the world now. So we've got a brand and campaigns team and the function of that is to look at the balance between our long term brand building and our annual festival sales cycle campaigns. And then we have a communications and digital team, so really looking at all of that external facing communication across all platforms. Then we have a ticketing and audience experience team, so that's all of the box office and front of house operation and that includes our audience insights and access provision as well. And then we have our discovery and participation team, so that's all the work we do with schools, families, communities and kind of emerging talent in the industry as well. So it's quite a big remit. It's basically all the ways in which the festival meets the public and the world and the audience.
Ash:And we talked a bit about your work at Scottish Ballet. Immediately before EIF, and I believe before that, you were at the British Museum. Yes, has your career always been in and around the cultural sector?
Kate:Yes, cultural sector in the broadest sense. So prior to the British Museum I was at Shrek the Musical in the West End. So always, yeah, in that arena of arts and entertainment and culture, but really ranging from kind of very commercial to, yeah, kind of the classical performing end and and then five years at the British Museum, which was fascinating as well.
Ash:I mean, the reason we're talking today is is you got in touch to talk to me about an experiment that you've been running around audience experience and we had a bit of a chat about it and it sounds really, really interesting. And there are a number of ways in which I think it is interesting.
Ash:I think number one experimentation is something I'm a big fan of. I think it's something that cultural organisations should be doing more of and so really excited to see that an organisation like the festival is sort of taking it quite seriously. And I think it's fascinating as well that that experiment is focused on audience experience. And I'd really like to talk a bit about how the festival is thinking about and talking about and looking at audience experience experience, because it sounds like it has really become the driver for all of your thinking and all of your activity and all of your decisions. So maybe you could tell us a bit about this experiment. What is this audience experience new audiences project experiment? Where did it come from? From what was the hypothesis that you were looking to test?
Kate:so we've rather grandly call it an audience experiment, which makes it sound like a big science project, and and then we have tried to be reasonably scientific about it. But you know it's difficult to do that when you're dealing with kind of all the nuances and subjectivity of humans and how they interact with the arts. But the idea of it really came from Nicola Benedetti, who was our festival director and she joined the festival around the same time as me a couple of years ago and the whole kind of imperative around understanding the audience experiments was really key to her vision. So I have to kind of give full credit to that, that having that come from the very top of the organisation and from that kind of artistic leadership makes a huge difference just to how much we're able to kind of really pursue and invest in this area. So Nikki kind of coined the term of an audience experiment and right in her kind of original sort of vision document she talked about the idea of wanting to really understand, like identify and remove barriers and particularly classical music.
Kate:So the festival presents lots of art form as we present music, theatre, opera and dance, but about 50 percent of our program is in the classical music space and it is a particularly challenging art form, I think, in terms of sort of audience development, and there's, I think, increasing sort of division in that art form around what sort of traditional audiences love about that art form and want to keep the same, and then sort of division in that art form around what sort of traditional audiences love about that art form and want to keep the same, and then sort of ideas around what innovation can look like and how we need to kind of create new experiences for in order to appeal to a new audience.
Kate:And something that's kind of central to Nikki's vision for the festival is that we don't necessarily need to separate those two things out. The the hypothesis, I guess, is that it's possible for us to bring those people together under one roof, into one shared live experience where we can really add value in quite a sort of utilitarian, in the philosophical sense, way what is the greatest good that we can provide to the greatest number of people at the same time? And so what we've been trying to understand is what are the ways in which we can make that experience feel more welcoming to a broader range of people, but, crucially, do that in a way that doesn't take away from the specialness and the kind of sacredness almost, of the experience for the people that already are very confident in that environment and know it and love it. Is it possible for us to do both of those things at the same time? That's kind of what we've tasked ourselves with.
Ash:It's a fascinating hypothesis because, as you say, the sort of discourse, particularly around classical forms of culture you know, opera, narrative ballet, orchestral music it seems like there's one school of thought that is this thing is great and we just need to get more people in to experience the thing. The thing itself doesn't need to change. And then there's another school of thought, that is, the thing itself needs to be unpacked and perhaps put back together in a different form for different audiences.
Ash:Audiences have changed. People who are already engaged with that historic form of the culture are not the same as the new audience, and it sounds like you're testing the first school of thought and, in doing so, also obviously saying something about the second school of thought. What were some of the areas that you identified that felt worth experimenting with? Because obviously an orchestral music experience has a lot of dials that you could adjust. You know around the marketing, the pricing, the timing of the concert, the length of the concert. You know the location of a concert, the music that you choose to play, the way that the orchestra is presented to an audience, how you promote that, where you promote that. As you said, it is a complicated thing understanding how or where to start with playing with audience experience, because it is comprised of so many different elements and I imagine when you're running an experiment you have to make some choices about where to experiment. So what were you looking at playing with?
Kate:We wanted to put kind of as much of it on the table as possible in terms of what could be a lever to work with, I suppose with caveat that we knew we weren't going to completely change either the artist or the repertoire that we were presenting. So something that was very clear is for us it's not going to be about programming music from popular films, for example, or having Taylor Swift perform with an orchestra. It wasn't going to be about kind of a fundamental shift in what the content musically was going to be. It was much more about how people find out about it and experience it rather than the product itself. So that was the kind of starting point. And then we wanted to hear from a range of people. So the kind of approach we took was sort of quite open-ended and qualitative but focused. So we identified different kind of personas, so people that were already very loyal and engaged with us, people who did attend classical music but maybe didn't attend it with us, as well as people who attended it but maybe not confidently, like they'd been to classical music concerts, but didn't necessarily mean that they felt kind of fully versed in that world and they had some questions and some potential barriers that are preventing them, maybe, from going to it more, and then people who had never attended classical music and also had never been to our festival. So we really wanted to hear from that kind of full range of people. So we did one-on-one in-depth interviews with people representing all of those different views to really kind of tease out in quite a deep way, without us putting words into their mouth, in terms of what we assumed those barriers would be. We really wanted to hear from them first and were able to draw out some themes that we could turn into a survey that we could put out more broadly. So that kind of helped us refine the factors that we were working with.
Kate:And then we used all of that to run a couple of sort of test events, which we did in the autumn of 2022 in the Hub, which is the venue that we have most control over, because it's the venue that we are based in and we operate and we knew we wanted to use the Hub in a different way. So that also created a parameter, I guess, in that we wanted to program a series of concerts that were going to take place in that venue for the following festival and we wanted to understand how we could best make use of that space, design it and create an environment that was going to have that most broad welcome, as well as thinking about how. Then, you know, we communicated with people and so on. So we ran a couple of test events, but going into it, we sort of already knew what we thought people were going to find most impactful and effective, and it also helped rule out some things, which is really helpful. So, for example, one of the things this is slightly disappointing to Nikki, I think, because she's very passionate about food being part of a festival experience but actually the research was pretty clear that, while having a good bar experience was important to people, food was really quite low down on their sense of priorities, and so it's really helpful to be able to rule some things out and go. There's no point us investing a whole load of time and thinking in developing a, you know, a beautifully curated food offering, because that's actually really not going to make a massive difference, and what we were really looking for was a sort of small interventions that we could potentially make across everything we programmed in that space, but potentially even across the whole festival. That would have a kind of maximum impact.
Kate:Some of the things that we learned from that that had like particularly strong appeal across all of those different segments and different personas, was having a short introduction to the music from the person performing, so having some level of welcome and presentation from the stage and a little explanation as to why those pieces have been chosen. You know what they sort of personally meant to that performer or what was going on in the composer's head or world at the time that it was written. You know, something really quite short and focused but that added a kind of human context to the music that has a kind of universal appeal, it seemed, and so that's something we started to weave into the whole festival experience last year, and we've tried doing that through lots of different mediums. So doing it in person, obviously you need the right speaker, someone who's confident, you know, comfortable doing that. Not all performers want to sort of talk to the audience right before they perform a complex concerto, so you've got to be mindful of having the right people doing it at the right time. But we've also looked at then how some of that information can be served to people in things like audio introductions through the website, through emails. We introduced text messages that shared those audio introductions a few hours before the performance so that if people wanted to listen and these are kind of two or three minutes long, so really just a super short way of just getting a bit of a personal connection into what you're about to go and hear.
Kate:And I think what was kind of revelatory was how much that appealed to everyone. People who didn't know very much about that music or that performer or were less confident coming to the concert found it made a huge difference to them. And people who already had that level of kind of confidence and knowledge either still found it quite helpful and interesting or, crucially, found it very easy to ignore. It didn't annoy them that we did it. Whereas one of the things we learned very clearly from that experiment is that doing anything visually in the space was hugely divisive. Anything involving screens, whether that's people using their own phones or having big screens in the space anything that was a visual distraction kind of split the audience completely.
Kate:So some people oh yes, I would find that much more interesting and engaging and and it would help me kind of get more out of the experience but a significant percentage I think it was something like 70% of our kind of existing core audiences would hate it.
Kate:So that was a really clear red line for us to go. Maybe there's a space for us to do that, but if we do it, we have to do it knowing that we need to really clearly market it to a different audience and not to our core audience, and we can't introduce it into formats where they want to be, because we know it's going to really detract from their experience. And so, again, that helped to rule some things out for us. We could have spent a lot of time and money trying to create kind of visual experiences or you know things people could follow along on their phones and so on, and then found that, you know, it created a real problem for a significant percentage of the audience. So the research was incredibly informative and it was actually really encouraging to see that there are some things that we can do that work for a majority.
Ash:And I think there's so many things in there that feel like they would be of value to any type of organisation. You know you're speaking to actual users. You didn't just come up with personas based on what people in your team thought might be the case. You actually use those to go and talk to people. You then use those interviews to inform a wider piece of research.
Ash:It feels like you've tested a number of things with some really clear outcomes some stuff you will do more of, some stuff you will do less of or not do, and, equally, a real understanding of the impact of making certain changes. So you know you can make intentional decisions around, as you said, if you want a really visual concept, you know that's not going to be for a certain type of audience and you can shape your marketing and your communications and your positioning and your expectations accordingly. So it's really interesting and exciting from my point of view to see so many apparent benefits came out of that experimentation. That's my perspective on it. Sitting over here in sweden, not working at edinburgh international festivals, did the organization see as much value as you and I see in it sort of more broadly, did it feel was it something that people understood and got excited about and got engaged with yeah, I think.
Kate:So I think it really helped Nikki and and the programming team to kind of have some of the the ideas validated in that way, so that then going into her first festival, which was in 23, we sort of already had a sense of some of the things that we thought should work.
Kate:And so we were kind of we were still piloting things and there were absolutely some still some things during that festival that we didn't quite get right for example, not always being clear enough about who those speakers were, and sometimes there was a kind of an assumed knowledge.
Kate:For example, with Nicola, when she gets up on stage lots of people in the audience know who she is, but not everyone does and sometimes, you know, she wasn't always introducing herself. And that we got from kind of the post-festival survey that some people, when we specifically asked them about, did they feel you know that that added a welcoming voice and the answer is yes, but they crucially needed to know who she was. You know, to have that context and similarly you know it sounds obvious, but just being really explicit about who is the person that's talking to you and what perspective are they talking to you from, and not assuming that anyone recognizes anyone's name or face. You know it was a really important learning. It's felt like kind of the knowledge base has been growing incrementally, rather than going into that festival taking a huge risk, you know, and not knowing at all whether some of these ideas were going to work. We had a pretty good sense of what was going to work and now it feels like we're building on that and refining the model.
Ash:Yeah, it didn't feel like quite such a scary plunge yeah, and from my perspective that feels like the biggest reason why experiments like this are so valuable. You know that you're starting to bleed some of the risk out of big choices that you could and probably should be considering, and I want to look now specifically at some of the digital elements of the work, the experiments that you've undertaken, because you mentioned a few of them, and I'm always really interested in the role of digital outside of the core in-person, physically co-present cultural experience, because I do think it can be really enriching and impactful and valuable. So I mean, you sort of mentioned briefly a few things there. You mentioned text messages and audio clips, but could you sort of map out what that audience experience looked like and the role that digital played in extending that before and afterwards?
Kate:Yeah, and this is something that we're now really paying a lot more attention to, and we really want to look at the digital version of the audience experience much more deeply, and I think there's a lot of interesting work we can now do in that space. So that first principle of we've kind of drawn a line around the auditorium and gone the digital happens up to the point where people are getting into their seats and then again at the end, but not not crucially during. So that's one kind of decision that we've made really is to discourage phone use and screen use in the auditorium, and that's we've really considered about how that's going to work for everyone. But in terms of the pre-show experience, there's quite a few things we've tried to do around just our booking experience on the website to make that smoother, and I mean there's so much more that we want to do in this space.
Kate:but you know a few really tangible things like, for example, we have an access pass now which enables people who have any kind of access requirements to be able to book online much more easily. And we've kind of ring fenced seats, not only just for wheelchair users but people who maybe just need to sit on the end of a row or have more leg room and things like that, and now kind of protected and if you have the access pass, which is free to sign up to, then you have access to book those seats completely in a self-serve way, which is, you know, much easier than having to do that all of that over the phone, for example. So just things like that where we're just kind of trying to remove friction because we've got a kind of overall vision statement that's about offering the deepest experience for the broadest possible audience, and we're always trying to kind of hold those things in tension and in balance with one another. And then when we start getting into the kind of content side of things, we experimented quite a lot last year with sort of so the audio introductions and then also, you know, longer form web content and then kind of pre-show emails and the level of content that we might put into those. So obviously the nice thing about email is it's so easy to experiment with and you know if you're sending large volumes of them in similar ways to different batches of people then there's so much room for kind of testing. I think in some ways it can be quite an overwhelming task trying to sort of think through all of the possible permutations of that kind of experimentation.
Kate:So we're trying to kind of take small steps in in working out how do we follow a cohort of people through a journey like that and work out whether so, for example, we have a particular long-term audience objective around winning back first-time attenders, and so we did an email campaign last year that was looking at people who had come for the first time the previous year but not yet booked for 23. So we sent a specific email campaign to them, trying to tempt them, talking about the types of shows that resonated with the types of shows they had been most likely to book the previous year. We had an offer for them. And then we also did a different version of a welcome email for people who we thought were booking for the first time and just kind of being really explicit about saying it looks like you're coming to the festival for the first time. Here are some things we think might be helpful to you, and so we're trying to sort of test that idea that if we do cultivate those people, hold their hands a little bit through that first or second experience with us and follow them as a cohort, compared to the people that we don't do that with, are they more likely to book, are they more likely to give us a high rating at the end of the festival? You know, we ask people how welcome they felt. You know, does that email have a correlation with the people that answer more positively to that question? You know, because you can't test everything all at once so you've got to be quite focused on where you think the impact is, and so that's one of our areas of hypothesis is about that sense of kind of looking after people.
Kate:Having that first time experience and then the other one really that did a lot with last year was the audio introduction. So that was this idea of you know we knew not every single concert would be, and we did it not just for concerts but for staged works as well. So we knew not every performance it would be possible or appropriate to have someone you know, welcome or speak from the stage. So we were trying to think how can we kind of deliver a version of that to as many people as possible? And so we came up with this idea of kind of a very mini podcast, kind of sort of three minutes ish introduction. Some of them were with Nikki, they were mostly presented by Tom Service, the BBC Radio 3 presenter, but we also interviewed some of our programming team. We interviewed some of the creatives involved in some of the staged works, but in a really, really kind of top line way, just to try and give people that kind of just personal insight into what they were going to see.
Kate:One of the areas that we realized that we needed to kind of dial up a bit more in our communication is that element of curation.
Kate:Because we happen alongside the fringe, which is, you know, the biggest arts festival in the world, in some ways we're kind of completely sort of drowned out by the volume of the fringe. But the thing that we offer that's different is that level of curation, and that's something that we wanted to try and bring across more strongly for our audiences the fact that someone has kind of handpicked this work, that these various creatives have come together and brought it to Edinburgh for a reason to put it in front of you, and so, as I said, the beauty of the audio introductions was that they were kind of enjoyed by everyone, or at least they didn't annoy anyone. We got no negative feedback about them, which in itself is a pretty remarkable thing when you're introduced something new you know about. A third of our audience is very loyal to us and therefore very valuable to us, and they have, you know, particular views about what they like and don't like about the festival, and they'll be very quick to tell us when we change something and they don't like it.
Ash:So introducing something that nobody disliked was a huge win and I'd love to dig in a little bit more to sort of audience response really. So you mentioned firstly that you're sort of doing these sort of couple of longitudinal pieces of work around the effect of nurturing first-timers or second-timers. Do you have any data so far to show whether or not that particular hypothesis is proving to be true and successful?
Kate:It's tricky because of the old pandemic. So we basically had to do a reset from 22, which was our first proper festival coming back, and we've decided to take a kind of three-year view of success on that, because it's maybe just not practical for people to come to the festival every single year and so we felt like if someone comes back within three years then that is a win in terms of making them on a step towards becoming more engaged, more loyal audience. So going into 24's festival this year, we're sort of starting to see that picture of engagement across three festivals. But what we've done is kind of tagged those people's accounts as being new in 22, new in 23, etc. And then we are kind of tracking them as a cohort and trying to look at what communications they receive, what they book when they come back, what are the similarities between the people that come back and people that don't.
Ash:So we're seeing some positive signs but it's probably a bit premature really to properly answer that'm afraid no, no, you're only halfway through that particular experiment and you know it seems like the audio content that you're producing is is perhaps the biggest in inverted commas thing that you introduced, I imagine, in terms of investment and time and tangibly to audiences. What was the sort of level of engagement? You mentioned about a third of your audience is sort of what would be termed core audience, you know, coming to probably a lot of things each year and probably coming every year. Was it mostly that audience that was engaging? Was it mostly the new audience that was engaging? Was it equal across all groups? You know how did it look with that content bet that you sort of placed?
Kate:We didn't really know what to aim for, having not done anything like that before of placed. We didn't really know what to aim for, having not done anything like that before, so we didn't really know what good would look like and obviously now we've done it once we can look at. You know how do we build on that? So we had, I think, around 30 000 listens to the audio content and people were listening to it in full because it was so short, and we got a lot of positive feedback from it in our post festival survey and that positive feedback did come from both kind of what we would call core audience and the newer audiences. One of the things that we learned from our survey something quite big that we introduced last year that came from from Nikki was the idea of having a more of an overarching theme for the festival.
Kate:We hadn't done that for many years, and one thing I found really interesting is that it was newer audiences, younger audiences and more ethnically diverse audiences who particularly valued having the theme, and in some ways that was surprising, I think, because there was a sense in the way that the theme was presented that maybe it was about adding depth for people who were already engaged and it was maybe a layer that sat below the shows themselves.
Kate:But actually some of our core audience, some of them liked it but some of them found it, found it unnecessary. You know they were already coming and they already felt quite confident, you know, finding their own sort of thematic journeys through the festival. But actually what was really interesting to me was that it was the people who were, who were newer and perhaps less kind of confident with exploring our program, who found a really helpful way in. So that's something that we're kind of thinking about with the audio introductions in particular is not just having some that are exploring the individual shows but having some of those kind of more thematic ideas explored to see whether that helps in that context. Because I think, whereas we found the audio seemed to work really well for people, the views of those longer form web articles, for example, felt a little bit underwhelming, and so I think we felt that the audio feels like an area we want to kind of go further in and experiment more with.
Ash:And I think it's interesting.
Ash:Something you touched on there, that you've touched on a number of times now, is this idea of curation, and you know, my personal perspective is that is a cultural organization's superpower.
Ash:Really. That is really the reason that audiences are engaging with you as an institution, because of your point of view, your ability to bring things together, and and so it's. It's sort of interesting and exciting to me that it sounds like that was most valuable for those newer audiences, younger audiences, more diverse audiences, and this is something that feels like it's been borne out in research elsewhere. I know StoryThings, the content agency, did a piece of research that really identified the value of curation across the internet more broadly, because there's just so much stuff everywhere all the time, and so I think that feels like a really interesting little pearl of wisdom that all organisations could perhaps do more with. But I'm interested now to look at artists and musicians performers a little bit, I know, or rather it sounds like the changes you made intentionally wouldn't have impinged on or sort of materially changed their experience of performing. But did you have any feedback or response from artists about some of the things you were doing?
Kate:Yeah, and we did solicit it as well, directly. So as part of that initial experiment process where we also did some interviews with artists and people that worked in the industry to understand what they felt would be important, and so I think that was really encouraging that actually both artists and industry people and core audiences share a perspective that they want the audiences to be more diverse, they want to share the art form that they love with a broader range of people and they want younger people to be, you know, discovering it and feeling confident in the space. So I think sometimes we set these things up as there's some kind of opposition, you know, between the kind of the people that are already coming and and the new people. And actually I I think there's been some interesting research from the audience agency on this that the existing audiences want to see younger and newer audiences in the space, but the younger and newer audiences don't necessarily want to be in the same space as the traditional audiences. There is maybe some tension to be reconciled, but it's not coming from the people that are here. I think fundamentally there is a sense that we love this art form and we want more people to experience it. There's a lot of enthusiasm for that. I think also the fact that this was being led by Nikki, as a very respected artist herself, and people recognise that she's dedicated a lot of time and energy to working with young musicians, broadening the appeal of classical music, so it felt very authentic as well coming from her.
Kate:I have a couple of quotes here from some of that research that we did. So someone saying I'm really in a concept where I wouldn't welcome more interaction from the stage, and that's from, you know, a concert performer. So there's this sense that that this stuff also adds value. Doesn't matter how much you already know. Actually, sometimes hearing a small personal insight from the person that's about to play or has just played, or a little bit more context, you know, there's always something new to discover.
Kate:I mean, no one knows everything and certainly no one knows the intricacies of why we've programmed something or why someone's chosen to perform something at this point in their career.
Kate:So there's always the possibility to add that value for people and I think that's something that's kind of quite widely felt. And also another nice quote is someone saying that wherever we are going to the audience rather than expecting the audience to come to us, is going to be better and I think that's another, you know, just really nice example of there is that willingness there. You know from from performers and obviously you know everyone's different and some people feel more passionate about this and more more confident about kind of stepping into that different role of being more of a presenter, which is very different to maybe what they spent their life training to be in terms of a performer. Some people do that more naturally and comfortably than others and you know we need to respect that, but there's definitely an appetite there, I think, for more of this kind of thing it sounds like there are aspects of this work that you're continuing.
Ash:There are aspects of this work that has yet to be completed because they've got a sort of three year timeline on them, but do you have any plans for expanding this approach, this sort of experimental approach, more broadly outside of the orchestral program and, equally, do you have any plans to evolve it within the orchestral program? Are there other things that you want to play with? I know you mentioned the sort of digital side of things, something you want to focus on more.
Kate:I'm intrigued to hear what the future life of this strand of work is yeah, I mean definitely much more experimentation in all areas, but trying to kind of work out what's the next logical step for us to take. So I think one thing that was introduced into the festival last year was the idea of a beanbag concert, and that was incredibly popular, and so that's something that we've brought back this year. They've multiplied. We now have several of them in different configurations, and that's very much now baked into the thinking and planning for the future. And so just this kind of the fundamental difference that it makes to remove some seats and put some beanbags in the space completely changes the atmosphere of a concert hall and the way in which we can then play with the experience there in terms of configuring the room, whether the audience, it could be that the performers are still on the stage in a quite traditional setup, but the audience are in a kind of more relaxed environment. On the beanbags, or we've done it where the audience are among the orchestra on the beanbags, which is a completely, completely different experience where you're sort of hearing things from the perspective of the first violin or, if you're a bit unlucky, the trombone. So that's an area where we're kind of going further in terms of slightly more innovative and informal forms of presentation. There is going to be a bit more multimedia stuff this year, but we've tried to signpost that very, very clearly and it's very carefully thought through in terms of how it adds to the storytelling of the of the piece and it's where it's a kind of more of a semi-staged kind of production as opposed to a concert. That's kind of purely about music. So that's where we're starting to see a little bit of that and see how that works for people.
Kate:And then, definitely, as we think about kind of across the art forms and how we entice people to try an art form that's maybe not been their kind of preferred one, that we do have sort of segments of our audience that are in a, in a groove.
Kate:You know, they come to a, they come to theatre and dance program, but not the music program, for example, and I suppose just generally kind of blurring the boundaries a little bit with the music genres.
Kate:So we've tried to talk less and less about classical music and instead we have, you know, there's a chamber series, there's an informal series, there's an orchestral series, but actually we've got kind of quite a range of different types of musical performer in some of those spaces and it's more about each of those venues offers a different type of experience, rather than grouping them by a sort of strict musical genre. But that was an area where we learned a lot. Then we went too far with trying to mix that up in our brochure in 2023 and people found it very difficult to navigate. So we got that wrong and we've kind of gone back to trying to organise things in a more familiar way to people because, again, the whole point is we're trying to remove barriers and not add them. So if mixing things up is just confusing people, then that's something we know not to do.
Ash:I mean. But I think also that's the inevitability of experimenting is not everything will be successful or go as you expect. And I think, working in this way, you have to be comfortable with the fact that some things will not work, and that's fine. That the experiment has taught you something.
Kate:Well, you say that's fine, but it has taught you something. Well, you say that's fine but it's difficult, isn't it? Because, like you know, I think, especially in in organizations working in the kind of classical performing arts, there's a real perfectionism that's kind of baked into the culture of you know the art forms and the organizations, and I found this you know scottish ballet as well it creates a real tension between wanting to be innovative and experimental and therefore accepting that you'll get some things wrong, and I try to live by that. But you know, it is hard not to sometimes be crushed when you've had a little, you know, a pet project of an idea that you think is going to be brilliant and then it turns out to be absolutely terrible. But you've got to own it.
Ash:I think that's the important thing is trying to role model, you know, seeing that as a success because you've learned from it yeah, I think it's fine if the environment and the culture in which you're operating allows for that and it sounds like you absolutely have the buy-in of you know Nikki and and sort of. You are a director, you know in the company and this is clearly a way of working that you are comfortable with. It feels like maybe it would be less fine, less possible, if there wasn't that exec level buy-in to this way of working, at least across aspects of the operation of the organization yeah, I think it's necessary and I think it's like I find it really important to you know, kind of personally, own my mistakes, you know, and and really show that you know.
Kate:I thought this was a good idea. Here's the evidence to show it's not. This is what I've learned from it. Like it's really important for me to be having that conversation out loud in front of my colleagues so that people also see that it's okay to have a similar process yeah, but but you know it's tough, isn't it?
Ash:In a leadership position, everyone looking to you, you sort of want to feel like you have the answers, and when you're having an idea, it's always going to be a good idea.
Kate:Exactly, yeah, it's hard, but it's necessary, and you can only get this kind of culture by living it yourself.
Ash:Absolutely, and I think you know it's also a really important thing to acknowledge that if you're talking about experimentation, you're talking about trying new ways of working. Yes, of course, there's enormous potential upside and unlocking new opportunities, etc. But there absolutely will be some failures. You cannot always be successful with something and when you're trying new things, some of them just won't work because it won't be the right time or it won't be the right conditions or whatever it might be, and I do think that it's an important thing people need to make their peace with. Yeah, and I suppose you know, other than the, there were ideas that you tried that maybe didn't work as you expected them to. What other challenges did you encounter, both in sort of working in this way, you know, running experiments but also through making some of the changes that you did? Are there any lessons that you feel you've learned that you would pass on to other people that might be looking to make similar changes or work in a similarly experimental way?
Kate:I mean, one of the biggest challenges always the timing of this stuff is trying to have enough time to do it properly, but also doing it at a point where it's going to inform decision making. And you know, as I alluded to, we had a real kind of crunchy window in which Nikki had just joined the organisation, had a lot of ideas. We wanted to inform the thinking that would go into kind of the programming for her first festival form, the thinking that would go into kind of the programming for her first festival. But you know, there was a really kind of a three months that we had to kind of go from sort of designing this experiment to having the results from it. So it was, it was pretty rapid, which you know made it imperfect, I suppose, like probably all experiments are. But I mean, I'm still so glad that we did it because in some ways it might have been easy to go. Well, it's just's just, you know, it's not possible to do it perfectly, so we just won't, I don't know, or just let it drag on, and then it doesn't really inform that first festival. And if we hadn't done it then, as imperfect as it was, it helped guide a lot of key decisions that needed to be made at that time. If we'd let it run for longer it would have almost been redundant because the direction of travel would have been already off and it would have been harder to course correct, I think, after the fact.
Kate:So I think, trying to find that balance between spending enough time on it, you know, to think it through and to plan the timing of it so that it happens, so you get the learnings at the point when you're going to put them to best use, there's a bit of a luxury, I guess, in a festival cycle in that, you know, in some ways we sort of have not really, but almost a year between festivals to regroup, learn, really make decisions about how we're going to do things better and differently.
Kate:And I think that's different to when I've been in an organization that's, you know, just kind of got a year-round offer. It's sometimes really hard to find that time to stop and regroup. You know we have a pretty robust kind of debrief window where basically September, we spend two weeks really analysing the results of our audience survey, you know, our sales feedback from artists, everything, the feedback from staff, and we kind of pull all that together and then everyone kind of collapses for about two weeks and goes on holiday, but then we kind of come back in October and then you'll be going into our new financial year.
Kate:So that the rhythm to the organisation I think you can't fight that. You've got to work with it. So knowing when key programming decisions are being made, when budgets are being set, and therefore, if you're going to say we want to invest more in this area, working back from when does that need to be approved? By when do you need the evidence to support your recommendation? By can you fit that in between the festival and that decision making window? Even though it's tight? It was sort of when it had to happen for us, and so I think that's a tricky thing to get right and reconciling.
Ash:It was more important to do it then and do it well enough, than it was to do it perfectly yeah, and I feel like that is another really important principle that you could spend forever trying to design the perfect experiment, but then by the time, if you ever did run it, you wouldn't learn as much as you would have done if you'd run it at the time, as you say, in a good enough state. And I've worked in organizations where the paralysis of perfection has been acute. You know somewhere where they spent over a year designing an audience survey because we had to ask all the right questions.
Ash:You know it's like sure, but we've not asked anything now for a year yeah so lastly, to sort of finish on what are your reflections on how transferable this approach, this thinking might be outside of a specific EIF context? You know, is it a bit of a lightning in a bottle perfect alignment of festival context. New artistic director you knew in post artistic director has the same interests and priorities as you and therefore that has unlocked a lot of things that's made this type of working and this type of change possible. Or do you feel there's something that could be lifted and stolen by other people that are looking to play with their audience experience in other types of organizations?
Kate:yeah, I mean, I'm always an advocate for stealing ideas that seem like they could work and you know I've got to count my blessings in terms of exactly the factors that you identified that made it possible for us to do this in the way and at the speed that we did. But I think the principles of letting go of perfectionism, finding out just enough information to inform that next big decision that's going to kind of be the, you know start a cascade of incremental change. I feel like anyone can look at you know their kind of operating cycle and identify, you know, if I were really going to have a big impact, it would need to happen, you know it needs to be in the conversation on that board away day, you know. Or it's that budget setting process where I need to make my case. So I think having that real clarity of what you're hoping to influence with the experiment is really important, because I think having it baked in from the beginning of what we're now in is a kind of you know, that was the beginning of a multi-year planning process and we've kind of been now working on this five year business plan and it's kind of been threaded through it from the beginning.
Kate:So taking advantage of those reset moments that happen in organisations, I think is really key, and even organisations that aren't going through massive change, although I don't know if there are any of those. There's been so much turnover of kind of leadership since the pandemic. It feels like lots of people are kind of grappling with about to be doing multi-year funding cycles and so on, for wherever you're based. So I think there's always a moment there to try and seize that opportunity. And then, I think, just the principle of having a hypothesis but starting with what the audience tells you and really listening to it. You know, without prejudice. I think it's a difficult thing to do, and especially it was there, but it means letting go of some things that would have been really fun to spend lots of time working on but maybe just weren't actually a priority for the people that you're trying to have an impact with. So I think that's a useful principle for everyone.
Ash:Brilliant. Well, I look forward to where this experimentation takes you next. Thanks so much for your time today, Kate.
Kate:Thanks for having me.
Ash:And that is everything for today. Thanks for listening. You can find all episodes of the podcast, sign up for the newsletter and find out about our events on our website, thedigitalworks. You can also find us on LinkedIn, now that Twitter is a total garbage fire. Our theme tune is Vienna, beat by Blue Dot Sessions. And, last but not least, thanks to Mark Cotton for his editing support on this episode. See you again soon.