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    Audience Development Conference

    The conference on Audience Development that took place in Ljubljana on 9 September 2014 brought together professionals from Slovenia, Croatia, the Czech Republic and Romania to discuss the topic of audience development, which is the key priority for the EU Creative Europe programme.

    Audience development is an important priority task for the Creative Europe Desk, and their goal is ‘to help European artists/cultural professionals and their works reach as many people as possible across Europe and extend access to cultural works to under-represented groups.’  They also aim to help cultural organisations to adapt to need to search for new and innovative ways of maintaining existing audiences and finding new ones. This includes reaching out to groups that currently do not quality as a ‘target audience’.

    The guest speakers included Sara Božanić, designer, strategist and CEO of the Transmedia Design Institute, along with:

    • Dragos Eduard Nemau, founder of the National Network of Romanian Museums, museum expert, and manager of national and European projects exploring new fields in Romanian museology (Romania);
    • Matjaž Farič, choreographer, director and artistic director of the Flota Institute (Murska Sobota and Ljubljana, Slovenia);
    • Eva Kesslová, managing director of the BERG Orchestra (Prague, Czech Republic);
    • Matevž Luzar, renowned young film director and screenwriter who has received many domestic and international awards (Ljubljana, Slovenia);
    • Petra Slatinšek, head of Kinobalon, the internationally awarded film education programme for children designed by Kinodvor arts cinema (Ljubljana, Slovenia) and board member of the European Children’s Film Association (ECFA);
    • Slaven Tolj, internationally recognised multimedia artist and curator, founder of Dubrovnik’s Art Radionica Lazareti (1988), and presently director of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka (Croatia).

    The conference was aimed at representatives of the cultural and audiovisual sectors who wish to extend their understanding of the concept behind audience development, share their viewpoints and help locate innovative ideas, with examples of good practice, in order to work with different audiences or develop new strategies.

    The goal of the conference  was to present methods for identifying audiences to audiovisual content creators and providing suitable screening platforms, focusing on three facets of any successful business model: reach, engagement and experience.