Creative New Zealand, Auckland City Council and ASB Community Trust have just released their research into the attitudes and participation of Asian Aucklanders with the arts. It’s interesting reading - you can get a copy of the report from Creative New Zealand.

The Asian population is growing faster than any other ethnic group in New Zealand, with a 49% increase between 2001 and 2006. The research shows that arts and culture are important to Asian Aucklanders: the arts are seen as a part of everyday life, and food, socialising and the arts are often entwined for these communities.

This beautifully presented report lists some of the barriers to participation for Asian Aucklanders, and also practical suggestions for how arts organisations can align their practises with the nature of this audience. I’m sure this is also true for the cultural sector more broadly.

Some of these barriers include having no one to go to an event with, having little time, the cost and lack of knowledge of a particular artform (not understanding the language and idioms used, for example).

In this, Asian audiences are not so different from other audiences. With regard to the importance of peers - ‘having someone to go with’ - the report notes that peer-to-peer marketing strategies and word-of-mouth are important tools that we need to use to engage with Asian audiences.

To overcome barriers to participation that are more specific to this demographic, and to build relationships with Asian peoples, the report (page 54) has these suggestions:

• use word of mouth, local networks, schools, education centres and community media to promote arts performances and activities
• use community leaders to reach out to communities
• work with other organisations to develop arts initiatives and build networks
• encourage communities to participate by sending out personalised invitations
• make connections between different communities and develop cross-cultural events that bring communities together
• consider using non-traditional venues (eg markets, parks) to raise awareness of an arts activity and help remove a barrier of not knowing the rules
• implement initiatives to reduce costs for families to attend events and increase opportunities to ‘test drive’ an arts events
• be aware of language barriers and find ways to help overcome this (eg producing other-language brochures, using community networks and ethnic media, multi-language booking line). 

Finally, in quite practical terms, the Auckland Theatre Company describes how they are looking at attracting more Asian audiences. Michael Adams, Marketing and Sponsorship Manager, has some interesting reflections on generational issues, too, and how we need to be prepared for the long haul:

Attendance as an adult is also very much determined by past behaviour. If the first migrant generation weren’t theatre attenders in their home country, it’s highly unlikely they’ll suddenly want to start coming to theatre in New Zealand. Their children, however, will experience the New Zealand education system where we already have development programmes in place. I think these programmes will be an important strategy to develop Asian audiences of the future. That’s a very long-term approach and we won’t necessarily see the results of that work for ten to fifteen years, when the 1.5 generation comes though.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 at 12:33 am and is filed under New in the sector, Research, Building audiences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.