Audience Development
About the author
Dr Lesley Paterson is a strategic and creative leader, practitioner and evaluator with over 20 years’ experience in public and community engagement and knowledge exchange (KE). Has led a whole variety of engagement programmes and projects: including PI for the £1M+ Wellcome-funded grants scheme Enriching Engagement (University of Oxford) to nurture high-quality engaged research; project lead for the complex, multi-partner project Curiosity Carnival (500+ researchers; 150+ activities; 7 venues; engaged 10,000+), in addition to facilitating participatory and dialogue engagement work.
Lesley is an Honorary Research Associate, Science & Technology Studies, University College London; UK Evaluation Society member; REF 2021 Impact Assessor; KE Concordat Evaluator; a #ResearchRevolutionary and was previously the University of Oxford’s Head of Public Engagement with Research; her first public engagement role was working for a sheep (called Dolly).
She is the Director of the Engagement Associates: a consultancy specialising in Engagement; Exchange & Evaluation.
Twitter: @lesleyapaterson
Linked-In: linkedin.com/in/lesley-paterson
Contents
Part 1: Background
- Why think about who you want to engage?
- Who are the ‘Public’ in Public Engagement?
Part 2: Defining your audience
- Ways to explore and describe publics and communities
- Exploring public and community engagement audiences or participants
Part 3: Working with your audience
- Reaching your audiences
- Values, Ethics, Safeguarding & Inclusion
- Evaluation
Further Information
- The Audience Agency describes 10 audience segments for arts, museums, and heritage organisations, including summaries of potential behaviours, attitudes and preferences: https://www.theaudienceagency.org/off-the-shelf/audience-spectrum/profiles
- This British Science Association and King’s College London have developed a framework that divides the public into four main groups to understand 16 years+ audiences, based on the extent to which they see science as part of their culture and identity or not: https://www.britishscienceassociation.org/our-audience-model