Highlights from the Creative People and Places Conference 2014

17 March 2014

(Image taken at one of the cultural tours at Hull Truck Theatre)

Laura Dyer, Executive Director at Arts Council England, opened the conference and explained how Creative People & Places goes to the very heart of ACE’s mission - Great Art & Culture for Everyone. She highlighted the big difference between CPP and other programmes – a long term vision of at least 10 years – and they’ve allocated £37 million in funding to create new partnerships to achieve it.

Day two was opened by Professor Nabeel Hamdi from Oxford Brookes University talking about Small Change and how small actions can bring big positive change to communities. You can hear exactly what he had to say in the specially recorded conference film.

Over two days delegates took part in a range of stimulating and illuminating workshops, open discussions and venue tours.

• A Theories of Change workshop led by Louise Scott and Sarah Jenkins from Ecorys UK, looked at a method for conceptualising the rationale for national CPP activity that explains how the Programme hopes to achieve its intended outcomes and impacts.

• In Participatory Decision Making, Mark Webster (Staffordshire University and Appetite) and Leila Jancovich (Leeds Metropolitan University and Right Up Our Street) explored how CPP Places could empower local people in the development of cultural provision and looked at how Appetite (Stoke CPP) are using a method of participatory appraisal in their ‘get talking’.

• Alison Edbury from &Co examined the merits of Audience Segmentation and how demographic, behavioural and attitudinal segmentation can help inform the way we approach and communicate with our audiences.

• The open discussion spaces covered subjects as diverse as marketing and communications, data collection and its management, pricing models and the thorny question of just what constitutes quality in art.

During the conference we captured all the action on storify here and afterwards, our friends at Transported blogged their reflections on their two days in Hull.

The CPP National Conference 2014 was a joint event from the CPP National Evaluation Programme (led by A New Direction) and the CPP Peer Learning Network (led by Woodhorn Museum and Northumberland Archives).

Like this blog?

We send out a monthly digest of all our blogs, news and updates - sign up here to receive straight to your inbox - www.anewdirection.org.uk/newsletter

You can also follow us at @A_New_Direction