Expressions of Interest - Lake Macquarie Arts, Culture and Tourism - Market Research

⁠⁠⁠Background:

Lake Macquarie City Council’s Arts, Culture and Tourism department (ACT) have initiated a range of new programs, facilities and projects to enrich the cultural and creative life of the City.

Our cultural venues including libraries, art galleries, museums and theatres have grown over the past five years inline with the Arts, Heritage and Cultural Plan initiated in 2017.

As programs continue to grow the need to better understand our audiences is become more prevalent. Notably understanding ‘who is not visiting and why?’. Our standard methods of data collection give insight into who our visitors are but those not walking into our venues remain unengaged

Through this research project ACT would like to discover ‘who is not visiting and why?’ through a three-year project that builds on existing data with focused research.

Objectives of Research:

• Evaluate current data to develop five – six audience profiles that are not currently engaging with cultural facilities
• Using the audience profiles complete focus groups and community evaluation to answer the following questions
• Who is not visiting?
• Why are they not visiting?
• Do we have specific audiences visiting certain cultural venues but not others? E.g. visiting Museum of Art and Culture but not Lake Mac Libraries
• How distinct are our audiences between different cultural facilities?
• How COVID changed audience behaviour – increase in digital engagement etc?
• Over three years the project will contribute to a developing understanding of audiences and key opportunities for engagement

Scope of the Research:

The research is to include both primary and secondary research of a qualitative and quantitative nature. This should be achieved by research tools such as focus groups and surveys of audiences in source markets. Other tools will be considered within the constraints of the research budget.

ACT will provide the consultant with all current audience demographic data.

The research should include all cultural facilities:

- Museum of Art and Culture

- Lake Mac Libraries

- Multi Arts Place

- Rathmines Theatre

- Warners Bay Theatre

- SugarValley Library Museum (2022)

Deliverables:

It is expected that the successful consultant will provide the Council’s with a presentation and report annually that addresses the research objectives.

Budget:

Budget of $7000 annually from 2022 – 2023 available for this project.

Expressions of Interest

Please submit an outline of how the scope and objectives would be fulfilled, timeline and budget to Jessica Dowdell, Lifelong Learning and Audience Engagement Coordinator, Lake Macquarie City Council, jdowdell@lakemac.nsw.gov.au by Friday 30 July 2021.