Arts & Cultural Brands
Helping cultural organisations clarify who they are for, how they show up, and how they grow.
Working in the arts and cultural sector comes with distinct challenges. Audiences are often deeply engaged but fragmented, expectations are high, and decisions about growth, messaging, funding, and partnerships need to sit comfortably alongside mission and values.
I work with arts charities and cultural organisations through strategy workshops and audience insight to help refine audience focus, clarify brand positioning and messaging, and identify opportunities for sustainable growth.
This work can be delivered as a standalone strategic workshop, or informed by audience research where useful. Depending on the brief, I use a range of research approaches. Social intelligence is one methodology I use frequently, as it offers a fast and affordable way to understand audience interests, behaviours, and cultural alignment, particularly for arts and cultural organisations.
What this work supports
Depending on your needs, this approach can help you:
clarify and prioritise audience focus
refine brand positioning and messaging
align teams around a shared understanding of who the organisation is for
clarify values and strategic direction to guide design, content, and communications
plan campaigns, programmes, or launches with greater clarity
identify growth opportunities beyond existing supporters
Sponsors and partnerships, informed by audiences
Audience insight can also inform sponsorship and partnership strategy.
When audience research is part of the work, it’s possible to see brand preferences and affinities within the data, revealing which brands, organisations, and institutions already resonate with an audience through shared interests, values, or cultural alignment.
This helps cultural organisations prioritise sponsors and partners that feel credible and meaningful to their audience, supporting more confident conversations around sponsorship and collaboration, grounded in real audience behaviour rather than assumptions about fit.
For organisations where sponsorship is a particular focus, this audience-led approach can be explored in more depth.
How I work
My work combines strategic thinking, facilitation, and audience insight to create practical and usable outcomes. Workshops are collaborative and focused, designed to help teams make sense of complexity, surface new perspectives, and agree clear next steps.
Whether you’re exploring a rebrand, launching something new, rethinking audience focus, or developing sponsorship and partnership strategy, this work is designed to support thoughtful, audience-led decision making.
Example: Granta Magazine
Granta is a quarterly literary magazine, renowned for discovering and championing new literary talent.
They were exploring how to better understand their subscribers and how to approach brand and advertising partnerships as part of a wider strategy to grow readership in both the UK and US.
This work combined multiple data sources to uncover key insights about both audiences. These insights informed audience strategy, messaging, and partnership thinking, and were used in a collaborative workshop to refresh Granta’s audience focus and communications.