How can the cultural sector start recognising audiences as creators, not just consumers? Centre for Cultural Value Director Stephen Dobson applies a cultural vitality lens to established audience segments, bringing into focus the value of everyday creativity in our communities.

For decades, audience development has focused on understanding who attends, who engages and how we can broaden or diversify participation. Tools like The Audience Agency’s Audience Spectrum have been indispensable, giving cultural organisations a shared language and robust data on the habits, attitudes and attendance behaviour of UK audiences, drawing on national surveys such as DCMS Taking Part. But this approach primarily captures cultural consumption, not the wider creative ecosystem of cultural participation. Communities are creating culture in ways our current datasets rarely capture.

Research across digital culture, co-creation and community arts consistently highlights the shift toward active cultural participation. Community-led models like Creative People and Places and Fun Palaces show what happens when residents lead cultural decision-making. And studies of inequality in cultural participation reveal how much creative capacity exists in communities that remain excluded from formal cultural spaces.

Audiences increasingly act as co-creators, not passive consumers (Simon 2010; Jenkins & Ito 2015; Edelmann 2022). This shift is particularly marked in digital environments, where people move fluidly between watching, making, remixing, sharing and influencing cultural content. The Audience Agency’s Cultural Participation Monitor also highlights the rapid expansion of livestreaming, digital creation and hybrid participation during and after the pandemic. Yet these forms of creative labour remain largely invisible in traditional audience data. If we’re serious about inclusion, innovation and relevance, we need to understand the full creative lives of the people we seek to engage, not only those who attend, but also those who create.

Changing the way we view culture

This is where the Cultural Vitality framework offers a powerful shift. It encourages us to see culture as a living ecosystem shaped by everyday creativity, social networks, digital platforms and community-led activity, not just by what happens inside traditional cultural venues.

When we overlay a cultural vitality lens onto Audience Spectrum, something exciting happens: audiences start to appear not as passive consumers, but as micro-producers, co-creators and cultural influencers. It reframes familiar audience segments as actors within a cultural ecology, a view strongly supported by Holden’s argument that culture should be understood as an interconnected system of institutions, informal practices, amateur making, digital communities and everyday behaviours (Holden 2015).

Matarasso’s extensive evidence on participatory and community arts reinforces this perspective, showing that people often engage not by attending, but by co-creating, crafting, storytelling and collaborating within social contexts (Matarasso 2019). Meanwhile, O’Brien et al. (2020) demonstrate that marginalised communities, often categorised as “low attending”, are in fact rich in everyday creativity, though often structurally excluded from institutional spaces.

Seeing the creative potential

The cultural vitality lens helps address audience development blind spots by making visible the creative potential otherwise left out of audience development planning. Under a cultural vitality lens, Audience Spectrum segments become not consumer clusters but cultural contributors, for example:

• Up Our Street are often rich in everyday creativity, grass roots culture makers whose DIY arts, music and informal events are a significant part of community cultural participation, even if they rarely appear in box office data.
• Kaleidoscope Creativity communities are hubs of hybrid, intergenerational and diasporic cultural innovation.
• Frontline Families exemplify the democratising potential of digital platforms (Powell 2012; Edelmann 2022), acting as digital amplifiers and ideal partners for co-creation, digital storytelling, sharing, interpreting and recontextualising cultural activity on platforms that influence broader engagement.
• Home and Heritage are keepers of craft skills, place-based stories and analogue cultural practices who can support intergenerational activities and are vital to sustaining place-based cultural ecosystems.
• Experience Seekers are early adopters and co-creators within immersive, XR and participatory formats, becoming both audiences and active contributors.

Taken together, this remix of Audience Spectrum and Cultural Vitality offers a more representative understanding of cultural participation, one that values everyday creativity, digital production and informal, community-led activity alongside institutional forms. In the field of audience development, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity.

What could audience development look like if we valued audiences as producers?

Taking a cultural vitality approach invites us to:

1. Expand what we measure. Looking beyond ticketing and surveys to capture digital creativity, informal making, social sharing and hyperlocal cultural activity.
2. Rethink engagement strategies. Reconsidering how our programmes, communications and partnerships can support audiences as co-creators, not just attendees.
3. Design for permeability. The most vibrant cultural ecosystems allow ideas, people and practices to move between formal and informal spaces. How can your organisation open those channels?
4. Recognise and reward cultural labour that has long been invisible. This includes acknowledging community knowledge and skills, DIY culture and online content creation, grassroots culture, intangible heritage and everyday creativity.

A call to action for audience development managers

1. Start mapping everyday creativity in your community. Talk to people where they create, not just where they attend.
2. Use Audience Spectrum as a starting point, not an end point. Layer qualitative insight, digital behaviours and community intelligence on top of your audience segmentation.
3. Build partnerships with local creators, informal groups and digital communities. They are part of your cultural ecosystem—even if they’re not yet in your CRM.

Find out more about the Centre for Cultural Value’s work on cultural vitality

Discover more about the Centre’s work on cultural vitality, the cultural indicator suite and read our interim report.

Read our research digest: Understanding Cultural Vitality.

References

Edelmann, N., 2022. Digitalisation and developing a participatory culture: Participation, co-production, co-destruction. In Scientific foundations of digital governance and transformation: Concepts, approaches and challenges (pp. 415-435). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Jenkins, H. and Ito, M., 2015. Participatory culture in a networked era: A conversation on youth, learning, commerce, and politics. John Wiley & Sons.

Holden, J., 2015. The ecology of culture [online]. Available from: https://publicartonline.org.uk/downloads/news/AHRC%20Ecology%20of%20Culture.pdf

Matarasso, F., 2019. A restless art: How participation won, and why it matters (Vol. 15). London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

O’Brien, D, Taylor, M and Brook, O. (2020) Culture is Bad for You: Inequality in the Cultural and Creative Industries. Manchester University Press.

Powell, A., 2012. Democratizing production through open source knowledge: from open software to open hardware. Media, Culture & Society, 34(6), pp.691-708.

Simon, N., 2010. The participatory museum. Museum 2.0.