Case study - Audiences North East

Company background

Audiences North East works with the north east region's cultural sector to understand, reach, sustain and develop audiences. They operate a one-year paid placement scheme.

The challenge

After two years of operation we realised we needed to restructure to accommodate how the company's activities were changing and growing. We knew we needed extra resources to assist with the ongoing operation of our website, event management and audience research and we just couldn't achieve this with our existing structure. As a low-risk option we decided to try out Northumbria University's placement scheme. We offered a 12-month paid placement as marketing assistant and thought that if it didn't work out we could always go back to the drawing board and recruit a permanent member of staff.

Placement benefits

• Improved quality of work. Prior to our placement we had hired casual staff for carrying out face-to-face interviews with audiences and we found that they could be unreliable. With our placement student we can be sure that a high quality of interviewing is carried out. As our student usually carries out a lot of the resulting data analysis, it is in their interest to ensure that interviews are carried out efficiently and effectively. Word of mouth in the cultural sector has spread about the quality of our audience research, so much so that we have been continuously employed in audience research for clients for the past 18 months.
• Gaining a different perspective. We tend to operate in a cocoon of seasoned audience and marketing professionals. Having a placement student has enabled us to look at the cultural sector with fresh eyes. We often test out ideas on our student to ensure we're hitting the mark.
• Knowing that we are contributing to the cultural sector in the region. The cultural sector is a small world, particularly in the north east. Whilst we have limited financial resources to effect change in the region, what we do have is knowledge and by operating a placement scheme we are ensuring that potentially one of the cultural sector organisations in the north east is getting a very well-trained employee.

Results

• Reduced recruitment costs.
• Better service delivery to our corporate members - we're now seen to be very proactive with our corporate members, ensuring that they really do benefit from all aspects of our membership scheme, e.g. chasing them for competition offers, ensuring that all members receive coverage on our website, liaising with our bloggers and forwarding their comments to our members.
• Becoming an employer of choice - word has got out about the quality and range of experience that we can offer. We were really proud to hear recently on the cultural grapevine that we were thought to be a 'fantastic opportunity' for someone wanting to start out in the cultural sector.

Information provided by The National Council for Work Experience (NCWE).