Anne is the founder and Chief Executive of The Audience Agency, the UK national charity for public engagement with arts, museums and heritage, enabling reach, relevance and resilience across the sector. The Audience Agency was established in 2012 and the Group now comprises:

• A unique data analytics service, Audience Finder, based on a world-first national database of cultural audiences
• A bespoke research and development agency specialising in public engagement
• Golant Innovation, an agency which enables new models for social enterprise, resilience and digital transformation (a trading subsidiary of The Audience Agency)

Anne has been influential, over three decades, improving practice and advocating for change in the cultural sector, especially in terms of encouraging an audience-centred approach and in the use of data and other evidence in the development of policy and practice.

Prior to Audiences London and The Audience Agency she was director of marketing and audiences with numerous UK cultural organisations – local authorities, theatres and festivals (including West Yorkshire Playhouse and LIFT) and then as a consultant, facilitator and adviser for agencies such as Arts Council England, British Council, the European Commission and a diverse range of cultural organisations in the UK (including The Albany, Graeae, Tamasha, Tate, National Theatre and Manchester International Festival) and internationally.

Anne is a specialist in audience strategy, trends and patterns of public engagement and works across all artforms and museums and has special interests in the use of data especially for cultural democracy, human centred design and organisational change in social enterprises. She is a regular commentator and speaker on these issues.

Anne’s work includes devising numerous organisational development programmes with the aim of increasing and diversifying audiences, both for individual clients and as funded programmes. Recently, she co-devised the From Them To Us inclusive leadership programme and was an adviser on the Engaging Audiences European Commission study on excellence and policy in Audience Development. She is currently lead programme designer of both the Audience-Centred Experience Design Blueprint Initiative for the largescale Creative Europe Adeste Plus Project and for the Erasmus Connecting Audiences programme (in partnership with Goldsmiths University’s Institute for Creative & Cultural Entrepreneurship).

She recently became co-director of the new Centre for Cultural Value, funded by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council, alongside Ben Walmsley at the University of Leeds.

Bibliography

Web resources

• The Audience Agency – Creating An Effective Audience Development Plan: https://www.theaudienceagency.org/insight/guide-to-audience-development-planning 
• The Audience Agency – Planning for People/Adeste+ : https://www.theaudienceagency.org/blog/from-boring-plan-to-creative-design-the-adeste-case 
• The Design Council Website: https://www.designcouncil.org.uk
• IDEO: https://www.ideo.com
• Creative People and Places – ‘Power Up’: http://www.creativepeopleplaces.org.uk/our-learning/power
• Creative People and Places – ‘More than a cup of tea’: http://www.creativepeopleplaces.org.uk/our-learning/mapping-and-analysis-of-engagement-approaches
• Design Thinking, OpenLearn, Open University (free course): https://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths-technology/design-innovation/design-thinking/content-section-0?active-tab=description-tab
• Co-creating Change Network: http://www.cocreatingchange.org.uk/

Publications

• The Design Thinking Playbook: Mindful Digital Transformation of Teams, Products, Services, Businesses and Ecosystems; Lewrick, Link and Leifer; Wiley, 2018.
• Cultural Democracy and Cultural Policy; Hadley and Belfiore; Cultural Trends, Vol 27, No.3, 2018: (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09548963.2018.1474009).
• Be SpectACTive. Challenging participation in performing arts; var authors; Editoria & Specttacol, 2018: (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328912738_Be_SpectACTive_Challenging_participation_in_performing_arts).
• Building the Agile Business through Digital Transformation; Abraham and Perkin; Kogan Page 2017.
• Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else; David Balzer; Coach House Books, 2014.
• Double Loop Learning in Organizations; David Argyris; Harvard Business Review, September 1977: (https://hbr.org/1977/09/double-loop-learning-in-organizations).
• This is Service Design Thinking, Bis Publishing 2011 (http://thisisservicedesignthinking.com) and This is Service Design Doing, O’Reilly Media, 2018: (https://www.thisisservicedesigndoing.com/).