Anna Jackson shares tips from local experts on how to gather and engage with your audience community.

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I had the pleasure of taking part in a discussion on with a group of people who do a fantastic job of building and managing audiences at our last Transmedia NZ MeetUp: Anna Guenther (Chief Bubble Blower, PledgeMe), Courteney Peters (Director/Founder/Editor, Gather and Hunt), Elise Sterback (Community Manager, Basement Theatre and Boosted Ambassador) and Kate Stevenson, Director of Communications for Star86.com.

Each person is involved with very different activities and audiences, but they share one very important principle; think of your audience as a community, or an ‘audience community’.

As Kate Stevenson says, there may be no real difference between ‘audience’ and ‘community’ but “the word you use to define ‘whatever you want to call it’ may then define how you act towards them.”

The Basement, for example, calls itself “A bar. A theatre. A community” and has put real effort into redefining the concept of audience with a Community Engagement Strategy that puts community at The Basement’s heart:

“We want to make all of our fans feel like valued members of our community; provide them with opportunities to participate and express themselves; and create long-lasting connections with our fans and between them.”

The thing that really struck me about each person on the panel is that they really know their audience community in a really tangible way because they interact with them constantly, and often do this in-person.

Gather and Hunt is an online cultural hub but Courteney Peters says that their regular Tasting Club events have helped to build real, meaningful connections.

While social media is one very useful tool for communicating with and building an audience community, actually gathering your people together makes them feel like, well... like a community! It’s also the best kind of audience research that you can do.

The key to getting to know your community, says Kate Stevenson is simple to talk to them, “find out what they want, but be prepared for it to get messy.”

This is especially true when your community members are children, as is the case with Star86.com, an online virtual world for kids. Stevenson has been responsible for managing Star86’s significant online community, which recently announced its closure in a statement that acknowledges the sense of ownership and belonging in Star86 that the community feels:

'You might feel sad, disappointed and maybe even angry about this news. That is completely normal and ok - all of us at Cubey HQ are feeling the same way. We hope you will join us to celebrate everything you created.'

Before closing, Star86 gave Dubbles (the name for community members) the opportunity to create keepsakes of their time on Star86 and threw a virtual farewell party before closing.

Engaging with audience communities online can be incredibly challenging, time-consuming and also increasingly expensive. On Facebook, for example, paid promotion is unavoidable if you want to be sure that your audience to actually see your posts. Creative New Zealand recently published a paper on engaging with audiences on social media, which has some very useful insights. The paper is based on data collected and analysed for Optimiser, an online benchmarking project for the New Zealand cultural sector, so it’s a useful local resource. READ IT HERE.