• Audiences South West will be merging into Audiences London from April 2012
• The South West of England will benefit from a more extensive range of high quality audience development services

Audiences South West was set up in 2000 as South West Arts Marketing (SWAM) before changing in 2008 into Audiences South West, the South West’s audience development agency. It is now working alongside Audiences London and All About Audiences (based in Manchester) to create a new national audience development organisation.

Plans for the national organisation (working title Audiences Plus) have been developing since September 2011 and as part of these, Audiences South West has elected to close as a single agency and merge with Audiences London at the start of the 2012 financial year. This merger will create a southern hub that will offer a superior level of provision, a wider range of services and new networks to the cultural sector in the South West. The region will continue to have access to audience evidence and data-interpretation, but will now benefit from new analytics tools as well as more specialist advice and support in building audiences, income, and community engagement.

"At a time when other regions are losing their audience development support, we're delighted to be trebling our range of evidence-based strategic support for the cultural sector", said Mark Wallace, Chair of Audiences South West. "With this new partnership, we take a big step forward in bringing internationally best-of-breed audience development support to the South West."

Chief Executive, Jim Brewster has commented: “Audiences South West has chosen to merge with Audiences London as this is the best way to secure supply of quality audience development services for the South West.  We are excited about the merger because it secures a dedicated, expert staff for the South West and increases the value we can add to organisations in the sector by extending the services available and strengthening the business model that provides them.”

The team of Audiences South West will stay on, adding their specialist knowledge of the region’s audiences and cultural offer to the expanded organisation, and ensuring the strategy for Audiences Plus will benefit organisations across the South West.

 Audiences South West would like to thank the region and sector for all their support in previous years, and the team looks forward to strengthening existing relationships and building new ones as a result of the new offer.

This merger signifies the first stage of creating a single national organisation for audience development in England. From April 2013 Audiences London will merge with All About Audiences to create Audiences Plus [working title], a commercially viable business model that will benefit from joined-up thinking, shared resources and national connections.

This decision to become a national agency has been scrutinised by independent consultants Anne Millman and Graeme Jennings. Their feasibility study of the proposal concluded that the new national agency offers a sound business case to deliver ‘world-class audience development services’ in England.

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For more details please contact Emily Bull on Emily.bull@audiencessw.org / 0117 927 6936