Birmingham Museums Trust: audience champions

Our challenge

How might we develop an approach to science engagement that responds to and shifts with Birmingham’s changing cultural ecosystems?

Rethinking Thinktank

Narrative Threads were brought on board by Birmingham Museums Trust in 2021 as audience-champions for a feasibility study addressing the inequality of engagement with science and culture across Birmingham and the wider region.

Bold in its ambitions, this project wanted to make a shift from being a ‘nice to have’ to an ‘essential’ service, building on the Trust’s work as a leader within the UK for socially engaged museum practice.

Understanding what makes people proud to be from Birmingham.

Audience manifesto for Birmingham

Our human-centred design process began with a period of blue-sky thinking, reflection and prioritisation. This formed the core of our audience manifesto, setting out high-level audience aspirations for the project and its development process. Next, we built on existing audience insights, mapping key tensions, needs, motivations and barriers and setting out assumptions and questions for testing within Birmingham neighbourhoods as part of the Trust’s story of change.

Takeover Day was a day of dialogue, creativity and relationship building at Thinktank. © Birmingham Museums Trust

Framework for creativity and change

The resultant study iterates on fresh insights gathered during this consultation. A roadmap for the journey ahead, it poses questions, frames challenges and imagines possibilities, prioritising them as short, medium and longer term initiatives. By so doing it becomes a framework by which creativity and change can self-seed and sustainably flourish well into the future, meeting the actual needs of communities.

Output

Our Audience Manifesto and Interpretive Strategy report was incorporated into the City of Ideas feasibility study.