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By James Kelly, July 8, 2010

Dance Ireland has published a new report “Dance Counts” ; a survey of Dance Ireland membership, activity and audiences. Click here to link DANCE COUNTS 2008

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By James Kelly, June 29, 2010

Are you looking to find ways to measure a gallery audience?

Under Arts Audiences’ Build Your Audiences Scheme, The Butler Gallery received free marketing consultancy to undertake a extensive study in this area, and the findings have been of great benefit to the organisation. Under the guidance of Heather Maitland, Jean Tormey, Education Curator in the Butler Gallery, has compiled a report on the findings, to download this, as well as the following;

• The Galley’s action plan
• the research plan
• 3 questionnaires
• audience observation sheet

click on this link: Measuring a Gallery Audience – Butler Art Gallery report

All combined, this information provides a significant resource for similar organisations considering a similar study.

Some notes from Jean on the body of work;

“We wanted to get involved in the Build your Audience Project to devote some dedicated time and energy to finding out more about our audience, and to thinking about how we communicate with both our existing and potential audience. One of the major reasons for this is the Gallery’s long-term aim to relocate to a new facility within the next three years to better accommodate our collection, exhibition and education programme.

In our current location [Kilkenny Castle] we attract a significant, transient, international audience who visit us as part of their tour of the castle. Our move to the new venue means we cannot rely on this particular tourist audience to automatically attend the Gallery as is often the case at present.

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image courtesy of the Butler Gallery

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This project was an ambitious one that could not have been undertaken without our committed group of volunteers. In retrospect, we were somewhat over ambitious in the questions we asked at the outset. More time spent honing the ‘real issues’ would have been beneficial. However, a study of this kind has never before been undertaken by the Butler Gallery or any gallery in Ireland for that matter, and was an eye opener for the Gallery in many ways.

Through the street and castle surveys, we discovered that many more people than we realised knew where we were, and a lot of people had complementary and positive things to say about the Gallery. The Project confirmed our prediction that much of our audience are attending as a result of a visit to the Castle – half of our audience comes directly to see the Gallery.

Furthermore, there are not as many young people or family groups as we would expect visiting the Gallery – reflecting a trend that visitors with children (particularly under 5) are apprehensive about attending galleries and museums. Equally, the fact that people above 60 do not appear to be visiting as much as we thought. The results encourage us to develop pointed programmes for people within these age groups.

In terms of how people use the space and our mediation of exhibitions (types of interpretation etc.), we have come to the conclusion that each exhibition needs a range of messages and channels of communication and interpretation – so that we are viewing each exhibition as having a diverse potential audience, with each segment having different needs.

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By James Kelly, May 31, 2010

Are you looking to build your audiences by connecting with primary schools? Perhaps you are from an organisation which already works with primary schools, but are looking to ways to improve how you engage with this audience?

Under Arts Audiences’ Build Your Audiences Scheme, The Ark and IMMA received free marketing consultancy to explore ways in which to improve their work in this area. Jeanine MacQuarrie has written a report on this, will be useful to you if you are looking to better engage with audiences in a primary school context.

To download this report, click on this link: Primary Schools Audience Development Project Report

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Mandscape, The Ark, A Cultural Centre for Children visual art programme
Photo credit: Paola Mezzaroma

This is the second report from Arts Audience’s Build Your Audience scheme. The first report, A Guide to Marketing Your Production on Tour, produced by Coisceim Dance Theatre with Heather Maitland, was published earlier this month.

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By James Kelly, May 18, 2010

Considering a new website? Want to optimise the outcome, and keep costs as low as possible? Two important words for you… ADVANCE PLANNING!

The more prepared you are in advance of talking with a web designer…

• the easier it will be for a web designer to give you an accurate quote;

• the easier it will be to decide which web designer can deliver on your requirements;

• the faster you will get through the process;

• and of course the cheaper it will be (if you approach a web designer with no preparation, you will need to develop the brief with the designer, which will cost more).

Temple Bar Gallery and Studios realise that a good website is a key element in engaging with audiences, and plan to redevelop their website. Under Arts Audiences’ New Media Mentoring Scheme, Aoife Flynn of asquared mentored Rayne Booth of TBG&S as she prepared a brief for the organisation’s new website.

Rayne’s report will be of great interest to anyone considering building a high quality website on a tight budget, and readers will no doubt find Aoife’s additional notes at the end of this report very informative.

If you are interested in discussing this work with Rayne and Aoife, there is a discussion started on the Arts Ireland group on LinkedIn – if you’re not already a member, it’s free to join (what’s this? find out more here).

to download a pdf of this report, click on this link: Developing a brief for a website

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REPORT OF RAYNE BOOTH

Basic requirements

It’s clear that now, more than ever, a website is an important tool in building a relationship with the public. Increasingly people are using the internet as a research tool rather than, or in addition to, visiting galleries, and as such it is possible that TBG&S has a section of it’s public that may rarely, if ever, actually come in to the building.

So it is important for us to be able to provide visitors to our site with relevant, up to date information as well as other features such as blogs, newsfeeds, etc. Furthermore, social networking developments such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as other facilities such as blogging, have become an efficient and cost effective way to keep connected with your core audience (as well as to engage with new audiences), and I felt it was important that our website should reflect these developments.

The current TBG&S website was designed in 2005. The format of the site means every time we wish to update content, we must employ a webmaster. This is more costly and time consuming than is necessary, and I felt that a system which would allow staff to manage content would make more sense for TBG&S. As well as problems with content management, was felt that the website’s design could be more dynamic and up to date.

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image courtesy of Temple Bar Gallery and Studios

The plan

In the first meeting with Aoife Flynn, I expanded upon my original proposal to the mentoring scheme, outlining the various other features that would be needed on the website. For example, an extensive archive section, a blog, a content management system, integrated to Facebook and twitter.

Aoife asked a variety of questions regarding TBG&S’s needs for the website and through these we established roughly what type of features we should think about including.

Aoife suggested that the website be linked in a simple manner to TBG&S accounts on Twitter and Facebook and, if budget was a concern, the site could be built on a wordpress.org template so that it could be easily updated by gallery staff.

Due to the fact that TBG&S are hoping to update our logo in future, Aoife suggested that the logo should not be included as an integral/central part of the design of the site, so that it could be easily replaced in the future should we decide on a redesign. As our current website does not have any analytical features built in, Aoife also suggested that we ensure that the new website is linked to Google analytics so that we can harness statistics regarding how frequently the site is accessed and by whom. Google Analytics is a free programme that can be added to any site via simple pasting of code.

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Preparing for the Brief – 4 stages

Aoife suggested several steps as to how I should go about writing a brief for a web designer:

• RESEARCH: Undertake a period of research, in which TBGS staff would each select a number of websites which we either liked or disliked, focusing on quality of design rather than quality of content.

• EVALUATION: Evaluate what elements on the current TBGS site work well and what additional elements may be required

• FIRST DRAFT: Once that internal research was completed I would then meet with Aoife to draft a brief which could subsequently be evaluated by TBGS management.

• FINAL DRAFT: Taking feedback from management on board, the brief would be finalised and Aoife would advise on how best to approach web designers.

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Research

To guide the internal research Aoife suggested that we focus on three factors:

• The look and feel of the website, ie, the colours, will it be contemporary or classical in style, will it be minimal or combine a lot of text and information on one page?

• When looking at other websites as a visitor, consider why they work, why they don’t work and use this to inform how we want our site to work for a visitor

• The back end. How will we use the website, what do we need in terms of archive, who will be able to update the website, how many users, what logos and links we need, how will the blog function and how many people will be updating it? How will we access statistical information, what is achievable within the budget, search engine optimisation

I began by asking TBG&S staff to each select 5-10 websites they liked or disliked. These did not necessarily have to be ‘arts’ websites. We then met internally and discussed the various elements of these websites that could work for TBG&S and which elements we were sure we did not want.

Example websites included;

The Irish Museum of Modern Art (http://www.imma.ie)
We found this site easy to navigate but a bit more ‘museumy’ in style than what we were looking for in our site. We like the Artist residency programme info which was well presented and clear with past, present and future artists – each have a page with image and info about their work

Smart Projectspace: http://www.smartprojectspace.net/
We really liked the use of a strong lead image on front page but would prefer a less complicated design.

Palais de Tokyo: http://www.palaisdetokyo.com
We liked simple the black on white text which dominates the design but felt it would be important for us to also include more images.

Whitechapel: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/
We really liked the format of large image on front page with minimal text, then going into another front page with more text and options.

Through looking at other websites we then established that we really wanted the look and feel of our website to;

• have a clean, simple feel,

• use strong images sourced through the TBG&S programme,

• and focus on images more so than text.

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image courtesy TBG&S

Evaluation

What we like about our current site is that it presents important information about the programme for the visitor on the first page. We like the immediacy of having an image on the front page as we feel that presenting artists work should be the most important aspect of the site.

In relation to our back end needs we then determined that some of the following should be included in the draft designers brief:

• The website should have an easy to use content management system so that staff can update the website themselves.
• Items like logos and images should be easily changeable by staff.
• The website should allow for multiple users to update.
• Website should have excellent search engine optimisation
• Some sections will be updated more regularly than others-eg, exhibitions and events will be updated regularly whereas studio artists will be updated with less frequency.
• Blog: This could be linked to a wordpress or similar blog page and not built in to the site as it is less costly
• Current Studio artists should be able to update their own pages, and only their individual page. They should be given a password for this.
• Current/upcoming events should automatically be archived by the system once the closing date has passed

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First Draft

During the staff meeting we discussed the layout of the website. How we would like pages to connect with each other. We decided that the front page of the website should have a large, striking image from the gallery programme, which would change every six weeks or so. Users would click on this image to access further options and to get into the website.

We identified three sections for the website; gallery, studios and Info. Both the gallery and studios sections would have an archive section where users can access information on past and future exhibitions, and current studio artists can update and maintain their own pages as a ‘mini website’. I drafted a diagram of how these three sections could link into each other and added details such as how many images we would expect per exhibition/artist.

I sent this draft document to Aoife and we arranged a second meeting to discuss and finalise the draft. At this meeting, we went into further details regarding how the website would function and Aoife suggested some changes to the structure of the brief to make it clear for the designer. This included giving more details on the exact needs of the back end (outlined above) and flagging which aspects of the design were set, and which were open to discussion. We also looked at some suggestions for web designers and discussed how TBG&S could make better use of our facebook page to promote our activities.

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image courtesy TBG&S

Final Draft

The final contact with Aoife was done through email. I emailed her the updated brief and she made some suggested changes to the language and layout. Following this, we confirmed a final brief that we were both happy with. At present we are experiencing some changes with regard to funding & budgetary structures at TBG&S, and I am now awaiting approval from the board to go ahead with the new website. I hope to begin speaking with web designers in the coming weeks. We now have the brief in place so that the process can begin quickly when funding becomes available.

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Learnings

The mentoring process was extremely helpful in providing me with the tools and language to be able to provide a web designer with a clear brief, and in doing this, save time and money for TBG&S. I now understand what information a designer needs in order to fulfill a brief. The process also helped us to establish exactly what we needed and wanted from the website, and to focus on what formats would work best for us. I now feel that I have a document that I can send to several designers and be confident that they will be able to understand our needs.

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Note from Aoife Flynn

There can be a lot of confusion around the costs of websites, which prices seeming to vary wildly for what appears to be the same “thing”- a functioning web site. Often this can arise from the perception within an organisation that they lack the specific knowledge around web design and thus plan to ask the web designer what they need.

This is a little like not knowing what you like to eat, and then expecting a chef to cook you something you will like. You don’t have to be a chef to know what flavours you enjoy, and if you do tell a chef the sorts of things you love to eat you will be sure they’ll cook a magnificent meal specifically to your taste. Web design is not so dissimilar.

As a user of the web you, and others within your organisation, know what you do and don’t like as a visitor to other websites. You know how you want your organisation to be perceived online, you know about your brand, and you know what information you want to prioritise for your visitor. If you can gather all this knowledge through internal conversations you will get a much clearer picture of what you want your site to feel like for other visitors.

So, now that you know what tastes you like, you are significantly more likely to get the website you actually want. By going through this process you’ve now determined the front end; i.e. the visitor experience of your site.

If you have a statistics programme on your site (it comes free with many webhost accounts) this is a good opportunity to check how visitors are using your current site- what pages are most popular, where are they spending the most time, how do they find your site? This information can inform the layout of your new site.

The next step is to discuss what you want the website to do for you internally- how often will it be updated, and by whom? Take into consideration time constraints and the tech ability of your staff. How many sections need to be updated? Do different people need different levels of access? Start with your ideal, you can always work back if the final budget doesn’t allow it. Once you lay this out you will have determined the back end.

This information, when gathered together into a design brief, will give any prospective designer the material they need to develop an accurate quote, and to determine whether they are the best fit for your project. The more accurate the quote from the beginning, the less likely it is to inflate during the process due to unforeseen design needs. Additionally, not all designers are the best fit, some will not be able to deliver what you need, and others will be too complex. A clear brief will allow them to opt to quote for your project.

A couple of other things to consider. There are a lot of free programmes available now, such as wordpress.org (which is different to the free wordpress.com blog platform), which incorporate a content management system. If your design needs are reasonably straightforward you can opt for a designer that knows how to manipulate these templates to suit your needs, which may provide a cheaper alternative.

Social media networks like facebook and twitter are prevalent now, but may not continue to be so popular in the future, think about where bebo and myspace are now. If your budget is limited it’s best to simply provide links from your homepage to your facebook page/twitter page rather than integrating it throughout the site. Similarly with blogs, I would suggest setting up a blog as a separate page or section on your site that is easy to remove if you find that you are not posting it regularly, or it is not working well for you.

Once you have your brief together you should gather a list of 4 or 5 designers whose work you like and send it to all of them, asking them to specify a quote and a timeline. If you have a fixed budget you can specify this, and determine what they can deliver for that amount, but if it is the first time you are tendering work in this area it might be more useful to leave the quotation open ended to give you a better idea of the range of prices in the market.

To gather a list it is useful to note that many websites will list their designer at the footer, or you can contact the company behind a website you like and they will give you contact details. Ideally you should shortlist the quotes to a list of three and then interview/meet these designers. It’s important that you can establish a personal relationship with the successful candidate, and that you feel confident they have understood your brand and your needs, and can work with you on the project to deliver the best site your budget will allow.

The final step in a redesign process is to install an analytical programme on your site (Google Analytics is very comprehensive and is free) so you can monitor how people are using your site. Are they accessing information the way you thought they would? What pages are most popular, how long are they spending on the site? How are the finding your site? If you monitor this on an ongoing basis you can adjust your site to better meet their needs.

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About Temple Bar Gallery and Studios

Temple Bar Gallery and Studios is a publicly funded visual arts organisation located in Dublin City Centre. TBG&S was established by artists in 1983 in response to the increasing demands for affordable studio spaces in Dublin city centre. In the mid-nineties a new gallery and studio complex was custom designed for the company by leading Irish architects McCullough / Mulvin and today the building that houses TBG&S integrates a gallery with on-street access, an atrium space and 30 artists’ studios. The use of these studios reflects the broad-ranging developments in contemporary practice as artists working with photography, video, sound, sculpture, print and painting all currently occupy spaces at TBG&S. The ground floor gallery space hosts a wide ranging programme of Irish and international art, including the work of both established and emerging artists working in a variety of media.

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By James Kelly, May 11, 2010

There’s no doubt about it, digital and social media hold great potential for those looking to increase the engagement with their audiences. For those with little experience of the area, the promise is great, and yet without significant experience in the area, it can be difficult to envisage what is involved in building momentum around a blog, or a social media campaign, using Facebook or Twitter.

Emmet Sheerin and Anne O’Gorman from NYCI entered this mentoring process looking for assistance with building an on-line community and social media network. However the very valuable lessons they learnt from the Lucy Campbell, Murne Laffan and the team in RTÉ Publishing was to first concentrate on getting the basics right, and as such Emmet and Anne’s report will provide very informative reading for those;

• considering starting a blog or social media campaign

• looking to optimise their overall presence.

If you are interested in discussing this work with those involved please visit the Arts Ireland group on LinkedIn – if you’re not already a member, it’s free to join (what’s this? find out more here).

to download a pdf of this report, click on this link:NYCI Mentoring Report

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REPORT OF EMMET SHEERIN & ANNE O’GORMAN

Original Plan

Our original aim, when applying for mentoring was to seek support around developing an on-line community and social media network.

As we saw it, this would enable NYCI to facilitate more organisations and practitioners in sharing practice and networking with others in the sector, regardless of geographical location.

Also a more effective presence on-line would also help us to promote specific aspects of our work programme, to highlight opportunities, and to further advocate for youth arts in Ireland.

As such, our specific goals were;

• to create an online discussion forum and blog to enable youth workers and youth arts practitioners to engage with each other, to share practice, and to access relevant youth arts news and resources.

• to exploit the potential of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, to engage with individuals and organisations in the youth / youth arts sector.

As we saw it, the objective of the mentorship would be to help us generate interest and participation around these applications and to develop a strategy for attracting and maintaining engagement with the on-line community.

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The first step – identifying our audience

Our initial meetings with Lucy centred on a critical reflection on our target audience, identifying their needs, and what information/ discussions we wanted to communicate and generate on-line, such as funding, training and supports etc.

This process of reflecting on our target audience and their needs was extremely valuable. Even though organisations engage with their audiences day in day out, it is really useful to make the time and space to step back and think critically about target audience.

We discussed what kind of information we are looking to share: this included networking and information exchange, and the facilitation of discussion around important topics affecting our audience.

In terms of finding new ways to connect with audiences, there was a useful discussion around identifying well known people who we could approach to be champions for youth arts, and who could use social media networks to advocate for the sector. These ‘champions’ would be well known figures who had been engaged in youth arts when they were younger – Aidan Gillen (former member of Dublin Youth Theatre), for example.

photograph by Emmet Sheerin, published courtesy of NYCI

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The way forward – a critical decision

On closer examination of our situation, we began to realise that creating an online community, consisting of a discussion forum and blog, might not be the best use of our resources at this current time. While the technical aspects of creating these applications is realisable (our content management system Drupal is capable of this), the main challenge lies in attracting and maintaining a critical level of engagement.

RTÉ Publishing have considerable experience in this area, and they felt that without a very large amount of traffic to our website, it would take a considerable amount of time and energy to build a discussion forum and blog of the scale which we had hoped. As it stands, NYCI’s youth arts site does have a relatively large amount of traffic given the size of the youth arts sector in Ireland. We would therefore have to invest a great deal of time into attracting a critical mass for the online community to be worthwhile.

We made the significant decision to change the focus of the mentoring, and that we would now focus on ways of attracting greater levels of visitors to the website. Achieving this would mean that we would be in a stronger position to develop the online community at a later stage.

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Social media network

In advance of making the above decision, we spent some time investigating the level of engagement other organisations in the youth/ arts sectors had with their social media networks. It was decided that our social media ambitions, for now, would be best served as part of the broader National Youth Council of Ireland’s social media strategy, and not as a separate, specific youth arts network. This would help maximise our potential audience and allow for greater integration with the other work areas in NYCI.

We did, however, decide to continue plans towards creating a YouTube channel, which we can use to show films made in the youth/ youth arts sector, and highlight best practice in this area.

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Focus on the Website

Before discussing any potential website developments, we took time to reflect on our programme of work, the resources and opportunities we offer the sector, and our strengths as a national organisation. Identifying the range of these “assets” helped us focus on what information and structure would make our website more engaging and attract more traffic.

Some of the key strengths we identified include:

• Optimum domain name (youtharts.ie), which features well in search engine results
• Wealth of publications, manuals and other resources produced by the programme
• Strong and exciting programme of work, which includes youth arts training, professional development opportunities, a funding scheme and an advocacy agenda.
• Wealth of images documented during youth arts trainings
• Professional networks and contacts
• Monthly e-bulletin (Youth Arts News) which has over 1200 subscribers

The main issues in respect of our website were:

- Design

Our website is too text heavy and does not capitalise on the wealth of images and visual documentation at our disposal.

- Applications

Currently, when we show images documenting our work (from trainings etc.) we use flickr to do this. While this is a nice feature to have on this website, it takes traffic away from the site when people click into the application. We should be trying to avoid this, by keeping people on our site.

- E-bulletin

Our e-bulletin Youth Arts News is a very important tool for us to communicate with the sector. We use an application called Mail Chimp to create and send the bulletin. This works fine, except for the fact that we are not drawing people back to our website. All the news is contained in the e-bulletin with no links to our site. [note from Arts Audiences: readers who are interested in the “the digital loop” may be interested in looking at the mentoring report of Marcella Bannon, Director of Droichead Arts Centre].

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photograph by Emmet Sheerin, published courtesy of NYCI

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5 Key Priorities

Out of this process, we came up with the following five main priorities/ practicalities for improving our online presence:

1.Integrated e-bulletin and website

In order to attract more traffic to our website, it is vital that we capitalise on the established success of our e-bulletin Youth Arts News. To do this, we have created a noticeboard section on our website for news. Instead of our e-bulletin containing every bit of information on each news item, it will only contain teasers. Subscribers to the bulletin click on the title for a news item and will be directed straight to the ‘full story’ on our website noticeboard. Not only will this greatly reduce the length of each monthly e-bulletin, it will ensure a greater level of traffic to our website. This new system was piloted on the 2nd April. See an example of our new newsletter by clicking here.

2. Explore the capabilities of our content management system (Drupal)
Instead of using external applications like flickr to display photographs from our programme of work, we need to explore the potential of our content management system to do this. This will help ensure that the traffic on our site remains there and isn’t directed elsewhere.

Having a self contained photo gallery will also enable us to display images of youth arts in action from around the country. We are now considering the possibility of having a ‘Year of Youth Arts’ gallery on our website.

3. Creating a more visually dynamic website
To help us come up with ideas for this, we met with Niamh Collins, Online Producer (RTÉ), and Micheal Lisovskiy, Platform Manager (RTÉ). The key advice was:

• We need a main feature for our homepage. We should ask ourselves, ‘what is a message we want to get across?’ ‘What’s our call to action?’

• We are using too much text to explain who we are and what we do. We should also use images and video to do this.

• Keeping the site updated with regular information is essential. Out-of date resources and articles shouldn’t be on the homepage.

• The text we are using on the site is too small. It makes it hard to read information and is not attractive.

• Need to pay attention to detail and fill the screen with images and applications.

• We should consider creating a campaign page on our site. Campaign should be understood in its broadest sense – a call to engage with our programme of work. It could also be an important tool for our advocacy work.

• Give visitors the opportunity to sign up to our e-bulletin on site.

4. Integrate website maintenance with daily work
Having dedicated time to update the website and manage its content is vital. The website is our calling card and is the first port of call for many people new to our programme of work. Maintaining the website only on an ad hoc basis will lead to the site appearing stagnant and out of date.

5. You Tube Channel
It’s relatively easy to set up a YouTube channel and the upload videos. We can even categorise the videos under different genres/ topics etc. A YouTube channel will keep the traffic away from our site unless we can direct people to it. We should therefore make sure that any video put on the YouTube channel has our web address at the end. We have to ensure that we have consent from groups/ individual’s whose videos are put on our channel. We can’t put up any videos that have copyrighted music.

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In Conclusion

Over the course of the mentoring, our plans changed from working towards developing an online community to a much more realistic plan for strengthening our online presence at its core. Developing and maintaining a strong website, and facilitating increased traffic is essential for any future ambitions to develop forums, blogs etc.

Underlying the mentorship process was a critical and realistic reflection on what we can currently achieve in terms of developing our on-line presence. Such critical reflection, we believe, has proved extremely valuable.

We have a more focused idea around what we practically need to do to develop our website. While the five priorities above are specific to our own plan of work and context, they are nonetheless relevant to other organisations – particularly organisations wishing to strengthen their website as a main calling card for clients.

An action plan was formulated with deliverable and realistic timelines to prioritise the website project. It is envisaged that phase 2 of the project will focus on the Socal Networking priorities including You Tube.

The National Youth Council of Ireland’s Arts Programme would like to thank RTÉ Publishing for their invaluable mentorship and time over the last three months. In particular we would like to thank Lucy Campbell, Muirne Laffan, Niamh Collins and Michael Lisovsky. We would also like to thank James Kelly (Arts Council) for this opportunity and for his support throughout the mentorship process.

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RTÉ Publishing manages five leading brands – RTÉ Guide, RTÉ Aertel, RTÉ.ie, RTÉ player and RTÉ News Now and has built significant multimedia hubs or “mega sites “around RTÉ’s core content areas of News, Sport and Entertainment. Working with RTÉ News, Sport, Television & Radio, RTÉ Publishing creates packages and distributes content on digital platforms to extend the reach of these properties in new markets.

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The National Youth Council of Ireland’s Arts Programme is a partnership approach for promoting and developing youth arts in Ireland. NYCI’s Arts Programme aims specifically to realise the potential of young people through good quality arts practice in the youth service and to develop appropriate policies and activities at local, regional and national level. NYCI’s Arts Programme is funded by the Arts Council and the Youth Affairs Unit of the OMCYA

Youth arts can broadly be defined as, ‘young people taking part voluntarily in creative, cultural or expressive activity outside of the formal education process. It can encompass participation and appreciation, as well as engagement with arts work specifically created by with or for young people’. Arts in Their Lives (NYCI’s Youth Arts Policy 2003-2007)

For more information on youth arts and the work of NYCI’s Arts Programme, please visit www.youtharts.ie