What do we know about our culturally diverse population?

Heather Maitland on Britain’s increasingly multicultural society

Hardish Virk, this issue’s guest editor, asked me to research the answers to three simple questions:
• How have the UK’s demographics changed?
• What will be the impact of recent immigration trends?
• What is the impact of recent immigration from Eastern Europe?


I wish the answers were as straightforward as the questions.

How have the UK’s demographics changed?

In the simplest terms, we need the answer to this question because we want to understand the communities our organisations serve so we can see how those communities are reflected in our audiences, visitors and participants…

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How to develop a culturally diverse audience

The recently published book on cultural diversity and audience development, Navigating Difference , lists well over 100 information resources relevant to arts organisations trying to develop culturally diverse audiences. Read them and you’ll come away with two clear messages. Firstly, ‘culturally diverse’ is a confusing term that can be used to mean both ‘ethnically diverse’ and its opposite, ‘culturally specific’ so many arts organisations don’t really know what they are trying to achieve by developing culturally diverse audiences. Secondly, every arts organisation needs to take a different approach to developing such audiences because their artistic work, internal culture, existing audiences, community contexts and overall goals are different. These two factors mean there can be no such thing as a simple ‘how to…’ guide. Nothing about cultural diversity is simple.

Multiculturalism is often described as ‘celebrating difference’. But social commentators suggest that it is no longer a useful concept. Several of the contributors to Navigating Difference point out that within multiculturalism people of ethnic minority origin are always defined by their ethnic origin and art by Black, Asian and Chinese artists is always contrasted with the ‘mainstream’. They suggest a new framework for programming and marketing based on transculturalism. This approach sees the arts as a space in which cultures can interact without being either obliterated or fixed and preserved. It means that programming and marketing can focus on the individuality that collective labels all too easily render invisible…

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How can marketers respond to cultural identity?

Many of us have targets for attracting visitors, audiences or participants from specific ethnic groups. But ethnicity is not a particularly useful basis for segmentation. Several pieces of research suggest that there are differences in the way different ethnic groups engage with the arts and museums but that other factors have an equally powerful influence. Among these are Telling it Like It Is: black and minority ethnic engagement with London’s museums (2004) in which Damian Tissier and Samir Singh Nathoo point out that, across all ethnic groups, managerial and professional groups are more than twice as likely to visit museums and galleries than other social groups and that 35 to 54 year olds are much more likely to visit than the over 75s and 16 to 24 year olds. Arts Council England’s report Focus on Cultural Diversity: attendance, participation and attitudes (2003) also identified a clear association between attending arts events and economic status and age regardless of respondents’ ethnic origin.

COI Communications, the Government’s communication agency, has published research that helps marketers unpick the complicated relationship between age, ethnicity and cultural identity. You can download Philly Desai, Karen Roberts and Christine Roberts’ summary report Dreaming the global future – identity, culture and the media in a multi-cultural age at www.coi.gov.uk…

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