When Edinburgh’s Collective Gallery  moved from Cockburn Street to Calton Hill in 2014, they had good reason to think that their move was going to be a positive step from the audience perspective. In fact, the move has transformed their audience profile, drawing in brand new audience segments and driving a vast increase in the overall visitor numbers.

We spoke with Collective’s Communications Producer, Jill Brown about her approach to change management and how the team has worked hard to engage fully with the full spectrum of visitors to their new home.

Collective had early indications that the new site would maintain, if not necessarily increase visitor numbers: as part of the 2010 Edinburgh International Art Festival, Collective hosted a temporary exhibition at the site – “Staged” by Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth – which attracted a significant number of visitors. The Collective team observed then that Calton Hill saw a good rate of footfall in all but the worst weather, and that many visitors made the gallery part of their hilltop visit.

Historically, Collective’s audience in Cockburn Street had a youthful profile and included a high proportion of people with specialist knowledge of visual arts –this reflected a high number of art school students, lecturers and visiting tutors. The gallery has maintained this audience, but since the move they have gained a significant proportion of first-time attenders, including a high incidence of international visitors.

Collective has been an active part of Culture Republic’s Edinburgh Visual Arts Benchmark project, which has been carrying out research on visual art audiences across five of the city’s galleries over a four-year period in order to increase understanding of visual arts audiences within individual organisations and the city as a whole. This allows individual organisations to compare their own performance against the city standard and gives context to any audience trends they experience.

During the 2013 – 14 benchmark survey period, Collective reported 85% first-time visitors, with more than 60% of the audience giving their reason for visiting as: ‘No particular purpose, happened to be visiting the area’. When asked how they learned about the exhibition over 70% reported: ‘I was just passing and came in’, highlighting a visitor profile that differed significantly from that of other galleries in the benchmark.

Through their relocation, Collective has not lost their core visitors but has gained an additional, much larger new audience of tourists. Sixty nine per cent of the gallery’s 2013-14 visitors came from outside Edinburgh, and 29% of that group from overseas – more than double the average proportion of international visitors reported across the benchmark as a whole. The benchmark reveals that Collective’s tourist audience has grown significantly year on year.

The team at Collective have worked really hard to maintain their core audience as well as to better engage with their new visitors, focusing on active invigilation – being really willing to engage with people about the site, about the building and about the work. The team also has put additional care and thought into interpretation in order to serve and support all of the gallery’s visitors. Extracts from the gallery’s comments book paint an illuminating picture of visitors’ experience:

“Weird, but interesting”
“Left me thinking”
“Bizarre, but in a good way”
“Nice surprise, I just stumbled across it”

Though the space has changed, the remit of the gallery and its programme has stayed the same – a contemporary visual arts organisation that delivers an exciting and ambitious programme of new exhibitions, commissions and projects. The team have a steadily growing e-newsletter mailing list which has stayed consistent from the old to the new space. To serve their new audiences, Collective has begun to produce new, quarterly printed guide. Half of these are distributed around the city, Glasgow and Dundee and the other half stay in the gallery and are used by visitors.

The move to Calton Hill is the first step in a larger project, further developments planned for the site include an additional gallery and permanent office space to occupy the City Observatory, which will finish in 2016. Collective is currently housed in the City Dome and in temporary accommodation for the Satellites Programme.

Looking to the future, Collective is actively fundraising for the next phase of the Observatory building’s development. The next phase of audience engagement work will incorporate a greater number of tours and talks as well as an increased formal creative learning programme in partnership with City of Edinburgh schools.