Step 1 - Targeting your audience
In any business whenever a new product or service is created the project team will have to ask the question - 'who do they want to buy or use the product or service?'
It is important that your Family Learning Festival event is treated in the same way. It is a service that you want to offer to particular members of the public and your whole plan for the Week revolves around who you are targeting.
For example, you may decide to target:
- Dads and lads;
- families from a particular ethnic background;
- families who live in a particular area; or
- grandparents and the wider family.
There are a range of different documents and websites that can help you to make this decision. You need to find out more about the people who live in your local area: what qualification levels do they have; what are the age ranges of children and adults; look at the unemployment levels. These will help you to get an overall picture of who they are.
This information can be collected through the following sites:
- The National Statistics website can give you information on demographics (eg age, gender, qualification level) as well as showing if how deprived an area is.
- Your local Learning and Skills Council has a Strategic Plan full of useful information, especially around education and qualifications. Once you have clicked onto their site go to 'Local view' where you will see a list of all of the local areas. Go to 'Information bank' where you should be able to download the strategic plan.
- Find out if your area is a Neighbourhood Renewal area (and therefore one of the deprived areas). Once on the site go to 'Site A-Z' and then choose 'About the 88 areas'.
- Twenty percent of the country's most deprived wards now have Sure Start programmes. If you are considering working with partners and would like to find out more about Sure Start go to their website.
Using this information you should be able to see how you could widen participation and therefore who to target. Now you need to think a little more about this group by finding out what interests them, what they do on a weekend, and where they are likely to go. This will inform the rest of your plan starting with:
Themes and activities
For more information, download your planning guide.
