Growing your group and audiences

Our research into engaging under 35 year olds in music groups pointed to a need for better outreach and publicity. Young people might not be specifically looking for a group to join, or might not be aware of groups in their area. So instead of waiting for them to find you, go to where they are! But where might they be? Here are a few ideas to get you started.

1. Go to local businesses and offices

Most offices will have a fair number of under 35s amongst their staff. Try the following:

At the risk of making you click away from this page in horror, we do need to start by citing that old cliché about a picture being worth a thousand words! No amount of cheerful prose will convince visitors to your group’s website that you are a joyful and inspiring group if they are confronted with a gloomy portrait.

In this guidance, reprinted from the Spring 2017 issue of Highnotes, Jen Farrant looks at how you can make sure your group is open to people with physical disabilities.

Many of our member groups are ‘mixed ability’, which means that people of any standard can join in – from complete beginners to advanced musicians. The challenge for these groups is how they keep things interesting enough for more advanced players, but at the same time don’t leave beginners feeling all at sea.

A good press release should be able to condense all the important information into one page of A4 in size 11 font. We've put together this template to help you get started alongside our top tips guidance.

Download the template

Online events listings can be a good way to way to reach new and bigger audiences, but you have to be willing to put in time, work, patience and a bit of creativity.

There are many options out there, and we'll outline the main types below. Also, before you venture deep into the web, did you know that you can list your events on the Making Music website?

Listings sites

In part 2 of this guidance on email marketing we'll cover what to include in your email, how to make a great subject line and how to measure success.

Part 1: Getting started and building a list | Part 2: Building a great email

In an era with more and more options available for communicating with your audiences, email remains one of the most effective - 99% of adults check their email at least once per day, and promotion via email is reckoned to be 40 times more effective than social media.

Many music groups choose to assess potential members in a variety of different ways – from a simple voice test, to a trial period or a full blown audition. The benefit of these approaches is that by ensuring certain levels of ability are reached, your group can aspire to a performance of a higher standard, and this in turn presents a challenging and rewarding experience for your members.

In the final part of our three-part guide on creating a website, we'll cover ways to increase the visibility of your website to bring in more visitors; something worth thinking about before you start to build your site, as well as when you're looking to make ongoing improvements to it in the future.

We'll start by looking at how to make sure your pages are appealing to search engines, move on to using social media and inbound links, then cover how you can apply for free advertising from Google and finally look at ways to monitor your progress.