The first part of the project was to seek investment to commission specialist survey services to provide independent advice and focus on engaging the sectors of the community that we identified as not being regular users of our facilities.
This included different groups of younger people, working families and some businesses, though we also engaged in detailed discussions with key stakeholders in Duns & District to identify opportunities for greater collaboration.
The second part of the project was to share this information and to do so as part of a weekend festival of events (Duns Weekender), including food, beer and music, and to encourage community participation in new and novel ways.
The initial work was very successful, and the assessors we employed, Allanbank Arts, brought in additional users and ways of reaching non-traditional audiences, and hosted individual and group sessions that encouraged real feedback, all of which provided some robust learning points. We considered: the extent to which the primary stakeholders are content with the service and events at the volunteer hall; how the Volunteer Hall might improve their offering to better serve the population of Duns and District; and how the Volunteer Hall might develop their audience in line with our strategic planning aims.
We prepared a summary of findings in an ask-the-audience report, and made it available to key stakeholders, and have now acted on many of the findings from the report.
The culmination of our efforts, where we introduced the report on a selective basis, was the food and beer festival held over a weekend from 13-15 September 2024, where we hosted 16 bands, some of whom were new to performing and most of which were new to working with professional technicians. We had an audience of more than 250 people over the three days, we had 6 food providers, one outside brewery, and lots of local participation.
Having a culmination date was helpful in that it was a new approach for a Friday to Sunday Food & Beer Festival in September, incorporating a festival of music and entertainment that reflects some early feedback and the effort we’ve made in attracting new audiences, and was very much a case of showing our community that we listened to what they wanted and delivered it.
While it was also a way of providing a celebration of our community engagements, and offered as a thank you to those who have taken part, at its core it provided us with new data and new volunteers to help us deliver impact into future years, and also confirmed an appetite for such festivals to the extent that we were asked to keep doing it in successive years.
The Weekender festival and the report both confirmed the audience expectation weas for us to do more and be bold in what we did, and confirmed our aim to establish an improvement path that will provide benefit for our community, informed from engagement about their current experiences of surveys and polls, and what communication methods they would like to see in future.
