Heather Maitland
Heather Maitland is a leading provider of services to help cultural organisations engage with their audiences, visitors and participants.
She offers three key services: consultancy, training and audience research.
She is the Research Associate at the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick.
Heather has an excellent understanding of the needs and practice of a wide variety of cultural organisations.
She has worked in arts marketing and audience development since 1983. She has marketed a wide range of arts organisations: from the smallest of touring theatre companies to running the London end of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s marketing operation. She has worked in both classical and contemporary dance. She supported audience and artform development in over 100 visual and performing arts organisations as head of two of England’s audience development agencies.
Heather’s current projects include profiling audiences for jazz, benchmarking audiences in the Republic of Ireland, supporting the team at Writers Centre Norwich and helping Rich Mix, London’s foremost centre for culturally diverse arts to write a marketing strategy.
Heather has a particular interest in developing models for marketing, audience development and research that can be easily understood and implemented by individual artists, community-led groups and small, under-resourced arts organisations. As a result, she has developed and delivered support packages for local authorities including South Kesteven District Council, Harlow District Council and the London Borough of Lambeth.
Heather has written eight books on arts marketing and audience development and was commissioning editor of Navigating difference: cultural diversity and audience development and co-author of Greater than the sum of its parts: a joined up guide to working in groups, both published by Arts Council England. Her Marketing Manual has been translated into Mandarin Chinese and is widely used across Taiwan, Malaysia and China as well as in the UK. She writes regular columns for the Journal of Arts Marketing and Arts Professional.
Heather has developed and delivered training courses for organisations such as:
CIDA: the cultural industries development agency for London
Theatre Forum: the industry body for the performing arts in Ireland
The Scottish Arts Council
The UK audience development agencies including Audiences North East, Audiences NI, Hi~arts and Arts About Manchester
She is Director of the Theatrical Management Association’s week long arts marketing courses in the Republic of Ireland and Scotland and has been involved in the original course in Wales as tutor and director for fifteen years.
Heather developed and regularly delivers the Arts Marketing Association’s most popular course, Do the Write Thing, a practical day-long copywriting seminar.
She is a regular speaker at conferences, talking about, for example
Public engagement for Arts Council England
Trends in marketing and audience development for Arts Council Wales
Effective use of box office data to develop audiences for tickets.com and Blackbaud