When designing a participatory online concert, we may wish to define our target audience. To this, an array of factors can be considered, such as: age group, gender, level of experience with music (and/or with a specific style of music), language, location, access to technology, a specific set of skills, experience in a specific area of knowledge, among others.
The definition of your target audience will work hand in hand with the strategies for recruitment. For example, a call for participants in English may, by itself, filter recruitment to primarily English speakers.
The place where the call or invitation will be placed could also be tailored according to the age group. For example, some social media platforms are more seen by one age group than by another. Also, posting calls for participants in places such as schools or cultural centres may, by itself, channel the recruitment to specific groups which may be distinguished by age, location, gender, areas of interest, or social background.
Additionally, the technology required to participate in the project can also be an element that will determine the group to be recruited. For example, in the music as an invitation project, the initial idea was to run the online workshops via the platform Zoom. However, one of the potential participants could only participate using her mobile phone since she did not have a computer, nor access to a wireless connection at home. Considering that it could become complicated for her to download a new software using her mobile data, I decided to do the workshops through Google Meet instead, which was a platform she had used before on her mobile phone and was more familiar with.
Naturally, these factors and others may be taken into account besides the content and visuals of the advert.
After the recruitment, a possible step is the selection of participants from among the ones who have responded to the call/invitation. The selection process can take place for a number of reasons, including: capacity, required skills / knowledge, confirmation of eligibility of the prospective participant according to the criteria of the project, among others.
Case study 1: music as an invitation (year 1: 2023-2024)
The project music as an invitation had a gender aspect in its proposal, therefore the call to participants was directed towards adult women (first year of the project) and girls ages 13-17 years old (second year of the project).
One of the first learnings in the recruitment process of this project’s first year was regarding the definition of gender. After sending out the first version of the poster with the call for participants, I have received the questions:
Are you including anyone identifying as a woman (i.e. also trans women) in your call for women participants? What about non-binary people?
Therefore, for this project, the call for participants was updated with the note: ‘all self-identified women are welcome’.
The posts were in English and Portuguese, which also framed the target audience.
The recruitment was done through posts on social media channels, which included my Instagram and Facebook pages, as well as my host University’s. The recruitment was also forwarded by other musicians and music promoters who were part of my network.
This decision ended up mostly attracting participants who were already in contact with my work. This factor incidentally created a group already inclined to engage in an intimate creative process, which was indeed a positive aspect for the proposal of the project.
The recruitment did not require a further selection process since it naturally ended up with 14 active participants - which was within the expected group size.
Case study 2: the piece Hecate writes & the concert rsvp: piano, toy piano, electronics, and actions
The recruitment of participants for the second year of the music as an invitation project focused on groups of teenage girls from Norway, Brazil, and the UK. The decision for such an age group was part of the agenda of the project regarding gender inequality and empowerment of voices traditionally neglected in the field of classical music. Since this project could have included some postings on social media, the specification of the minimum age, 13 years old, took into consideration the requirement for access to some of the most popular social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. On the other hand, the maximum age, 17 years old, tried to ensure that all the participants were approximately in the same phase of adolescence.
The language of the recruitment was English and Portuguese, which naturally filtered the call to participants who could speak either of these languages.
The recruitment was firstly made by sending emails to school and private piano teachers, as well as to NGOs and social programmes dedicated to the development of girls. In this process, different contact persons asked for different (and sometimes contradictory) adjustments to the invitation text, alongside additional materials such as:
- broader texts with more details about the activities involved in the project
- a more succinct text with just a general call
- a poster with attractive visuals and less text
- a poster with more textual information about the project
On one hand, these adjustments show the need for the tailoring of the recruitment to each context. On the other hand, it might have given a hint about the most appropriate strategy for each project, since the contacts who asked for more modifications in the call / invitation ended up not being very productive in attracting participants anyway.
In the meantime, calls were also posted on social media, which did not bring much results either.
For this phase of the music as an invitation project, the most effective recruitment came through contacts with friends and individual invitations to their teenage daughters. The adjustment of the recruitment strategy coincided with the change of method. Now, instead of developing a whole concert with the participants, it was decided to focus on the development of the music which had been commissioned for the project - Hecate writes, by Alwynne Pritchard. The delimitation of the locations was also amended, now including France as well.
In this process of inviting potential participants individually, I would firstly get in contact with the parents, explaining the project and asking if they would like to pass the invitation on to their daughters. After they had told the girls about the invitation, if the girls were interested, I would schedule a video call to tell them about the project and the activities in more detail, giving them a chance to have an informed decision about their participation in the project.
As for the live-streamed concert rsvp: piano, toy piano, electronics, and actions, besides advertisements to the general public, I got in contact with specific audience members, most of whom were musicians and artistic research practitioners. I explained to them the participatory activities which would take place during the concert. Having this informed group was indeed helpful in encouraging other audience members to engage with the participatory proposal. Among other actions, the participatory activities of the concert included walking around the room while playing a sound with their mobile phones, as part of one of the pieces in the programme.