MS Alumni #2: Daniel Buckroyd
MediaSnackers Alumni
The MediaSnackers Alumni are a growing number of past clients that could just disappear into the ether if we didn’t catch up with them. We decided to hunt down and grill them to find out what difference their training had made in the way they work professionally and personally. This months thoughts and insights are from Daniel Buckroyd:
Who do you work for, what’s your role and what sort of things do you do?
I’m Chief Executive/Artistic Director of New Perspectives Theatre Company – an established ACE-funded small-scale touring theatre producer – core team of four plus actors and other artists joining us for each project.
My role naturally centres on the artistic content of the work we tour – I lead on commissioning new plays and assembling creative teams, plus I direct many of the productions. However, I’m also closely involved in thinking about how we communicate with our promoters/audiences etc and I enjoy using new media, SO most things to do with our website and wider use of the internet fall to me.
Its been a month or so since you have been drenched in the MediaSnackers ‘way’, what did you learn from the experience?
The two main things I gained from the course were (a) an introduction to the enormous range of social-networking & content management platforms out there, and (b) a new ‘fearlessness’ about simply diving in and seeing what each of them could offer New Perspectives – if in doubt CLICK!
How have other members of the team/organisation, that didn’t attend the course, received your new techniques?
The approach I’ve taken to involving colleagues is to wait until I’ve got to a point in my exploration of each platform when I’ve actually got something interesting/persuasive to show people and THEN lay it on them – first film on YouTUBE embedded in our website, first Flickr album, first BLOG etc.
Generally people have been pretty excited by the possibilities inherent in what we’re trying – supported by the evidence of increased website traffic – so I suspect that, although none of us are IT specialists, our transition to getting more internet-savvy in what we do will be fairly painless.
What has been the biggest and easiest change to make in the way you work?
Getting into the ‘habit’ of getting news onto the BLOG has been simple – in many ways easier than our old mechanism of saving up news stories to publish on a news section of our website – plus it’s much more fun now being able to incorporate video/images/sound etc into our ‘What’s New’ content.
Has there been any difficulty in implementing these new approaches?
All pretty smooth AFTER I started keeping a log of all my usernames and passwords – with so many platforms on the go it can get a bit confusing!
What future projects do you have planned which utilise social media?
We’ve currently got a writing competition running which will culminate in us publishing recordings of winning monologues on the internet and opening up an on-line discussion of the published work – lots of scope for us to use one/more of the new platforms MediaSnackers introduced.
Thank you for your time, Daniel Buckroyd.
February 17th, 2009
New Perspectives rock. I took my mother to see their ‘Titfield Tunderbolt’ at Countesthorpe College in Blaby circa 1998. It was fabulous.
It’s a shame that many people, especially 13-19, miss out on such high-quality touring products purely due to misperceptions of an arts experience, especially theatre. Also I guess, especially venues, are caught between two stools in terms of programming and marketing, wanting to acknowledge and reward the traditional demographic that keeps the theatre ecology ticking over, but also needing to target the potentially exciting young futre participant and audience member.
I firmly believe that social media offers (especially) the subsidised arts sector an opportunity to ‘capture’ the immediacy, excitement, emotion and impact of the arts. Simply by embedding pictures, film & sound, including UGC especially reviews, and being willing to put the time in to work smarter to create consistently good digital content.
It’s free, easy and doesn’t need a funding uplift to to achieve!
Conspiracy theory: how many organisations are scared of utilising social media in its true democratic and participative ethos because they don’t really want different audiences or the layman having a say in their work…