Our History
“AAM has always been in the vanguard of new audience development and marketing practice and has undoubtedly led the field in many areas.”
Susies Hargreaves, formerly Director of Audiences Yorkshire.
Arts About Manchester’s origins can be traced back to 1977 when arts marketing was in its infancy.
Set up as a consortium of organisations, the mission was ‘to serve the members and the public at large by increasing audiences and attendances at arts events in the Manchester area, by encouraging cross-fertilisation of audiences between venues and artforms’.
AAM was formally incorporated as a business in 1989.
Some 18 years after the certificate of incorporation was signed, we remain dedicated to working with our members and partners to develop audiences for professional arts events in Greater Manchester.
Whilst our primary focus has stayed the same, the company itself has undergone many changes in that time period.
AAM started life delivering often pioneering collaborative arts marketing activity and went on to make significant changes to the cultural face of Greater Manchester.
For example, it was AAM who bid for, won and marketed City of Drama 1994 for Manchester; invested at an early stage in computers, (at a time when no-one thought they would catch on) in order to offer members the new technology of email and computerised market research; and devised major campaigns such as Family Friendly and Test Drive the Arts which were later taken up by arts organisations and other agencies all round the country.
Today we continue to innovate and deliver activity of national significance in the areas of research, audience development, community engagement and new media.