EJN Staff Exchange Programme

From: Sage Gateshead (UK)
To: LantarenVenster (Netherlands)
27 June - 06 July 2019

I’m Sam Patterson, the Marketing and Communications Manager for the Popular and Contemporary Programme at Sage Gateshead, an international music centre and renowned conference and event venue located in the North East of England. It is for artists, for audiences and for the North. 

Every year we welcome more than two million visitors. More than 400 concerts featuring all kinds of local, regional and international music, take place all year round. Music-making and learning activity takes place not only in the building but across the region, with 190,000 people of all ages taking part in over 10,000 music classes and workshops.  Visiting LantarenVenster was a fantastic opportunity to work with Frank, the music programmer, and Liesbeth, the marketing and communications manager and her team, to discover which tools and tactics they’re using to build audiences, deepen engagement with their jazz programme, develop their tone of voice and refine their marketing approaches.  

It was also a fantastic opportunity to attend InJazz and to meet other festival and venue marketeers in the city including Michelle, the Director of North Sea Round Town, Vinod from BIRD and Richard from WORM who all have different approaches to marketing and measuring success.  

I’ve come away from the experience with lots of ideas and suggestions about how we can change our approach to marketing for jazz, developing our tone of voice and creating our own unique content to speak to jazz (and wider genre) audiences directly and specifically. I’m also keen to look at our approach to all of our marketing tools to see what improvements can be made.  

It’s a comfort to know that, even in venues that seem very different, we all share similar challenges and approaches and we’ve now forged relationships which I hope will continue beyond the exchange programme in sharing creative ideas, best practise and, of course, jazz recommendations!