“Clear, to the point, sensitive to us all … targeting her presentation to the specific audience … we are visual, creative people so the exercise was spot on.”

Aim of the workshop

To give arts and design students of all disciplines a grounding in the contribution good communications should make to their career ambitions and to supply detailed, practical ‘how-to’s that will help you avoid common mistakes and instil confidence in you as communicators of your work. These lively seminars encourage you to approach how you communicate your work in a more professional, planned way and to integrate it into your overall workload. They help you understand press viewpoints and needs, and to maximise the chances of gaining a living from your art.

Who is it for?

For fine art, design, fashion, applied art, photography etc students and postgraduate students who are approaching your final year – as well as recent alumni newly established as practitioners.

Workshop outline

The workshop will enable you to:

• Understand the difference between press and marketing and such concepts as product and segmentation; and the stages in building an effective communications plan.
• Consider and identify the ‘unique selling points’ of your work.
• Identify the characteristics of your ‘target’ and understand the variety of ways the target audience will gather information before taking action.
• Understand press motivation, needs, timescales, technical image requirements etc.
• Prioritise your communications activities.
• Research the marketplace and readerships.
• Write press releases.
• Organise photo shoots, press visits, etc.
• Build up and maintain press relationships.

Workshop format

This is a full-day workshop with access to online resources afterwards. It can also run as a half –day or two, linked 2-hour seminars. The workshop is delivered through group work, exercises, Q&A and resources. It can also be commissioned as an online seminar, with group work replaced by individual exercises and the Q&A replaced by FAQs. An amount of direct tutor feedback could be offered as an optional extra.

Where next?

To delve deeper, try one of the related skills-based practical seminars (see online). You could also reinforce your skills by either a one-to-one surgery session or a limited number of one-to-one mentoring hours (by phone and email) to support you in putting the lessons learned into practice.