Setting up a group

About the event:

Running your group is a rewarding but challenging role. Our regular meetups are a chance for you to meet and share learning and ideas with other Wales groups facing similar challenges, explore specific issues affecting leisure-time music making in Wales and consider how we can work collaboratively to find solutions and advocate for the sector. 

Miranda Glen, Wales manager, will be leading this session.

In this meetup we'll:

About the event:

Running your group is a rewarding but challenging role. Our regular meetups are a chance for you to meet and share learning and ideas with other Scotland groups facing similar challenges, explore specific issues affecting leisure-time music making in Scotland and consider how we can work collaboratively to find solutions and advocate for the sector. 

Alison Reeves, Scotland manager, will be leading this session.

In this meetup we'll:

Often we think of income ‘only’ in terms of funding, subscriptions or ticket sales. There definitely is a lot to delve into on those three topics, but is there more we could be exploring? Are we thinking about the whole financial picture?

70% of Making Music performing groups and 58% of volunteer promoters break even every year; but 15% and 23% respectively regularly make a loss. So finances are always a topic groups are thinking about, to maintain that balancing act of breaking even, yet remaining accessible to participants and audiences in their community.

The first of our marketing events in 2025 will discuss how social media has become a key component in many organisation’s marketing strategy. But how does it differ from ‘traditional’ marketing, what should you use it for, and how can you manage your time when there are so many different platforms available? 

In this session, we’ll look at how a social media strategy can help you define your goals in line with your overall marketing plans, manage your time more effectively, and create content to target the people you most want to engage. 

Are you fed up with how much time and effort it takes to organise your music group? Do you end up inputting the same data into numerous spreadsheets, calendars and documents just to keep your group running? Do you wish you had more time to dedicate to the music? 

Your Making music membership offers a wealth of benefits. They are designed to support you running your music group, to save time, effort and money, as well as offer ideas and inspiration.

But are you making the most of your membership? In this event we will explain what you have access to - and how we can help.

We'll talk about some of the main benefits:

To fully include everyone in our music activities, we need to understand the barriers that stop people from attending, taking part or progressing. In the Conversation about inclusion series of events, hear about the issues from the perspective of those who directly experience barriers and discuss what we can do to change things from within our own music groups.

If you’d like your group and your audience to be more diverse and inclusive, thinking about how you recruit and welcome people is crucial. And if you want to increase your membership and your audiences, recruiting and welcoming new people in a way that is inclusive means you’ve more chance of success. Whatever your driver, there are actions you can take that will remove the barriers to joining your activity and provide access to more people.