Setting up a group

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. 

Creating an event or activity that is accessible, welcoming and inclusive of everyone starts with one big question: what are the barriers that would exclude someone from taking part? People who experience barriers to making and enjoying music are more likely to be disabled, from an ethnic minority, have a mental or physical health condition or be in challenging socio-economic circumstances. How can you identify the barriers that exclude people from taking part in your group's events and activities, or stop people being included when they experience a change of circumstance?

Many groups have told us that they want to be able to recruit more members, and in particular, to engage better with younger people. Thanks to a legacy left to us by Pauline Thompson, we’ve been able to develop a bank of ideas that can help!

Come along and find out more about the research we’ve done, how you can use it to help your group reach more people of all ages, and how you can still engage with new people even with social distancing guidelines in place.