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Founded in 2011, Music@Malling brings world class musicians to historic venues in and around West Malling, Kent through concerts and year-round outreach. Nationally recognised for groundbreaking programming, Music@Malling places contemporary music at its heart, including a nine-day annual festival each September. Every year we engage hundreds of people of all ages and backgrounds, particularly in areas of rural and urban deprivation, improving wellbeing, inspiring creativity and strengthening communities. In 2025, we hosted 13 world premieres and two European premieres, reaching audiences of over 3,500. Plus, our project The Enchanted Garden, featuring art by Ana Maria Pacheco and music by Zoë Martlew, was seen by 13,600 people at Ightham Mote last year.
Our plan is to strengthen Music@Malling’s digital presence to reach new audiences and retain recent attendees, while remaining visible year-round to funders, press and music industry professionals. We’re especially interested in boosting our digital presence between festivals so we can convert engagement into attendance. For example, just 10-20 more additional audience members per event would make a real difference.
We’re also fundraising to produce regular short‑form digital content that gives context to our work. These could be insights into performances, interviews with composers, performers, audiences and outreach participants, and features that celebrate the local area’s cultural heritage. This content will help showcase contemporary music, which sits at the heart of our programming, and extend our reach beyond live events.
We first engaged with the Digital Culture Network in 2020 in response to the Covid‑19 pandemic, which highlighted the importance of having strong digital infrastructure and improving how we connect with people online.
Our website is central to how we communicate with audiences, funders and potential supporters, so we sought some support with turning it into a hub for all our activity and information. Originally designed in 2015, we knew we needed some professional advice to keep it current, accessible, effective and generally in-keeping with a wider digital strategy. We also needed some support with updating our audience questionnaire to collect and use data more efficiently, alongside developing regular newsletters via Mailchimp to grow and better understand our audience database. Overall, we wanted to take a more data-driven approach across our website, social media and ticketing.
Andy Leitch, Tech Champion for Websites, supported us with a detailed website audit focused on audience journeys, accessibility and SEO. While limited funding meant we couldn’t implement every recommendation immediately, we have since commissioned our developers to redesign the site’s back end and several key pages in direct response to the audit. For example, we’ve just developed our homepage to work more flexibly, so we can simply reposition elements of the page and curate content that is relevant to our programming.
We also worked with Jack Roscoe, Audience Data Collection and Evaluation Tech Champion, to modernise our audience questionnaire process. Previously, we received lots of completed paper questionnaires, but because they were anonymous and distributed at every event, we could not identify unique respondents or gather reliable insight. By moving to a digital Mailchimp questionnaire, promoted through QR codes and follow-up emails, we collected 90 responses in 2024 and 94 in 2025. These responses represent individual audience members and have significantly improved the quality and usefulness of our audience insight – far exceeding our expectations!
We’ve also worked with the Digital Culture Network’s Tech Champions to build our digital skills in areas like streaming, ticketing and social media. They helped us realise that improving our in‑house video skills is a great opportunity to keep existing audiences engaged and attract new ones, by sharing richer stories and context behind our work.
Since 2020, Music@Malling has learned a great deal about the importance of online tools and tech. Like many cultural organisations, the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the need for change and new ways of working. Our digital platforms are now so much more than an optional add-on for us – it’s a core part of how we communicate, gather insight and extend our audience reach.
Support from the Digital Culture Network has been hugely beneficial in helping us move all our audience feedback online. This has resulted in significantly higher response rates and more meaningful data, informing future strategy, planning and reporting to current and potential funders, as well as capturing powerful audience quotes.
The Digital Culture Network’s website audit was also extremely helpful and provided us with expert guidance we would not otherwise have access to as a small organisation without in‑house digital specialists or consultancy budgets. Looking ahead, we want to use digital to widen access for audiences who cannot attend in person and to build a lasting digital legacy. We believe that properly recording and documenting Music@Malling’s work – particularly world premieres – is essential to preserving its cultural significance and extending its impact far beyond live performance.
Go for it! We cannot emphasise enough how much help the Digital Culture Network has been for Music@Malling. As a small organisation led by busy professional musicians, we needed clear, practical guidance to understand our digital needs and build confidence in using – and embracing – technology effectively.
The Digital Culture Network were helpful and responsive, tailoring their expertise to our circumstances, and the impact of that support has been significant:
Thanks to the Digital Culture Network, we now have a much better picture of the role digital can play in our audience engagement – which is a huge shift from where we were in 2020.
Maybe the Digital Culture Network can help! Our digital experts can provide free one-to-one support to all creative and cultural individuals and organisations who are in receipt of, or eligible for, Arts Council England funding. If you need help with a specific issue or would just like to chat about your digital ambitions, please get in touch.
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