Anthem – mapping survey, comms and youth research work

Living in Wales, and bringing up a daughter here, we have a particular interest in opportunities for young people in Wales. Anita has been writing about the challenges for music education in Wales for many years. So we were pleased to be contacted by Anthem, a new charity for young people’s music in Wales, launched by Welsh Government in 2018.

The organisation was looking for someone to help them with a number of communications-related activities, and appointed Anita, working intially with its temporary CEO Leonora Thomson, and then the current CEO Rhian Hutchings, to:

• carry out mapping of people and organisations working with young people through music in Wales: including researching and creating a database; creating a bilingual survey; interviewing a sample of respondents; writing a report and presenting the results to the board
• project-manage a youth consultation: this involved working with Youth Music and Anthem (both partners in the project) to devise the workshop, and shortlist partner organisations who would bring young people and would be representative of the diversity of young people and music-making in Wales; commissioning Youth Cymru to deliver it; finding and securing eight partner organisations; overseeing the change from face-to-face, to online workshop during the Covid-19 pandemic; overseeing the analysis and report-writing process.
• provide occasional communications advice and support – including copywriting for the news section of the website and for a fundraising document targeted to wealthy donors in the music industry
• work with the youth forum to create blogs and social media content to share Anthem’s stories and messages

The two pieces of research helped Anthem to devise its strategy and along with its subsequent youth forum and sector consultation work, to create its first grant-making process in partnership with Youth Music.