Chickenshed Theatre

Opening up audience access and outreach using our diversity audit and analysis

Chickenshed is a specialist theatre company and charity based in North London, with franchises nationwide.

Renowned for their inclusive approach to performance and community education, they came to us for an extensive diversity audit of their current equality policies, and guidance on inclusive strategy.

Inclusive Theatre at Chickenshed

Challenges

IC Analysis
Data analysis and action-planning
IC Challenge Benchmarking
Benchmarking/ business advantage

Our research and analysis used a customised version of our Diversity in Business Accreditation (DiBA) framework. Our methodology focused on five key areas:

  • Diversity Action Planning
  • Community, Partnership and Supplier Diversity
  • Organisational Leadership
  • People Management and Organisational Culture
  • Customer Communications and Satisfaction.

DiBA gave Chickenshed the diagnostic tools they needed to benchmark performance on diversity, and to showcase areas of good practice.

Throughout the audit we paid particular focus on issues around socio-economic barriers to access. We also looked into how Chickenshed could expand its outreach activities to welcome new communities (for example, people with hearing impairment).

Inclusive Theatre at Chickenshed Theatre 2

“Very skilled… thorough and business-like in their approach, but also engaging and human.”

The resulting audit included a full document review, benchmarking Chickenshed against other arts and culture organisations, plus interviews with representative samples of staff, students and young people, volunteers and other stakeholders.

Our final report presented analysis of current positioning and recommendations for future development.

"The EW staff were very skilled in understanding the nature of the organisation within a short amount of time. They were thorough and business-like in their approach, but also engaging and human. They gave us good insight not only into specifics but into more strategic possibilities. There is great respect given to achievements as well as attention to developments that are possible."Jelena Budimir, Associate Director at Chickenshed Theatre
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