User Guide

Are you ready to play around with Crowdbuilder and organise a session with your team? You will find everything you need to know on this page, alongside a few tips from the team. Have fun and enjoy Crowdbuilder!

Before the session

Bring colleagues together

Invite at least one colleague to run Crowdbuilder with you. When possible, invite people with different jobs and experiences, as each perspective can strengthen the discussion.
The whole team does not need to be present. A small group can complete the exercise and then share the result with other colleagues, inviting them to react, question or add to it.

Book the time & choose format

Audience development matters, but it rarely feels as urgent as day-to-day operational issues. Deliberately set aside time to work on your strategy. Otherwise, urgent tasks can take over, leaving less room to make deliberate choices, shape your direction and enjoy the work.

Set aside a dedicated time for playing with Crowdbuilder, either online or in real life. You can complete the process in one sitting, or divide into shorter sessions. You can either use Crowdbuilder during a team seminar, devote 2 weekly team meetings to this, or find several short moments to do
it, one step at a time.

  • A 2 hour session will allow you to complete the process in one go
  • Two one-hour sessions: complete steps 0 to 3, followed by steps 4 to 6
  • Several 20-minute sessions: complete one step at a time

Before the session, agree on how many steps you want to complete and when you will continue if needed.

Appoint a Game Master

Choose one person to facilitate the session. They do not need previous experience in audience development, or in meeting management. Their role is to:

  • Read and clarify the questions
  • Identify any participation or accessibility needs
  • Give everyone space to contribute
  • Summarise the discussions into a short answer
  • Keep the conversation focused
  • Prevent one question from taking too much time (we’re not looking for perfection here)
  • Introduce the session and explain that the group will focus on one audience and look for workable answers rather than perfect agreement.

Are you a Game Master that needs help in preparting your next session? Make sure to use the checklist below.

Game Master Checklist

During the session

Let go of perfection

Do not let imperfect answers or an imperfectly organised session prevent you from moving forward. The aim is not to get everything right from the start, but to reach something clear and workable enough to test, learn from and improve.

Launch Crowdbuilder on the website

Launch the tool on the website, start a new session and follow the steps together. Make sure one person can open the online tool, that everyone can see the questions and that someone is responsible for entering the answers.

Keep the discussion moving

Do not spend too long trying to resolve every disagreement or perfect every answer. The Game Master should summarise what has been said, check whether the group has enough common ground to continue, and move to the next step. When a question needs more information, note it and agree on what should be checked after the session.

Think small enough to test

Turn broad ambitions into an experiment that is small enough to try. It should feel safe enough for the team to undertake, while remaining meaningful, engaging and capable of producing useful learning. A first experiment does not need a large budget or a complete change of programme.

After the session

Agree on the first action

Finish the session by agreeing on a first practical step. Agree and take notes on:

  • What will we do?
  • Who will lead this action?
  • Who needs to be involved?
  • When will it take place?

What will we observe and when will we review it?The objective is not simply to produce a strategy, but to use it, learn from it and decide what should happen next.

Use our “From Strategy to Action” sheet to help you in this process.

From Strategy To Action

Test your assumptions with your audience

The Crowdbuilder method will drive you to make assumptions. Test your assumptions, speak with people of the selected group, informal representatives or organisations already connected with them. Use these conversations to verify, challenge and refine the team’s assumptions before
investing time or resources.

An unexpected response is not a failure. It may show that the audience, concept, setting or partnerships need to change.

Review what you learned

After testing the idea, bring the team together to review what happened. Compare the result with your initial assumptions, identify what worked, what did not and what remains unclear, then decide whether to continue, adapt or stop the experiment. Unexpected results are useful when they help you make better decisions for the next step.

Do you have question?

Browse our Frequently Asked Questions section: the answer might be there! If you can’t find it, feel free to contact us, we will be happy to answer!

Our team cannot agree on one audience

Choose one group for the first experiment, based on your experience, existing connections and what your organisation can realistically do. This choice is not permanent and does not exclude other audiences. Keep a record of the other suggestions and return to them in future Crowdbuilder sessions.

Our audience is still too broad

Categories such as “young people” or “people interested in culture” are too broad to guide concrete decisions. Refine the group by adding a shared location, situation, interest, practice, need or barrier.

The audience does not need to be defined perfectly, but it should be specific enough for you to imagine who they are, where to find them and what questions to ask.

We do not know what this audience wants

Crowdbuilder invites you to make assumptions about the selected audience, but these assumptions should not be treated as facts. Use them as a starting point, then speak with people from the group, informal representatives or organisations already connected with them to check, challenge and refine your ideas. Be ready to adapt the concept according to what you learn.

We have a very limited budget

Treat audience development as an experiment rather than a large investment. Reduce the scale of the idea, involve relevant partners and test your main assumptions before committing more time or money. A small experiment can still be useful, including when it does not produce the expected result, as long as you are clear about what you want to learn.

We already have an event idea

The event idea normally comes at Step 4. If you start Crowdbuilder with an event concept already in mind, return to the earlier steps and check whether it responds to an identified audience need, rather than selecting an audience afterwards to justify it. If it does not, adapt the concept, reconsider the setting or set the idea aside and develop a more relevant experiment.

Some colleagues are resistant to the process

Do not treat resistance as something to suppress: it often shows that colleagues are protecting an artistic identity, a responsibility or an established way of working. Present Crowdbuilder as a limited experiment for one audience group, rather than as a permanent change to the organisation. Ask
what concerns them and whether the proposed experiment can be made smaller or safer while remaining meaningful.

We do not want to lose our artistic identity

Return to Step 0 and clarify what defines your artistic identity. It may be a particular genre, but it could also be a commitment to discovery, artistic risk, cultural exchange or community participation. When developing the event concept in Step 4, you can preserve the artistic programme while
adapting the context around it, such as the time, location, format, audience behaviour, food or additional activities: you do not need to reinvent your organisation.

Our organisation has several departments or managers

Do not try to involve or transform the whole organisation at once. Crowdbuilder is not designed to resolve internal conflicts or wider management and communication problems. One department or a small group of interested colleagues can run a clearly defined session, then share the strategy and lessons with the wider organisation and invite feedback or further involvement.

Our team usually works through instinct and informal discussions

Crowdbuilder is not meant to replace professional experience, intuition or spontaneous ways of working. Use it as a temporary structure to make your assumptions and different perspectives visible, for one audience and one experiment. Try the method once, then decide together which
parts were useful and how they could fit your usual way of working.

Ready to grow your crowd and rethink your audience strategy?

Jump into Crowdbuilder and start exploring the tool with your team — it’s fun, easy, and made for you!

Start to work