The Challenge
Glasgow Life sits at the heart of the city’s civic fabric. It runs museums, libraries, sports centres, music venues, learning programmes, community services and major events often quietly, often brilliantly, and usually without the public realising these services belong to a single charity.
That lack of visibility was mirrored internally. Each service understood “the audience” differently, drawing on its own habits, its own data, and its own pressures. Museums talked one language, libraries another, sport another still. Glasgow’s audiences wonderfully diverse, highly value-sensitive, often time-poor and navigating real inequalities experienced the organisation in pieces, not as a whole.
Glasgow Life is on a journey to behave more like a unified charity, deepen relevance and encourage people to move confidently between services, it needed a shared, evidence-based understanding of who it existed for and what audiences actually needed.
What We Did
We built a charity-wide audience development strategy anchored in Culture Segments shifting Glasgow Life away from surface-level demographics and towards the motivations, barriers and behaviours that genuinely drive engagement across the city.
The work blended rigorous analysis with deliberate co-creation:
- A major programme of staff workshops that brought together colleagues who rarely sit in the same room
- Deep qualitative research exploring what “culture”, “community” and “wellbeing” mean in different parts of Glasgow
- Large-scale consultation with residents across the city, capturing attitudes shaped by cost-of-living pressures, local pride, social connection and the desire for places that feel welcoming and relevant
- Live synthesis with senior leaders to build a shared definition of priority audiences and what success should look like across services
A strategy built with Glasgow Life, co-created, based on real audience insight.
The Impact
The organisation now has, for the first time:
- A single, coherent audience framework used across museums, libraries, sport, learning and events
- A shared understanding of priority segments and their needs, motivations and barriers
- A practical, evidence-based strategy that aligns audience priorities with Glasgow Life’s broader strategic aims and charitable purpose
- Early pilots demonstrating how cross-service thinking can deliver deeper engagement and support the organisation’s long-term sustainability
“Working with MHM never felt abstract. They pushed us to make choices, kept us honest, and helped turn all the insight into something our teams can actually use. We’ve had strategies before, but this is the first one people are picking up and working with.”
Moira McCall, Audience Engagement Lead, Glasgow Life
Perhaps most importantly, the work has given Glasgow Life a common language.
Teams that once saw themselves as part of disconnected systems now see how their work fits into a bigger civic mission one charity, serving one city.
“Having an audience segmentation and strategy has given us a shared language and new confidence to generate bold, creative ideas to connect with our communities.”
Senior Leader, Glasgow Life
If your organisation needs to join up, get clearer, and become audience-focused, we can help.
Glasgow Life’s journey is not unusual. Many organisations sit on brilliant assets, talented teams and deep civic purpose but struggle with fragmentation, conflicting definitions of “the audience”, and strategies that never quite make it off the page.
If you’re ready to build a shared audience framework, align your teams, and turn insight into action, we’d love to talk.
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