Kongsberg Jazz Festival nominated for national audience award
Who is the best at audience development? Norsk Publikumsutvikling has nominated 12 candidates for the national award.
By Carsten Øhrn, Buskerud County Municipality
Each year shares Norwegian audience development (NPU) awarded the NPU prize during the annual NPU conference.
NPU is a national network for sharing knowledge and best practice in the arts and culture sector.
Now they have nominated 12 candidates for the NPU award 2019
- Congratulations Kongsberg Jazz Festival!
- The jazz festival has worked systematically to reach its target groups - both the jazz environment and the more commercial market - and with very good results, so it is well deserved that they are among the 12 nominees, says cultural manager in Buskerud county municipality, Jon Endre Røed Olsen.
Røed Olsen says Kongsberg Jazz Festival is a major investment for the county council and a beacon for the festivals in the county.
The county politicians in Buskerud increased their investment in the Jazz Festival this year, so that they received NOK 2,5 million in support from the county council.
"The systematic and purposeful way they work with audience development should be an inspiration to others in the jazz field."
Norwegian audience development
The NPU prize was awarded for the first time in 2014. The aim was to understand which audience development initiatives, tools and practices have worked in the field, in order to share the experience with the rest of the industry.
This is what NPU writes about the Kongsberg Jazz Festival:
Kongsberg Jazz Festival works actively to be an inclusive festival and collaborates with a number of environments on social inclusion, within drug and mental health, among other things.
This nomination focuses primarily on whether they achieve their main strategic objective of "getting more people to appreciate and take an interest in jazz". They can show a 400 per cent increase from 9.000 tickets sold in 2012 to 38.000 in 2018 and are thus Norway's most visited jazz festival.
The winners are awarded at the NPU conference 2019 at USF Verftet in Bergen on 12 November.
