Hoipolloi strides towards an increasingly creative and flexible future

Hoipolloi and Hugh Hughes have taken a bold step toward new creative challenges and a more flexible model of operation in a bid to help Hugh Hughes, and his stories, reach a wider audience than ever before.

Hugh Hughes has been delighting audiences since 2005. He's made five stage shows with a number of his friends and members of his family, and all of that has been possible through the support of Hoipolloi as producer, Arts Council England funds and the generosity of commissioning and presenting partners across the world.

Over the course of Hugh's nine year journey, starting out as an emerging artist right through to deciding he simply wanted to be a member of the world, Hugh has made work for stage, for radio, and digitally as video, audio, text and image. The radio adaptation of Floating won the Best Scripted Comedy BBC Audio Drama Award in 2011.

In the summer of 2013, working with National Theatre Wales, Hugh made the bold step of returning home to Anglesey to make his fifth show. Things I Forgot I Remembered exploded from the stage into nooks and crannies of Llangefni through a story walk, across libraries in a series of storyboxes, onto the pages of a specially printed newspaper, into the Dingle woods for a twilight gig and on to the high street in a specially created story shop. It was a remarkable occasion, and a fitting way to complete the circle of Hugh's achievements on stage.

Shortly after returning to Cambridge, Hoipolloi knew that it would have to make some choices about Hugh and his creative future with the company, with application dates looming for further revenue funding from its primary supporter Arts Council England. It was clear that Hugh's appetite for making work was rooted in exploring how art can make a difference to the world, and that Hugh wanted to connect with the most people possible to share stories, trigger imaginations and encourage connections. We decided to support Hugh to explore how he might work with a broader range of people, in different kinds of media. To do that, we knew that public subsidy might play a part in the business model for the company, but that we needed to increase the amount of freedom we had to explore other opportunities. So, we decided not to apply to remain in Arts Council England's National Portfolio of arts organisations.

With the support of Arts Council England, we are now working through the transition from regularly funded organisation, with an especial focus on providing Hugh the time and space he needs to develop his skills and form relationships with new producing partners.

In the meantime, whilst he's not connecting with people in arts centres and theatres across the world, Hugh is exploring what it means to connect online in a 100 day internet safari. He's sharing stories through facebook, twitter, instagram and vine, and for those who want to see everything, he's also sending a daily email. Sign up for your daily dose of Hugh and make sure you're following on your platform of choice.

Click here to sign up for your daily email: http://bit.ly/HHDailyDose

Beware of noise

In 2012, Hoipolloi and Hugh Hughes launched a new digital space – www.invisibletownstories.co.uk – that shared a multitude of stories, created by Hugh, his brother Derwyn and sister Delyth and a cast of friends. This digital collection of stories twinned a performance called Stories from an Invisible Town that toured the UK in the Autumn of 2012.

The digital space had two express intentions. Firstly, it was designed as an artistic space: it wasn't built to market the show, but to express ideas; it wasn't designed to provide information, but to provide an artistic experience. Secondly, the space was designed to adapt, to develop iteratively, in response to what we found out when people used it.

We originally had a timeframe in mind for the fifth iteration of the site (the soft launch was the fourth iteration), but when we raised this with the developer we'd worked with, and after interrogating data provided through analytics, we received a warning: beware of noise. The feeling was that there simply hadn't been enough visitors to make any useful decisions about how to develop the site, and part of being responsive is actually taking heed of the data available. So we waited. It took just over a year for as many people to visit the site as had been to see the show on tour (a tour that lasted seven weeks). In the meantime, we made a neat little hack from some of the qualitative feedback we'd had – that visitors just wanted to turn the site 'on' and not have to fiddle around to get a stream of stories – and that is still going strong as Hugh Hughes FM.

There was only one conclusion to draw from this information, and that was that we hadn't marketed the site well enough. As is often the case with small organisations, having the relevant expertise in-house is a case of pot-luck, and having the time to develop the expertise is very unlikely. It's a phenomenon that was noted by the Arts Marketing Association and the Audiences Agency recently, something that they have attempted to remedy through their Small Scale Development programme (an intensive retreat designed up upskill and begin to develop strategic marketing plans). Hoipolloi benefited from this programme.

The biggest thing to take away from the programme was confidence. We're trying to enter a new 'market', with players who've developed extraordinary tactics for capturing attention (no matter what we thing of linkbait), a market saturated with the bizarre (wet wipe phones?) and the banal (cats in tights?), a market that to try and navigate feels like playing with giants. But for all that, we believe in Hugh Hughes, that quirky, charming, offbeat character, whose perspective on the world is the perfect partner to a globally connected, social society. And that's worth all the effort to raise profiles, reach new audiences and deepen enagagement.

HOIPOLLOI NEEDS YOU! Set our content free...

 

Hoipolloi is an award-winning theatre company that exists to produce the work of Hugh Hughes. Over the last four years, alongside making two theatre shows (Stories from an Invisible Town and Things I Forgot I Remembered), Hugh has created lots of content and crammed about two hundred stories into a digital version of his childhood home at www.invisibletownstories.co.uk. This content is sitting patiently waiting for visitors to cross the threshold, when it could be out meeting new friends in all kinds of social spaces.

We're looking for... a self-starter, who knows their instagram from their pinterest, their moo from their cowbird, and who oozes with enthusiasm for online conversation. You'll need to be as interested in people as you are in social platforms, as happy talking to a stranger in a cafe as you are in creating a new vine. You'll work alone a lot, but it's important that you know the value of teamwork. You'll probably care just a teensy bit about data, and be keen to see the impact of your work, having a love-hate relationship with analytics. More than anything, you'll be adventurous, and willing to iterate your way to meaningful engagement with digital audiences.

We're offering... a bootload of content that's funny, charming and a little bit fantastical that you can get your hands on and spread into the far corners of the internet. We'll encourage you to be an explorer of the online world, a digital flaneur, and a tastemaker for your colleagues. We're a small team that cares about creativity, so you'll encounter lots of ideas, and be expected to throw your own hat into the ring. You'll be our digital vanguard, but with the support of a Digital Producer and active board. You'll have as much autonomy as you need, but we'll expect to be in the loop talking about learning, progress and surprises you've found along the way.

Check out http://bit.ly/HHrecruit for information and http://bit.ly/digicontentasst to apply.