Creative selfie project - budget and audience reaction

Relating the collaborative project to my MA question I focused on two main aspects - budget and audience reaction.
Budget
The budget of the event was tight (the prepared ne was around 100 pounds) but as we were a small group of performers - around 10 people -  we managed to spend even less than the amount we had. It wasn't hard to spend less because we used both bought items and everyday objects (which our curator found in her house without spending money on them). Here are a price list of the used materials:
1. Color paper lists - around 10,00 pounds total as we used many different colors for the head a thinner (for the hair) and a thicker one (for the skin) and silver paper for the masks.
2.  A plastic rubber bin and a cardboard skeleton both at an proximate price of 7 pounds.
3. A cardboard box also got for free as an old delivery box.
4. Second hand kimono from ebay for 5 pounds, fabric for the entensions - around 5 meters, 1,20 pound for a meter which makes 6 pounds
5. Washable glue for the head for 5 pounds
6. 10 packages of color markers, each of them for a pound; total: 10 pounds
7. 4 packages of pink glousse for the box at a total price of approximately 4 pounds
8. Black paint for the box at the price ot 3 pounds
9. The color print of our selfie photos which we put on the box and the kimono costed approximately 15 pounds
10. Safety pins to hold the selfie photos to the kimono - 1,00 pound
11. Sewing equipment for sewing the extensions of the kimono - 1 pound
12. Elastic for the masks - 1 pound.

total cost of the project: approximately 73 pounds

Audience reaction
I based my analysis on an article about the audience engagement in nonprofit arts. An essensial part of choosing an approach how to engage the audience is choosing a mix of  audience typologies your project would target to reach. According to this research article, there are 6 main audience typologies:

 "1 Readers are “light engagers” who enjoy doing little except for reading program notes, wall texts and an occasional article;
2 Critical Reviewers pay attention to critic’s reviews and other independent sources of information before deciding to attend;
3 Casual Talkers process art by talking about it informally with friends and family members;
4 Technology-based Processors are facile with blogs, social media and other digital venues for engagement;
5 Insight Seekers seek an intellectual experience, and like to absorb a lot of information before and after arts programs;
6 Active Learners want to get personally involved in shaping their own experience.", Brown, A.S., Ratzkin, R. (p. 8)

The typologies which our Creative Selfie project focuses to reach were Casual Talkers, Technology-based Processors and Active Learners. Casual Talkers the people who were participating in the event and who were expected to share their exciting experience with their relatives and also we as a performer to spread the information about the event to our friends and invite them to participate. Technology-based Processors we expected to be active online and to upload their creative selfie photos (we created a hash tag #creativeselfie to make this happen) and the Active learners were all the people, who drew something on the kimono, look into the black box or even had a quick chat with us about the idea of the event.
 The most successfull reached typology in our project was definitely the Active learners as there were many people participacipating.the most effective costume in terms of audience participation was the kimono - we managed to get all of it covered by their drawings and an important fact was that people were finding it really interesting (some of them spent even around half an hour, trying to create extraordinary and beautiful images). One big reason for its success was that we found it easiest to be promoted and spend most time on asking the people to draw. The second capturing the attention part of our street performance was the head mask - kids and young people were waving to it. A deffect of the head mask was that it was impossible to communicate with the audience with it because they couldn't hear the words I was saying. The black had its audience looking at it but we didn't received any excited reactions from the people. The last thing in terms of audience participatin were the mirror masks - but silver paper couldn't actually serve as a mirror. Maybe a better effect would have had covered the masks with glued mirror pieces.
In term of the participation by technology-based processors, the event couldn't reach the effect we wanted. Although we creat a hashtag #creativeselfie, there weren't any people uploading selfies with our masks and costumes. But this could be considered normal as the event happened just once and people weren't prepared with any preliminary promotion and presentation of the idea.
Another aspect which wasn't very developed about our project was the preliminary process as a whole which. We had 2-3 brainstorming sessions but on mostly we discussed mostly the different ideas and their visual aspect. Bigger projects usually require a long preparation process. According to the Arch of engagement1, the Build-up, "begins when a commitment to attend is made" (Brown, A.S., Ratzkin, R. (p. 15), process very often continue up to 18 months.


*"Arch of Engament refers to a five-stage process through which audiences pass, including buld-up and contextualization, the artistic exchange, post-processing and extended impact echo." Brown, A.S., Ratzkin, R. (p. 5)

Reference:
Brown, A.S., Ratzkin, R., 2011. [online] Making Sense of Audience Engagement. Available at: wolfbrown.com/makingsense [Accessed 30/06/14]