Our friends at StageText offer a range of resources on their website, from checklists to training videos to help you understand more about your deaf, deafened and hard of hearing audiences, as well as handy how-to guides to make your work accessible to many more people.

When you're putting together your marketing campaign activity:

Tell your staff team about captioned performances

• Make sure your full team know the dates, times and performances that will be captioned at your venue so that you are ready to welcome higher numbers of audience members who may be deaf, deafened or hard of hearing.
• If you have staff trained with fingerspelling skills or who have had deaf awareness training, plan your staff rota so that they are front of house when you have your captioned performances.

Let your audiences and potential audiences know

• Add the information clearly to your website and main communication channels, emails, press and social media posts.
• Make sure your access page on your website is easy to find (ideally no more than two clicks from your homepage) and list or link out to relevant accessible performances in your programme.
• Make sure your information is accessible and remember that not everyone will tell you that they need captions, so it can be hard to measure the impact of your work.
• Share your event details with StageText who can list them on their website.
• Look out for the annual Captioned Awareness week and get involved.
• Add your performances to local listing sites.
• Connect with relevant local organisations in the deaf, deafened and hard of hearing communities.
• Other audience members who may benefit from a captioned performance include people with English as an additional language, neurodivergent audience members and students who may be studying the playtext. Think about how you'll let people in your local area know about captioned performances that they may enjoy.