Top tips for collecting audience surveys in museums, theatre, arts, and the creative and cultural sector

Audience surveys are a valuable tool for organisations that want to learn more about their target audience. They might support an evaluation, monitoring your strategic objectives and important metrics, or you might be required to collect audience data as part of your funding requirements. 

However, many organisations can find collecting those surveys to be a challenge. These top tips should help you find ways to boost your survey collection and get results. 

If you are just getting started, you might first want to check out our Introduction to Audience research here: 

Introduction to Audience Research in museums, theatre, arts, and the creative and cultural sector – Digital Culture Network 

Can the design of my survey make it easier to collect more responses? 

Keeping your survey short and to the point makes data collection much easier. Stay focused on your organisation’s strategy and key goals and try to avoid adding questions if possible. Being able to say that your survey is 5-7 minutes long means that more people will agree to complete it, while surveys that are 10 minutes or longer are less attractive, and you will have to work harder and spend longer to get each completed survey. 

Clean, minimal design is important – keeping the design and language brief, consistent and clear will avoid overwhelming respondents, reducing cognitive load and helping respondents complete your survey more quickly and attentively. 

Mixing it up with a variety of topics and question types will generally help keep respondents engaged. 

Respondents have agreed to tell you what they think, so you should consider what they might want to communicate to your organisation, and what an interesting survey might look like to them. There’s nothing worse than spending a few minutes on a survey but not getting chance to express yourself. If you don’t already have questions that allow this, an ‘anything else?’ open text question is an easy way to give space for responses about things you might not have thought of. 

What should you look out for when quality checking your survey? 

Make sure you carefully check your survey to review the language used, that the questions asked and answers available are relevant to a variety of survey takers. It can be very helpful to ask someone else to take a look, for a different perspective. 

You should make sure that your survey really takes the amount of time to complete that you claim. If your survey has that any logic or any dynamic elements, it’s important to check that they are all working correctly too. 

If you’re reviewing your survey, you can reach out to Digital Culture Network for free one-to-one support, and get feedback from a survey expert! 

Ask a Tech Champion – Digital Culture Network 

Which methods can I use to collect responses for my audience survey? 

There are few different ways to get your survey out there. The ones that will work best for you can depend on the work and programming that you do, your audiences, your resources, systems and the practical reality on the ground. It may even be helpful to combine a few different approaches and channels to maximise your response rate and get a good mix of people. 

Is it effective to send my audience survey by email? 

If it’s possible, sending post-show or post-visit surveys to ticket or event bookers can be a goodway to connect to them. You can time a survey email to come through to them straight after their visit or experience. However, it’s important that you send a dedicated email asking people to complete a survey. It’s less likely that people will choose to if it’s buried among other calls-to-action, links and bits of information. 

You might expect to get a completed survey from up to 10% of the people that you send an email. So if you have a larger audience, that can quickly add up to a good survey sample. If you work with smaller audiences, 10% won’t be as many people, so it might not give you enough surveys to work with through email alone. 

You can find more information about survey sample sizes in this article: How to decide your survey targets and improve your sampling 

You’ll always get a better response rate if this is within 24 hours of a visit or event, while it’s fresh in their mind. If your system allows you, you could also send a follow-up reminder email 2-3 days after the visit if they’ve not already completed the survey. 

My audience is composed of walk-up visitors, so we don’t capture their contact details – am I missing out? 

In a word – yes! It won’t be suitable for all organisations, but anything you can do to encourage online ticket booking will allow you to capture email addresses. Even if your offer is free, you may be able to institute a free pre-booked ticketing option, perhaps using a small incentive. The National Portrait Gallery in London utilises free pre-booked ticketing, partly to manage crowding, but it also provides a host of other benefits. 

Online ticketing gives you the ability to collect email addresses – allowing post-visit survey emails, but also the opportunity to add more people to your marketing list. That gives you the opportunity to encourage repeat visits to future programming, and to cross-promote: pre-purchase a guidebook, programme, or hospitality package. Or, to point to your online shop and merchandise, or for gift ideas later on. 

It’s also a great opportunity to ask for a donation during the booking process, especially for free venues. For free information and advice around opportunities to encourage marketing signup or on ticketing solutions, head to our Ask a Tech Champion page: Ask a Tech Champion – Digital Culture Network 

What makes a good introduction or email to encourage people to take part in an audience survey? 

Getting the message right is key – a subject line that stands out, an inviting image, and a personal and effective call-to-action. Often, survey emails sound very transactional and generic, for example: “We’d like your feedback as part of our quality monitoring processes to improve our services.”

You could test out different and more engaging copy, for example: “We need your help! We’re a small, community-focused organisation, and we love doing what we do. 

We’d be so grateful if you could help us out, by giving us much-needed feedback.  

By completing a survey, you’re helping us to survive by getting funding, and making fantastic, relevant work that speaks to our audience.” 

Whether it’s in an email, or the written introduction to a survey: being authentic, honest, and even vulnerable to your audience could help sway them to take part in a survey. It’s the same approach as if you were marketing your programme: find a good hook, and think about how can you make an emotional connection in your pitch. 

What is the best way to collect more audience surveys? 

You’ll usually find that a more hands-on approach will pay dividends. Audiences are much more likely to take a survey when someone has asked them to do it in-person. Having a friendly face make an effective appeal adds a human element to your surveying, and is more likely to make a connection with the audience. 

While you can provide paper surveys, or make a QR code or short link available in your venue – for example, on a leaflet, map, receipt or ticket, posters around the venue, or re-usable cards in your exhibition space or auditorium, in general these survey delivery methods struggle to get audiences’ attention on their own. It’s worth briefing front-of-house staff to point people specifically to the survey and make an appeal, and make the most of the interactions staff or volunteers are already having with audiences. 

Keeping your team regularly updated on how many surveys have been collected (and perhaps, who is doing a particularly good job, and how they’ve done it) can keep surveying top-of-mind. It’s not always easy to successfully collect surveys, so keeping morale up with encouragement and even key bits of data that your team might find useful or interesting can make a difference. 

If your staff are approaching audiences with your survey, the Digital Culture Network can offer free training sessions. We cover the purpose and benefits of your survey, tips for approaching visitors, carrying out interviews effectively, and how to make sure your surveying approach is representative of your audience. 

For a free survey training session for your team, or free one-to-one support with your surveying, head to our Ask a Tech Champion page: Ask a Tech Champion – Digital Culture Network 

Should we complete surveys with audiences, or leave them to self-complete by themselves? 

If you have the resources available among staff or volunteers, you could conduct the whole survey face-to-face with your respondents. There are some benefits to doing this rather than self-completion (leaving respondents to fill in the survey by themselves). 

Firstly, face-to-face surveying tends to result in higher-quality data. Interviewers can make sure that respondents have fully understood a question, and double check their answers. They can also prompt for further comments and information to expand on answers – for example: if a respondent says that they liked a particular exhibition, or element of a show, the interviewer can probe and ask them what they liked about it; and then ask if there was anything else they’d like to comment on. 

Conducting surveys face-to-face builds on that important human connection – making a connection with respondents, adding in a bit of conversation, and encouraging and motivating them to continue. With a good interviewer, respondents can have a more positive experience taking a survey, and sometimes report enjoying it. This brings a couple of benefits – they will be less likely to abandon the survey or become frustrated and provide low quality data and feedback. 

It can also mean that the survey is completed faster, as an interviewer who is familiar with the survey can more quickly guide respondents through the questions. 

So is self-completion of audience surveys a bad idea? 

Not necessarily – most creative and cultural organisations do choose to rely on self-completion. This is often because they don’t have the resources to dedicate staff or volunteer time to complete full surveys with respondents. To increase responses, they may still choose to approach audiences to recruit for the survey (which is then self-completed by the respondent). 

One advantage of a self-completion method is that you can approach a higher number of people, getting them started on the survey and then moving on to recruit the next respondent. Or, when staff are also performing other duties, self-completion surveying can have less impact on their time. 

For performances or participatory types of programming, where lots of people do something at the same time and then all leave together, it isn’t really feasible to carry out full face-to-face surveys with audience members – you’d only have time to complete one or two surveys. 

So while there are a number of advantages to completing full surveys with audiences face-to-face, it may not be realistic or practical. Self-completion can be a good alternative, but do be mindful of the drawbacks: it may be helpful to check your responses from time to time, to make sure people are correctly understanding the questions, and that they are providing full and useful answers. Or, if staff notice any audience frustrations with long, confusing or repetitive self-completion surveys. 

Would we still need to assist some people to complete the survey? 

One thing to consider is supporting people who have access needs – you should have staff ready to assist people to complete the survey if they need it. This makes sure the survey is representative, and that nobody’s feedback is missed due to disabling barriers. 

Some people are less comfortable using technology, such as a touchscreen tablet or a QR code on their own device – in which case you may wish to help them complete the survey or consider providing a paper survey alternative, which many audience groups can feel more comfortable using. 

How about an ‘annual audience survey’ sent out to my email contacts? 

Some organisations consider this approach. It can serve some purposes – like reflecting on your overall brand and offer, or to ask about possible changes or improvements in the future. But do think about how effective and representative it’s likely to be. You would probably send it to your newsletter mailing list – and these people may be your most loyal and engaged audiences. They could have a different profile, and different experiences and feedback to the rest of your audience who didn’t sign up to marketing permissions. 

If you are hoping to ask about people’s visits or attendance, an annual survey to your mailing list could mean that there is a significant gap between their visit and the survey. Often, this means they can’t recall the experience as accurately as if they were surveyed shortly after their visit. It also makes it more difficult to ask questions about specific shows, exhibitions or events, as people may answer more generally about your offer. 

What if I’m trying to survey more widely than just my existing audience? 

If your survey has a particular research focus, like developing new audiences, or to get some feedback and data from young people, then you might need to find other channels, social media groups, spaces or organisations where you might find the groups you’re looking for. 

For non-attenders or potential audiences, some organisations might need to turn to research agencies, fieldwork suppliers, or do-it-yourself online research panel services. This might sound scary, but it can be easier and cheaper than you might expect – for some expert support on scoping and assessing this kind of project, reach out for free Digital Culture Network one-to-one support here: 

Ask a Tech Champion – Digital Culture Network 

How can I collect more accurate and representative data with my audience survey? 

The data you collect from your survey needs to produce a dataset that is robust and useful when it’s analysed. There are a few main factors to consider here. 

• Sample size – you need to gather enough surveys so that you can have confidence that any trends you identify in the data are statistically significant. The more surveys you gather, the more reliable it is and the greater the confidence that any outliers have been smoothed out. It also makes it more likely that you’ll be able to usefully look at specific groups within your respondents (e.g. new audiences vs repeat visitors, visitors to different shows or exhibitions, or different demographics or segments). 
• Random sampling – if you are directly appealing to and approaching people to ask them to do your survey, you should consider that your interviewer or colleague may also have subtle biases in the types of people that they ask. Maybe they are more comfortable approaching a particular gender, or they presume that families with young children will be too busy to help. To counter this, professional interviewers use a counting approach where they pick a number appropriate to the visitor flow (say 3, or 5), and then approach every 3rd or 5th person they see. If it’s a specific person within a group, you can explain that you must count and approach a specific person to make it randomised. If you have a large enough team, another consideration is that you might want to make sure you have at least three people responsible for recruiting respondents, so that you can identify if one interviewer is doing something unusual and any differences in approach or profile are smoothed out. 
• Across your offer – ideally, the composition of your survey respondents would reflect the different groups within your audience. A key consideration can be around making sure the audiences of different events, shows or activities are represented in proportion – so you aren’t gathering too many surveys from one activity and very few from another. 
• Stratifying by day and time – you might also consider making sure you are spreading your surveying across different day types, and times of day. For example, a daytime weekday audience is likely to have a very different demographic profile to an evening or weekend – with the mix of ages, families, and working people varying. A general rule of thumb is about 60% weekday, 40% weekend, but you can check your visitor counts for an exact split as it does vary. 

You can find more information about sample sizes and improving the quality of your survey data in this webinar recording, and this article: 

Webinar recording – Increase your audience surveys and improve survey data – Digital Culture Network 

How to decide your survey targets and improve your sampling 

How can I keep track of my survey performance, and predict achievement against targets? 

You’ll want to dedicate some time to checking the number of complete surveys regularly – ideally every week or fortnight. Most importantly, you’re looking to find out how many surveys you’re getting per day or week, and then make projections about how many you’re likely to end up with by the end of the year, or the period of your show, exhibition or event. 

A simple sum to work this out: 

Average number of surveys per day / week achieved so far 

X 

Total number of days / weeks in the research period 

= 

Projected total number of surveys 

It can be useful to maintain a spreadsheet that will keep track of this for you as you fill in daily or weekly survey totals. If you’ve recently seen an improvement in survey response rates, you might want to use an average over a recent period to make projections for the future. However, be aware of any seasonal dips or gaps in your programming that might bring them down again. 

You can then see if you’re above or below your target, and whether you need to do anything to boost completion rates, or share and congratulate your team if they are driving good numbers of surveys and encourage them to keep going. 

What do I need to consider when asking about demographic questions or sensitive topics? 

Questions that are more sensitive or feel unrelated to your interaction with the audience (e.g. detailed demographic questions) might need a short text explainer to reassure respondents that this data helps you understand who is visiting you, and therefore who is not, so that you can grow your audience. It can sometimes be helpful to say: ‘This helps us make sure nobody is missing out’ – which can be a more positive framing of the need to collect demographic data. 

If you’re not asking for contact details or information that could identify your respondent, it may also help to reassure them that all data collected is anonymous. Also, survey data is analysed in aggregate, meaning that you look at statistics for the whole dataset rather than looking at the way that specific people have answered. 

If you are collecting personally identifiable information (PII), then you might instead say that all data collected is ‘confidential’, but you will have to consider some data protection requirements when handling this data.

What are the data protection requirements when handling personally identifiable information (PII) in an audience survey? 

If you are collecting contact details or any information that potentially allows you to identify a specific living person as part of the survey, you will need to make sure you are doing so in a manner that is compliant with data protection legislation; primarily the Data Protection Act 2018 (sometimes referred to as UK GDPR). Most organisations will already process personal data and will likely have privacy policies, responsible staff, and processes in place. 

If your survey is collecting personally identifiable information, you will need to point to your GDPR-compliant Privacy Notice before and during the survey. Make sure that it does reference the scope and purpose of your survey activities and any platforms that you use, especially if they are processing personally identifiable information and contact details. This is a legal requirement and fines for non-compliance can be severe, so it’s important to make sure that this is up to scratch and that you have Data Processing Agreements in place with any suppliers or platforms that will also be processing people’s personal data on your behalf. 

You should think carefully about how survey records containing personal data are stored and consider regularly expunging them from your survey data platform or database to make sure that the individual responses stay anonymous. In general, you should aim to collect the minimum amount of personal data required for your research or other activities, and typically privacy policies will specify how long it’s going to be kept before it’s destroyed. 

Are there other ways to collect audience data besides surveys? 

Surveys aren’t always suitable for every organisation, or for answering all the research objectives that you might have. For an overview of other methods, check out our article here: 

Data Collection Methodologies for Creative and Cultural Audiences – Digital Culture Network 

If you are in need of any support or want to talk about data collection, surveys, or other ideas about audience research and evaluation, please do reach out to us and book in for free one-to-one support. 

What next?

The Digital Culture Network is here to support you and your organisation. Our Tech Champions can provide free one-to-one support to all arts and cultural organisations and individuals who are in receipt of, or eligible for, Arts Council England funding. If you need help or would like to chat with us about any of the advice we have covered above, please get in touch. Sign up to our newsletter below and follow us on X @ace_dcn for the latest updates.