Digital Culture Podcast episode #3 – The art of asking: effective audience surveys with Jack Roscoe

The Digital Culture Podcast is for creative and cultural professionals to get to know the Digital Culture Network team, learn how we can help your digital skills development, and find out what’s happening across the sector.

In our third episode, James Akers interviews Jack Roscoe⁠, the Digital Culture Network Tech Champion for Audience Data Collection and Evaluation.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Designing effective audience surveys by focusing on clear objectives, tailoring questions to different audiences, and utilising tools like Illuminate and Microsoft Forms
• Methods to boost survey participation, including face-to-face interactions, staff training, and creating concise, engaging surveys
• Top tips from Jack’s experience in the creative and cultural sector

Listen to the Podcast on Spotify

Listen to the Podcast on Apple Podcasts

Listen to the Podcast on Amazon Music

Links and resources discussed in this episode

• Download the transcript for this episode (Word document)
• Increase your audience surveys and improve survey data – Jack’s webinar exploring tips and tactics to collect more audience surveys for a variety of organisations
• How to decide your survey targets and improve your sampling – Jack’s article including a step-by-step guide to determining an appropriate number of surveys to aim for.
• National Museums Liverpool – Understanding Audiences – an interview with Wesley Thistlethwaite, Insight and Analysis Manager at National Museums Liverpool, on what he sees as the most essential skills and approaches to his role working with audience data.
• Freelancer Directory – Arts Marketing Association – a useful resource to find freelancers, including evaluators and audience consultants.
• Tomorrow’s Audience Indigo Share: Hot Topic – this sector-wide audience survey makes a number of useful recommendations on how to reach, grow, and better cater to new audiences, backed up with solid data.
• Connect with Jack on LinkedIn and enjoy his videos.

For National Portfolio Organisations and Creative People and Places:

• Illuminate by Arts Council England – an overview of Illuminate including links to FAQs and to download a list of the mandatory and optional questions.
• Impact & Insight Toolkit – an alternative platform for National Portfolio Organisations to collect surveys, with templates containing the mandatory questions, along with the ability to write your own questions and more flexibly redesign surveys.
• Culture Counts to Illuminate Conversion Service Guide – a guide to the free survey data export service for Impact and Insight Toolkit users, creating data files that are formatted and ready to be uploaded directly into Illuminate.

For designing your own surveys from scratch:

• Microsoft Forms is an easy-to-use platform that will meet the needs of most users with a few nice features and unlimited survey responses.
• For more advanced surveys, Qualtrics offers a free account level with more question types, features and customisation – it’s limited to 500 survey responses but this will be sufficient for many smaller organisations.

Music by ⁠⁠SHAR

Further support

The Digital Culture Network is here to support you and your organisation. Our Tech Champions can provide free one-to-one support to all creative and cultural organisations 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 for our newsletter below and follow us on LinkedIn and X (Twitter) @ace_dcn for the latest updates.