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Audience research is a process of finding out more about the people who visit you or see your work, use your services, or engage with you in some way. But what it looks like in practice can mean different things for different people.
In most cases, it involves collecting some data or information, then analysing or looking closely at that data. This is to draw some conclusions and insights, which tell a story about your audiences.
If you have a strategy or plan, audience research could tell you how well it’s working. Ideally, audience research will give you some useful insights that will help you (or your organisation) to make better decisions, and achieve more success in the future.
There are a range of methods that can be used to collect data or information. Most commonly, organisations or artists can use an audience survey to ask questions directly to their audience or visitors. Surveys are most useful when you can collect a good number of responses, because otherwise the data might not be very reliable.
You can read more about how many surveys to aim for here: How to decide your survey targets and improve your sampling and article covers top tips to collect more surveys: Top Tips for Collecting Audience Surveys – Digital Culture Network.
This webinar recording gives a complete guide to both of the above topics: Webinar recording – Increase your audience surveys and improve survey data – Digital Culture Network
Not everything has to be a survey. You can collect audience research data through other methods; which could include comment cards, short conversational interviews (sometimes called “vox pops”), focus groups, collecting observational data, or even coming up with imaginative and different ‘creative’ methods. These methods might be more appropriate if it would be hard to collect a lot of surveys, or you have more complicated or deeper questions to ask. You can read more about these different methods and approaches in this article: Data Collection Methodologies for Creative and Cultural Audiences – Digital Culture Network.
Audience research may involve using more than one source of data. A lot of useful information might be found in the systems and tools that you already use. For example, ticketing systems can provide data about bookings and audience numbers, and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems might hold additional information about audiences, and a record of their behaviour and booking history. Electronic visitor counting systems may be in place in some venues, or visitors might be counted manually by staff and volunteers.
Data is also available from your website analytics, email platform, and social media channels, or financial transactions such as shop or cafe sales. This kind of data – how many people you’ve reached with your digital channels, and the activity and actions of those people – can provide you with lots of extra information and context. It might tell you whether your efforts to grow your digital presence are working, and whether specific programming, marketing channels or messages are successfully ‘converting’ audiences (making them choose to attend or engage with you).
To help you make the most of the data you already have, or improve what you’re collecting from your systems and software, click here to get free one-to-one support from our Data Analytics and Insight Tech Champion: Ask a Tech Champion – Digital Culture Network.
Lots of things! In fact, once you start thinking about it, you could easily end up with a very long list of questions. Wanting to know too much can make it difficult to carry out your audience research, because your surveys or data collection methods become too long, and overwhelming for your respondents (the people who are asked your questions).
This is why it’s important to try to focus on the most important questions. Think carefully about the work you do, and your strategic objectives and ambitions. Which pieces of information are essential, and most likely to be transformative if you had them? What are the biggest puzzles and challenges that you face?
The two are often connected – you might be using a survey to do both at the same time. Audience research is simply when you try to learn more about your audience.
Evaluation is when you try to find out if you’re successfully doing the things that you’ve set out to do. That can involve lots of different activities and also involve research and feedback from artists, partners, performers and other stakeholders.
But to evaluate your work, you might need to ask your audiences some questions:
If you have a strategy or objectives for your work, programming, or visitor experience – the right questions can help you understand if you’ve been successful in making things that you wanted to happen become a reality.
Evaluation is a big topic. If you want to learn more about it, there’s a great free course on evaluation in cultural and creative settings, created by the Centre for Cultural Value: Evaluation for Arts, Culture and Heritage: Principles and Practice – Centre for Cultural Value.
It’s important to find out who your audiences are. That might mean their demographics – so things like gender identity, age, and where they’re from. You might ask for more information to check that you’re being inclusive and that you’re attracting people from lots of different backgrounds, which could include questions about people’s ethnicity, their socio-economic status, any disabilities or their neurodiversity. But, people aren’t always happy to answer these questions, so it’s a good idea to put them at the end of a survey, so that you can start with more interesting and immediate questions, and build trust during the survey.
Another important part of your audience research is often to find out whether your marketing efforts have been successful, and why audiences are visiting. That might be related to attractors – parts of your offer, like events, specific exhibitions or programming, a cafe, or ways in which you are convenient to visit, good value, or serve a particular need. Or it might be related to deeper motivations – the things that people want to get out of their visit – being entertained or having a good day out, learning or satisfying their curiosity, seeing beautiful things or emotionally connecting with your work.
By understanding which marketing channels people have seen, and what motivated them to visit or engage, you can make sure that you are using your marketing time and resources effectively. You can try to identify better messages, channels and techniques to increase your audiences and reach different people.
You might find this webinar recording helpful to design focused and effective surveys and questions – it covers those ideas about marketing, audience behaviour and motivations in more detail: Webinar recording – Designing your own survey: research basics and top questions – Digital Culture Network.
When you eventually get the results, you should hopefully have the data and insights you need to answer your big questions, and to make effective decisions in the future.
If you design your questions carefully, what should emerge are some interesting statistics or themes, that point you towards opportunities. Maybe a certain audience group are really interested in a particular topic or kind of programming. Maybe there was a motivation for visiting that was particularly important for some people, and you can use that in your marketing or design programming around it. The data can steer you towards valuable opportunities.
Sometimes, it’s helpful to find out something isn’t working, isn’t being used, or that people don’t like it. It’s not great to hear, but it’s better to know and be able to take steps to overcome a challenge, or change something that isn’t viable or a good use of your time and resources – whether that’s part of your offer, or something in your marketing.
To design a good survey or research plan, or even an individual question, it can be helpful to imagine yourself looking at the finished research results and data. What does the data look like – how would it ideally be structured for you to best work with it? With your puzzles and objectives in mind, how have you phrased the questions and possible answers to get the most useful results?
By working backwards from your ideal end result, you can design questions and data that will best meet your needs. You might also identify questions or data that probably won’t help you as much; and that you could cut from your survey or questions to make the research shorter and more focused.
Often, people don’t consider this stage – because designing research and then collecting data can sometimes be difficult, we can forget that we need to work with the data afterwards.
How you go about this depends on the types of data you’re working with, what software and platforms you have access to, and your skills at using them.
If you’re working with survey responses (or other ‘quantitative’ statistical data), you can do some basic analysis in a spreadsheet such as Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. To do more with your survey data, you could use a data visualisation platform like Google Looker Studio to build reports and dashboards. Some survey platforms (often, paid platforms) give you powerful analysis tools built into the platform that can help you more quickly and easily find insights.
To analyse written responses or other ‘qualitative’ data, the process usually involves identifying common themes and topics. You could manually do this by ‘tagging’ or ‘coding’ your responses. It’s also possible to use AI for this purpose – to process and summarise a large volume of text information. The Impact & Insight Toolkit has a ‘Thematic Analysis’ tool which is a great example of a responsible and purpose-build analysis tool for written survey data.
If you are using any AI tool in your research analysis, you should take steps to use it responsibly and comply with data protection laws – for example, making it clear to respondents that AI might be used to process their data, and the nature and purpose of that processing. If possible, consider using closed AI systems that do not share processed data with others, and making sure no personally identifiable information is uploaded an AI system. For more information about using AI responsibly, check out Arts Council England’s practical toolkit:
Responsible AI Practical Toolkit | Arts Council England
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