Understanding audiences for festivals and outdoor events

Participating Organisations

We consulted with 12 festivals, 7 Local Authorities and 3 stakeholders and gathered audience data from a number of participants, including:

• London Mela
• Greenwich and Docklands International Festival
• Thames Festival
• Liberty Festival (Attitude is Everything)
• Celebrating Sanctuary
• Trafalgar Square Festival
• London Festival of Architecture

Project objectives

• Establish how audience information is currently collected and used by festivals and stakeholders.
• Analyse existing audience data from festivals to assess if it is possible to make any useful comparisons between their audiences.

Project activitiesThe study involved semi- structured interviews with twelve festivals, members of the culture teams of eight local authorities, the events team at the Greater London Authority, the Director of Independent Street Arts Network and the Creative Programmer for the five Olympic host boroughs and Create 09. A standard questionnaire was  alsocirculated to all of the festivals that took part in a consultation session in June 2009. Five festivals were also offered three days of Audiences London consultancy time to support them in developing a better understanding of their audiences.

Some key findings:

• Audience numbers are the key measure of success for festivals, followed by press coverage, feedback from artists/partners and audience information.
• All but one of the festivals consulted are regularly collecting audience information, mainly through face to face interviews or self completion questionnaires/postcards.
• Audience information is primarily used for reporting back to funders. To a lesser extent it is used to develop fundraising proposals (for commercial and public funding) and to inform the development of the event.
• There is widespread support for standardising audience data, but sharing audience data amongst individual festivals has .
• The most commonly asked research questions are about visitor profile, followed by visit history.

From this work we have developed fact sheets to support festivals with their data collection. These include evidencing success, questionnaire design and understanding economic impact measures amongst others. Visit the resources page here to download the fact sheets.