Building a picture of an audience
Talawa Theatre Company wanted to build stronger relationships with the venues they tour to, so they could build a better marketing partnership with the venues' teams. They wanted to demonstrate that they can bring new audiences to venues, and the research we carried out (partly informed by our collaborative project to explore audiences for contemporary dance tours) enabled them to do just that. We've also worked with Fevered Sleep and English Touring Theatre on similar research of their audiences on tour.
The Almeida Theatre wants an ongoing view of who their audiences are and how they differ from production to production and over time. We developed an e-survey that is mailed to each booker after they have attended the performance. The standard questions are analysed and reported on, so the theatre can clearly spot trends and changes. We're now working with them to introduce occasional extra questions to explore particular groups, such as youth audiences.
The Design Museum came to us with a quest to identify and characterise the different segments of their audience, to guide their marketing and communications as well as their programming decisions. We started with a year-long survey to build a statistical view of the whole, then used balanced focus groups to understand more about the audiences' motivations and opinions. We're now helping the museum quantify the sizes of the segments through their Visual Arts Survey participation. As well as this bespoke research, our consultancy experience helps the museum interpret the results and decide on future actions or where deeper analysis would be useful.
ArtsHead (formerly All About the Arts) wanted to help local families feel confident about leading other families on tours of the free arts activities all along the South Bank in London. We designed an evaluation of the tours, including training of the tour guides so that they could get feedback from the participating families more effectively. We then collated and assessed the evaluation information they had gathered, and offered a summary of the findings, pointing to potential improvements in the way the project (part of the SOWF Invest to Save research) operated.
The marketing team at Tate knew that they had lots of useful audience research data spread throughout the organisation. But it wasn’t being used or collected in a coordinated way. We helped them gather together their existing data, and facilitated a workshop with key staff to establish what data Tate needs to support its audience development strategy. The workshop was followed up with advice to the marketing team on developing a research strategy.