2023 Audience Research Round-Up

We’re hosting an online session in early November to talk about what we’ve collectively learned from doing audience research this year, to support anyone planning to send out a post-show Experience Survey for their shows this November and December, and to answer any of your general audience research questions.

Invitation & Registration
Audience Research Q&A Friday 3 November, 11.30-12.30, on Zoom
Katy Raines and Heather Maitland will host our last Audience Research event of 2023. Just register to attend and please share this invitation with your colleagues too.

A lot of research already done…
Thank you to everyone who has already participated in this year’s Audience Insights research project collecting quantitative insights into sales and audience behaviour generated from data held on your ticketing systems. Here’s the overview report of the analysis of the 285,000 people who spent €21 million on 978,000 tickets for events at 41 festivals, theatres and arts centres in Ireland in 2022 compared to 2019, the calendar year immediately before and after the Covid-19 pandemic. Some of you also carried out an annual online survey of your organisation’s ticket buyers conducted through Indigo Share and have your own report with insights into your audience profile, behaviour, and attitudes as well as the overview findings..

Last bit of Audience Experience research to end 2023…
You and your marketing team might decide to complete your own 2023 research by setting up an ‘always on’ Audience Experience post-show survey. This will allow you to start building a better understanding, show by show,of your audiences’ experience and use the findings to inform programming, marketing campaigns as well as service improvements.

Devised by Indigo for Irish arts venues, this online survey is a comprehensive year-round post-visit survey for audiences at cultural events, designed to capture feedback on the performance or event and the overall experience at the venue, as well as insight into audience motivations, demographics and general cultural behaviour. As with all our research, your involvement will contribute to a large Ireland-wide data set that we can all learn from, and with Katy and Heather’s help, analyse together. You can automate the sending of these with Ticketsolve, and start to send out your Audience Experience post-show surveys out any time after the 3 November Q&A session until the end of December 2023 with support to get set up from the Indigo and Ticketsolve teams.

Looking ahead to 2024…
Theatre Forum plans to continue and extend this Audience Insights research work next year. The Audience Experience survey will continue throughout 2024, and taking your feedback on timing into account, we’ll start the data collection for the annual snapshot/overview on 24 January 2024 to report back to you before the busier summer months. Please send any more feedback to director@theatreforum.ie