Theatre Forum Audience Insights 2023

Audience Insights project gets underway

It was great to see some many of you at our Waterford Gathering and at the Marketing Forum session during which Heather, Katy, and Conor introduced you to our Audience Insights initiative. It’s all about collecting and using your audience data to make data-driven marketing decisions. Here are the slides from that session if you want to review them or use them to contextualise this Audience Insights project for your colleagues and marketing team.

Audience Insights

Over the next three months, we’ll be working with Heather Maitland and Katy Raines on Audience Insights to help you better understand your audiences. Our aim is that you can use the Audience Insights in your applications and reports to funders as well as a foundation for growing your audiences.

There are two strands to the project.

Strand One
The first strand focuses on audience data from your box office ticket sales and is led by Heather. It will answer nine key questions about sales and audience behaviour requested by participants at our Cork Gathering in October 2022. Heather will be asking you to extract the data for both 2019 and 2022 so you can see the trends. She will be the only person to see your results apart from you and will send you an annual report showing your Insights compared to the average for organisations like yours.

If you use Ticketsolve, download the step-by-step guide and the results form
If you use another system, download your data specification and the results form
Ticketsolve ran a webinar on Wednesday 21st June to help you extract your data.
You can watch is back here.
Email your completed form to heather@heathermaitland.co.uk

Strand Two
Katy Raines will be leading the second strand, Indigo Share, to gather information about demographics, motivations, perceptions and impact that can only be collected through two surveys: an Annual Audience Overview survey, and a year-round post-show Audience Experience survey. Just like the Missing Audiences research in 2021 and 2022, you send a link to the Audience Overview survey to the ticket buyers in 2022 that you have consent to communicate with. Again, the Indigo team will be the only people to see your results apart from you.

The audience Overview survey links should be sent out between 14 June and 10 July , and the final date for responses being counted is 14 July. Katy and her team have written a suggested email to accompany the link. Post-show Audience Experience surveys should be sent from September onwards (more on these soon).

Follow this link to register your organisation for Indigo Share.
The Indigo team will then get in touch to set you up on Indigo Share.

Your box office data report and the aggregate Audience Overview report will be ready on 28 July and we’ll convene a Marketing Forum on Friday 25 August at 11:30 where you can discuss the implications of the findings. The timing is to ensure you can feed the results into your application(s) to the Arts Council.

We want to emphasise that, just as in previous Theatre Forum Benchmarking and Missing Audiences projects, Katy and Heather will not reveal your organisation’s results to anyone else, only sharing the overall averages and ranges for all festivals, all small scale venues and all large scale venues.

The final Audience Experience strand will start in September. This is a survey you can send to ticket buyers for specific events of your choice immediately afterwards, designed to capture your audience’s reaction to their experience. For the Post-show Audience Experience surveys, you can send them out after every show, or just a selection of shows throughout the year. They will do all the analysis and create an annual benchmark report which you can use to compare your audience with the averages for organisations like yours. More about that in a future newsletter.

Here’s a summary of the timeline:

As soon as possible: download the relevant guide and data form by clicking on the links above
As soon as possible: register for Indigo Share.
Wednesday 14 June– Monday 10 July: send out the link to your Audience Overview survey to your ticket buyers for events in 2022
Wednesday 21 June: Ticketsolve webinar. You can watch is back here.
Friday 14 July: survey closing date and the deadline for returning your data form
Friday 28 July: you’ll get your reports, one from Katy and one from Heather
Friday 25 August: the Marketing Forum to discuss what the results mean for developing your audiences and improving your financial sustainability.

We would really appreciate your organisation participating in this Audience Insights project. We’ll be in touch with links for upcoming webinars and online meetings in the coming months.