Build a picture of your own audiences or visitors
If you want to know how your visitors or audiences think, feel, react or behave - or how to contact them - there are ways of finding out. Primary, secondary, desk - or a combination of research methods with interpretation and insights may be what you need.
Below are some of the questions posed to us by other organisations. What's your question?
For touring theatre companies, AL’s research was invaluable in helping us show that our tour brought in new attenders to the venue we toured to.
Jackie Friend, Marketing Manager, Talawa Theatre Company
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're also working with Fevered Sleep and English Touring Theatre to research 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 alll 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 particpating families more effectivel. We then collated and assessed the evaluation information they had gathered, and offered a summary of the findings that pointed to potential improvments in the way the project (part of the SOWF Invest to Save research) operated.
The marketing team at Tate knew they had lots of useful audience research data spread throughout the organisation. But it wasn’t currently used or collected in a co-ordinated 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.