Creative Scotland is working with The Audience Agency (TAA) to introduce a system of standardised audience data collection, sharing and benchmarking for organisations working in the Arts, Screen and Creative Industries in Scotland.
As part of this work, TAA will provide data and analytical services to Regularly Funded Organisations to support audience development, through their Audience Finder system. These services include:
TAA will also provide access to the Show Stats dashboard for audiences of toured work, allowing organisations to report on a production or performance basis, and ensure access to their Audience Development Planner tool for all participating organisations.
The Audience Agency is a charity that supports the cultural sector in widening access and improving resilience. Their purpose is to enable cultural organisations to use shared data to increase their relevance, reach and resilience.
Their ambition is for a UK-wide, cross-border approach to sharing data and building collective insight into the patterns, trends and opportunities for cultural engagement.
TAA developed Audience Finder for Arts Council England, and the Arts Council of Wales has recently invested in a similarly tailored service.
TAA will enable organisations from the Arts, Screen and Creative Industries to engage with Audience Finder through their ticketing systems or a standardised survey. Organisations providing data into the system will be able to access the resulting analytics through a dashboard as a free service.
TAA will provide all necessary infrastructure and expertise to aggregate, cleanse, enrich, analyse and report on audiences as well as the potential audiences in the general population.
Audience Finder is a data and analytics service for audience development. It combines audience data from ticketing systems, a standardised survey and household and population data. Aggregated and analysed, data is then made useful through in-demand services. Key to the analytics is the ability to compare your audience metrics with others in relevant groups based on geography or sector, or a collaborative grouping.
In the coming months, the Audience Finder platform in Scotland will be tailored to the needs of organisations in Scotland through a process of engaging users in defining requirements.
Show Stats is a dashboard tool designed for touring companies in the performing arts with penetration in both the funded and commercial sectors. It provides audience reports by show, individual performance, run or tour.
The level of input required from RFOs will vary according to business model, box office systems and current arrangements for engaging with audiences.
We hope that by using Audience Finder and the other tools offered by TAA, organisations will be able to more easily identify potential – for more audiences, diverse audiences, better access, more revenue and greater efficiency.
Standardising benchmarks and data collection methods will also help us to gain a better picture of Scotland’s cultural sector as a whole and allow sector development organisations to better understand their constituencies.
Creative Scotland will not request or have access to the data of any individual Audience Finder Scotland user organisation. Once RFOs are using the system we will ask for anonymised, top line national audience data once a year to replace the audience section of the current Annual Statistical Survey.
RFOs will retain full ownership of the data inputted into the Audience Finder system.
Find out more about The Audience Agency at theaudienceagency.org; Show Stats at showstats.org; and Audience Finder at audiencefinder.org.