Outlandish is happy to be working with The Audience Agency to develop their Audience Finder website.
Arts organisaions can use Audience Finder to collect data from their audiences, analyse it and apply the insights they’ve gained to achieve their goals. The site is designed to be a basic introduction to audience data analysis that gives organisations useful information to expand their reach.
We launched the site in July 2013 and have steadily built up a list of interesting tools and features.
Below I’ve said a bit about three of the most powerful tools on Audience Finder.
Audience Development Planner
It’s a good idea to have an audience development plan if you’re an arts organisation. For one, it will help you think strategically about your goals. Secondly these plans are often required in order to obtain funding.
But if you’ve never done a plan before, it can be a pretty daunting task.
That’s where the Audience Development Planner (ADP) comes in. The ADP is a wizard that guides organisations through the process of creating an audience plan. What makes it a bit special is that it pulls in insightful graphs of box office data that users can add to their plans. (In order to see box office data in your plan, you need to have added it to Audience Finder – this is something The Audience Agency can help you do.)
There are hints and tips and links to useful articles to guide users through setting goals, analysing their current situation, setting a strategy and taking action.
At any point users can download a Word version of their plan.
Tour venue & audience mapping
The Audience Agency uses Audience Spectrum audience profiles extensively in the analyses they provide to their clients. These profiles – known as audience segments – help organisations understand broadly who their existing and potential audiences are and the kinds of things they like. It doesn’t take long to realise that an offering targeted at Facebook Families will need to be different from one for Metroculturals in order to be a success.
When it comes to understanding the audience segments, one important thing is to know where they are. So we created a mapping tool that maps the segments across England and shows the locations of UK Theatre venues.
Having talked to current and potential Audience Finder users during the extensive user testing we conducted on behalf of The Audience Agency, we think this map would be of particular interest to touring arts groups who need to know where their audiences are in relation to performance venues.
Insights
Once an organisation links their box office data up to Audience Finder they will get automatic insights that will help them to start thinking analytically about their audience data.
For example, for organisations that feature different art forms, it might be good to know which have the highest levels of audience cross-over. Knowing that 35% of dance performance attendees also went to see plays is the kind of insight that could help someone designing a marketing strategy.
Another insight called priority postal sectors helps organisations find the areas that have the highest concentrations of their two most common audience segments.
So far we’ve added 12 insights like these to users’ dashboards.
Only logged in users with box office data can see insights. So if this sound interesting to you, consider signing up to Audience Finder.
