The Brief
To build an ambitious data portal that serves as a hub for UK arts organisations to collect, understand and benchmark their audience data.
The Client
The Audience Agency is a charity which helps arts organisations to understand their audience and increase their reach through data insight.
The Audience Agency approached Outlandish to develop Audience Finder, a suite of data-crunching and visualisation tools that analyse ticket sales, feedback surveys and website performance, as well as national and local demographic data.
Audience Finder was funded by Arts Council England and is free for arts organisations to access.
Our Solution
Outlandish created a dashboard for arts organisations to input their audience data.
We created a set of tools that organisations can access in order to analyse their performance and audience diversity, compare their statistics to other organisations and receive suggestions for future development.
A map helps identify audiences according to segments defined by The Audience Agency. Another tool helps arts professionals to write an audience development plan, a crucial part of many Arts Council funding applications, and a website analysis wizard allows organisations to understand the performance of their website.
The Tech
- Highly customised WordPress application using an AngularJS front end and integrating with multiple data sources over APIs
- Arts ticketing and survey data dashboard fully integrated with The Audience Agency’s data warehouse comprised of data from multiple ticketing systems
- Interactive website analysis functionality built for end-users, using Google Analytics API
- Step-by-step audience development plan generator, integrated with survey and ticketing data, allowing users to create tailored plans to send to the Arts Council so that they meet funding criteria
- Users’ audience data benchmarked against national and regional baselines as well as other similar organisations
- Google Maps with shape data overlay to display demographic information
The Impact
Audience Finder has provided arts organisations across the country with the tools to better understand their audiences. A firmer grasp on audience data allows these organisations to instigate new projects to improve their services and diversify their audiences.
Audience Finder has enabled The Audience Agency to collect the data from over one million ticket sales, and more than 2,500 audience member surveys from 1,300 arts organisations across the UK. This makes theirs one of the largest arts audience datasets in the world.
Audience Agency now provides more consultancy services using Audience Finder, meaning it has greater financial stability and a wider range of clients, while Arts Council England uses the tool to analyse funding priorities.
Going Forward
Audience Finder is soon to roll out across Wales and we have been in discussion with The Audience Agency over the possibility of extending the platform to other countries.
Audience Finder allowed us to exercise and develop some of our key skills: data analysis, design, information architecture, UX, caching strategy and API integrations. At Outlandish, we are always on the lookout for exciting new projects of this type.
What they said about us
“The Audience Agency look for expertise, technical capability and a positive can-do attitude. We also look for our suppliers to help us carefully consider the implications of different approaches and assumptions we’ve made in order to make best value of our investment in technical development.
“Working with Outlandish, we’ve not only been able to deliver beyond our expectations in terms of technical output, but we’ve also learned a lot about how to think about and plan for complex new capability.
“For these reasons, we continue to work with Outlandish and plan to do so for the foreseeable future.”
Cimeon Ellerton, Chief Operating Officer, Audience Agency
