Author Pete Davis believes that a defining characteristic of our generation is to keep our options open as we are stuck in ‘infinite browsing mode’. This culture of restlessness and indecision, he argues, is causing tension in the lives of young people today, wanting to keep options open and yet yearning for the purpose, community and depth that can only come from making deep commitments.
I haven’t got hold of the book yet, but I’d be interested to read it. It seems we can see the effect in audience data already given tickets are being booked more and more last minute.
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The findings suggest that participation in arts, culture and heritage activities will increase from where it was in post-Covid 2020. While intention data always needs to be read with a grain of salt, it is good news that intended participation is higher than post-Covid 2020 participation for all arts, culture and heritage activities with increases most pronounced for activities which involve visiting a place or going to an event.
There is a clear preference for engaging with arts, culture and heritage in person rather than online, in particular among Māori and Pacific peoples, as well as women. Yet results also indicate that online engagement will continue with respondents typically saying they intend to engage both online and in person.
Still, concern about Covid-19 is the primary barrier to in person visits to arts, culture and heritage places in the next 12 months. Aucklanders (especially those living in South Auckland), people with disabilities, Pacific peoples and Asian peoples were more concerned than average about Covid-19. The research suggests that the most effective measure for encouraging attendance is reassurance that people will be refunded if the event is cancelled. Health-related measures are important to half of New Zealanders, but play a lesser role.
The study goes into participation and engagement by art form and for highlights demographic differences in engagement levels and platform preferences, find the full report here.
“Our reservations team spoke with a potential customer asking about the age restrictions for the zipline… She was 92 and wanted to bring her children with her for her birthday. It took a few seconds to realise her children would be seniors too, but they came and had a fantastic time! For us, it really opened our eyes to a whole new world of customers we hadn’t previously engaged with”.
Christchurch Adventure Park
Image: Christchurch Adventure Park
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Many organisations are audience focused and want to offer what is relevant to audiences. A question I often get is how to ask audiences what they want.
Unfortunately it isn’t as simple as that. People find it really hard to express what they want or even know what they want. A popular quote is Steve Jobs (in turn quoting Henry Ford):
“Some people say give the customers what they want, but that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, ‘If I’d ask customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse.’ People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.“
So how do we figure out what people want? Well, we have to do the hard work of understanding them, their life, what is relevant to them and how we fit in their lives. Put the focus on “understanding what people want to accomplish, not necessarily how they want to accomplish it”. Often conversations can reveal more than just looking at data (Harvard Business Review). This sets the basis for developing ideas and offers, which can then be shown to audiences for their reaction.
Image: Christina Wocin on Unsplash
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With lockdowns part of our life now, I thought it might be helpful to list the research that’s available about audiences and Covid. Thank you to all the organisations that are so generously making their data available for free.
Most relevant (not just in a New Zealand context) I find:
Culture Segments and Covid Audience Mindsets: Useful for organisations that are working with Culture Segments and Audience Atlas, MHM have looked into how the segments engaged during lockdowns and their attitudes to re-engaging after openings. Attitudes to re-engaging seem to be roughly in line with the segments’ general attitude to taking risk with culture. If you are new to Culture Segments, there is a lot of information freely available online that you can use, see more here.
Dexibit offers Recovery Index, a free dashboard that allows you to compare your visitation to the equivalent time in previous years and rate of recovery, and to put it into context globally and locally. In a live video in February 2021 Dexibit shared Secondary reopening trends for visitor attractions who are reopening after lockdown including visitation recovery, visitor behaviour like attrition and spend.
COVID-19 Audience Outlook Monitor Australia: This is a study by Patternmakers in partnership with international research partner WolfBrown. It tracks how audiences feel about returning to events in the context of the pandemic and was conducted several times with the latest findings from July 2021, with three more phases planned for 2021. It includes data about audience attitudes and behaviours, and how they are changing over time with indicators like attendance, ticket buying and spending, and measures things like comfort at different types of venues and confidence in different safety measures. It includes an interesting fact sheet on disability and factsheet on digital engagement.
New Zealanders and the Arts is the latest longitudinal study about New Zealanders’ attitudes to, attendance at and participation in the arts and, given it was conducted in 2020, touches on the impact of Covid-19.
Interesting data from other parts of the world – UK:
Evidence about how arts, culture and heritage audiences have responded to online content during the crisis from the Audience Agency.
Culture Restart is a tracker of cultural audiences and visitors during Covid-19 by the Insights Alliance (a collaboration by Indigo Ltd, Baker Richards and One Further). In their Culture Restart webinar (September 2021), they look back on 18 months of data gathered from cultural audiences, lessons learnt and how to use this insight to build resilience and innovative ways to engage with audiences.
Indigo’s After the Interval and Act 2 surveys asked audience members about their attitudes to missing live events during Covid-19, how they were engaging with culture during lockdown and when they anticipated returning to live events in the future. Coming Back to Theatre – Prioritising the Audience Experience (May 2021) looks into how food and beverage options impact people’s decisions whether or not to re-attend theatres.
The Family Arts Campaign and Indigo have worked together to look specifically at family audiences. There are a few key areas in which families differ significantly, these are price sensitivity, social distancing, digital content, outdoors and Christmas.
Indigo also released a special report on disabled audiences. The headline finding is that “77% of disabled audiences consider themselves to be ‘vulnerable to Coronavirus’ whilst only 28% of non-disabled audiences do”.
Cultural Participation Monitor is the Audience Agency’s nationwide longitudinal and ongoing panel survey of changing views about participating in creative and cultural activities through the pandemic and beyond.
The Patrons’ perspective is research undertaken with 3,000 members of the TheaterMania community in the UK and US to better understand the impact of the pandemic on the performing arts industry.
Audience Outlook Monitor for the US (part of the same initiative as for Australia, mentioned above).
LaPlaca Cohen shares Culture + Community in a Time of Crisis: A Special Edition of Culture Track, a national research and strategy initiative for US cultural organisations with Key Findings documents, raw data tables and an interactive tool.
And Colleen Dilenschneider shares data from Impact’s research with US visitor attractions in a Covid-19 section on her Know Your Own Bone blog.
DIY?
Lastly, you might want to conduct your own research. But what if there is no budget to outsource research? Well, with some careful planning it can also be done in-house. MHM helpfully shared their 5 tips to get the most from in-house evaluation:
Starting thinking about evaluation early
Start by asking — what are you trying to achieve?
Take an audience-focused approach
Mix your methods to cover a range of outcomes
Push for objectivity – challenge your assumptions
Have you come across other useful data? I’d love to expand the list and share what you found useful. Please get in touch.
How do these changes impact expectations on brands?
New research shows how the pandemic impacts core human needs – and what this means for brands.
The study has been conducted by Firefish, an insight agency I know from my time at Tate in the past. The research gives some relevant and interesting insights into what people across different generations are looking for in this time and how brands can help meet some of those needs. While done in the US, I think a lot of this is relevant here and applicable to cultural organisations.
Unsurprisingly the research reflects how dramatically life has changed across most aspects and for all generations. The basic human need of safety dominates currently, followed by Wellbeing.
The re-priorisation of needs leads to expectations people have from brands and these might influence a company’s reputation in the longterm. People see through marketing and how organisations act in a crisis can reveal how much they actually live up to their values.
People have expectations of brands, the research shows that in the main, people expect brands to:
step up and do something – this can be either helping directly or, if that’s not possible, providing a platform for help
show compassion, starting with staff
contribute to lightening the conversation
Source: Firefish report
The report finishes with a more detailed and practical summary of ‘where brands can help to meet evolving needs’. It seems to me that most of these findings can easily be interpreted for arts organisations (and many organisations have already provided activities in some of these areas).
What do you think? Does your experience in recent weeks correspond with these findings?
Bring everyone to the same level of understanding;
Incorporate data into all planning processes (not just marketing);
Develop measurable objectives and metrics for success;
Continuously gather market data and update plans accordingly;
Take advantage of the predictive power of data;
Look at market research as an investment rather than a cost; and
Are actively shifting the organization’s culture
For me no7 is bringing it all together – a culture change. This is about attitudes to data, but I think behind this needs to be a positive attitude and approach to people – eventually it is not about data, but about our visitors, audience, customers, whatever we choose to call them, and about understanding them and showing empathy.
BTW, I realise I didn’t post Colleen’s third blog, here it is if you want to complete the series and hear about common cognitive biases to data: Accepting Data Can Be Hard
2/4 of Colleen Dilenschneider’s steps to a data informed cultural organisation
Here is step 2 of Colleen Dilenschneider’s path to becoming a data informed cultural organisation: Data interpretation.
From my experience working at Tate, I support the suggested need for data advocates 100%. Research and data alone are not enough to become data informed, you need to bring the data to life. It requires a lot activation to get people to understand, embrace and eventually act on research findings.
Investing in insight is great, but investing in its activation will get you the return.
As Colleen suggests, data needs:
an insider, who knows what the findings mean
a storyteller, who shares the story that the data tells
Some great insights into becoming a data-informed cultural organisation can be found in a mini-series of Colleen Dilenschneider, of US research agency Impacts, on her blog.
She suggests four steps:
1 – data collection 2 – data interpretation 3 – data acceptance 4 – data integration
Read more about data collection including some useful explanations of types of research, what to measure and how to get the data.
But data is only the start, of course, and the culture change involved is not to be underestimated. Look out for the other three of the four steps she proposes in following blog posts.
Museums Aotearoa released a new report that brings together academic research with data collected from New Zealand museums and their visitors to answer the question “What value do museums, art galleries and heritage properties contribute to Aotearoa New Zealand?”.
Drawing on draws on a decade of visitor surveys at New Zealand’s museums and referencing international research, it shows how cultural institutions are making an active contribution to cultural well-being, social cohesion and the economy in addition to their vital role as kaitiaki of knowledge and tāonga.
A diverse audience is a much proclaimed goal for many cultural organisations, and rightly so. Public arts organisations need to be relevant to a broad population in order to be sustainable and funded long term. This means striving for an audience that is representative of the population.
The upcoming NZ census will tell us more about the ever-increasing diversity of the NZ population and with the update of the Audience Atlas by MHM and Creative NZ due in a few months, we will be able to compare cultural audiences with the population and understand the opportunities and challenges.
InsightUnlocked 