Turning the spotlight on your audience

At Indigo, our mission is to equip arts and culture organisations like yours to better understand and connect with your audiences. Post-visit surveys are a vital tool in achieving this, but we know many arts organisations worry about response rates, not to mention whether your responses reflect the full diversity of your audience.

The views of first-time attenders, younger people, and those from less advantaged backgrounds can feel harder to capture, and the next-day survey email can only go so far. So, how can you capture more responses and make them more representative?

Make more of your prize draw

With Indigo Share, survey respondents can enter a £100 quarterly prize draw every time they complete the survey. But are you shouting about this enough to under-represented groups? You could use the incentive as the subject line in your survey emails (perhaps A/B testing with a more traditional “tell us what you think” approach to see which gets the most clicks). Mention it in programmes or toilet door posters (and add a QR code to help people complete it there and then). And make sure your front-of-house staff know about it so they can encourage audience members to go home and check their emails.

Re-mail your first timers

We know that first time attenders are the least likely to fill in a post-event survey; after all they hardly know you (yet). So if your system allows, identify the first time bookers that you emailed who haven’t opened it, and re-send it a day or so later. 

Meet people where they are

Face-to-face approaches can work wonders. Having trained staff or volunteers with tablets in the foyer or at the bar allows you to intercept people when the experience is still fresh in their minds. If you’re unsure about approaching people directly, we can offer tailored training to help your team feel more confident.

Mix up your methods

Combining online surveys with other channels, like in-venue QR codes, can help you reach a broader audience. A simple sign at the bar or exit saying, “Enjoyed your visit? Tell us in 5 minutes for a chance to win £100” can make a big impact. We can give you links suitable for a range of different collection methods. If you can, print the link or a QR code on receipts in the bar or cafe; or put a business card with the QR code next to their interval drinks order. Catching them when they may have 5 minutes sitting down can mean they do it there and then.

Think about sampling

If you want to work out how many people would make a big enough sample to be confident of the results, you can use a sample calculator like this one. 95% confidence interval and 5% margin of error are fairly standard to use (you can read all about these on the same webpage if you’re interested). Then add your total audience numbers to see how many responses you’re aiming for. You could add your annual ticket sales or visitor numbers, or your total audience for a particular event. (Spoiler alert: sample size is usually 300-380 people unless you’re very small; as you get bigger, the sample size doesn’t tend to increase much.) 

Indigo Share Subscription surveys tend to get great response rates from bookers. One typical client with around 70,000 bookers each year has gathered 1,645 responses already with three months left to go. This works out at a 99% confidence interval and 3% margin of error - a great sign that you have reliable results to work with.

But ensuring your data is representative doesn’t just mean getting more responses: it’s about who responds. Hundreds of responses from only one section of your audience still won’t be representative of all your audience. Face-to-face collection (perhaps once a quarter if you can’t do it all the time) allows you to be more proactive with your sampling, and not just rely on the convenience of those who are willing to respond to an email - and gets you beyond just the booker, too. Systematic sampling is a semi-random way of gathering responses and is really practical and easy: you intercept every 10th (or 5th or 20th) visitor to walk past and ask them to complete the survey, either interviewing them, or perhaps handing over a tablet so they can complete it themselves. If people are racing out the door to get a train after an evening show, perhaps think about approaching them at the interval or even on their way in and giving them a QR code on a business card, thanking them for their time in advance.

Tell them how they’re making a difference

Why should we ask our audiences to spend time giving us their feedback when we never tell them what we do with it? Sharing examples of how audience feedback has changed what you do can encourage people to remain vocal and feel valued. My local gym has a noticeboard with a simple A4 document they refresh regularly entitled “You told us; we listened” and two or three things they’ve done on the back of feedback. It really encourages a wider range of people to speak up and helps build a great relationship with their customers.

Here’s a great example from our lovely friends at The Portico of Ards of using survey results to feed back to your audiences (thanks for sharing!).

What methods have you tried to capture a richer, more inclusive picture of your audience? We know that working together makes us all stronger, so if you have a story of best practice, please share it with us and we’ll shout about it. Together, we can ensure arts organisations across the UK thrive—one survey response at a time.