We talked to Svend Brown, Artistic Director of the East Neuk Festival, about audience data and what it means for him.

Q: What does audience data mean for East Neuk Festival?

“For us it is all about specific audiences, knowing them, building them, serving them better, renewing them: we can never learn too much about them and while hard box office data has its limitations, it is still invaluable. Qualitative data such as audience surveys and focus groups can mislead (inadvertently or not) or skew a picture: respondents may want to put over an impression of themselves which is then not borne out by the data. I was shocked once at how few performances some people who had claimed to be regular enthusiastic attenders actually came to. Increasingly web stats and social media analysis is crucial, especially FB and twitter.”

Q: What do you measure, and how do you use the measurements you make?

“Quantitative data for audiences is relatively straightforward: what are people going to, how often and when. What age and gender are they, how much do they spend, and in what kinds of groups do they seem to book? Where do they come from and how does that map against 1) demographic data from those postcodes and 2) any area specific actions we have taken to promote our work? How far will they travel, which days of the week do they prefer, which times. Doing this annually at East Neuk Festival builds a picture of audience preference that is fascinating and useful and I factor it in when planning programme – deciding timings of concerts, what kind of music to put where, where to develop and where to cut back … I find quantitative data more honest than for instance verbal feedback to questions like ‘which factors were most important in your decision to buy a ticket for …”   Ultimately I suspect that people attend concerts for many reasons which have little to do with music itself – social, tribal, availability and behavioural reasons – but they would prefer to give the impression that the music is the most important thing, so their answers can mislead. Perhaps we too are not good at asking questions that will get to the heart of concert attendance.

“The fantastically useful data that we cannot easily collect is about barriers to buying. Why didn’t they come? Which factors affected their decision?”

Q: Data gathering and data sharing: what’s your experience of working with external box offices? 

“The main challenge when working with box offices generally is that so many people have their own interpretation of the Data Protection Act: who owns the data; how it may be shared and utilised. If all of the box offices in Scotland got together with a fine lawyer and hammered out an agreed common understanding of it we would be much better off. Otherwise with any box office, you get out what you put in: if you are organised, focused, know what you want and build it in upfront you will fare better.”

Q: Tell us about your experience of partnerships; for example with peer organisations and local communities.

“The trick with partnerships is finding enough common ground for the partners to benefit without sacrificing the things that make them distinctive and special.

“Artistically this is difficult. For example there is regular pressure to buy into tours – and for big sections of the music industry tours are the natural way to do things: costs are shared and promotion enhanced. But if you are a small festival aiming at establishing a distinctive profile which gives audiences a unique reason to attend, the last thing you need is a lot of shows that they can see somewhere else too. At ENF we curate everything – nothing is off the peg.

“Operationally there are many more ways to make this work – and it would be good to see more of it in Scotland. For example, there are very few smaller organisations that can afford excellent marketing and PR: partnering with other organisations to engage skilled professionals here would be excellent.  We have also benefited strongly form partnerships in developing specific audiences; for example, in Littoral, our writing and ideas strand. Partnership with Waterstones put our programme and authors into their stores – in return they sold the books at our events; we partnered kindred festivals nearby in Dundee and St Andrews to cross-promote and make special offers and effectively reached literature loving attenders for all of us.

“ENF uses no actual venues: we put concerts where they work, in churches, halls, gardens, roadsides, woods … the process of working with the individuals and committees who run these places is a form of audience development in itself. If someone is sufficiently public spirited to serve on a committee or look after a place for the public benefit, chances are they will be connected in other ways to the community. We appreciate them hugely and ENF has benefited over the years from the many connections we have made through this process.”

Q: How you build relationships directly (or indirectly) with your audiences?

“I take this very personally and ENF has a very personal feel. At ENF I programme every concert and I curate the programme as a whole. So I also put my face on it: at every concert I welcome the audience, and then I am front of house before and after concerts, during the interval; I find people stop me in the street to comment or ask a question and I make myself available for this willingly. The team at ENF is small and the audiences get to know who they are pretty fast, so they too have warm relationships with the audience. This festival time shared experience lays a foundation for the whole audience relationship. When we email or write to them over the year, they know who we are. ENF has been notably successful at inspiring the audience to support us through donations and I believe this personal connection is key to that success.

“Next most important is tone and message.  I believe the personal touch is key. I write every piece of copy in the brochure and online; I write most tweets and FB posts. All  programme notes etc are by me. This gives the ENF a clear voice, tone and attitude which is recognisable, I hope, and also chimes well with our visual look. The key qualities are: we are serious about and seriously good at music, writing and art but we want to enjoy them in an informal, unstuffy relaxed environment. That also feeds into our look: e.g. our graphics are designed by a local artist whose wood and linocuts fit perfectly with our sense of local event on an international stage.

“When it comes to new and prospective audiences, we have to be inventive as resources are tight. One major venue manager I know boasted that he had to spend something like £75K on cross-mailings, advertising, buying mailing lists etc to develop his song audience. That just is not an option for us.  So here we do depend heavily on partnership and in kind exchange. We do special offer for X if they’ll do one for us. We use social media effectively to build awareness of our work and invest as heavily as possible in PR. We also depend on artists to bring their own audiences, though it is depressing how many of them simply are not social media or press savvy.”

Q: How does data help you when it comes to decision making and audience profiling?

“Having now 10 years of data on ENF we have a strong and evolving impression of who are audience is and how they relate to us. Take a crucial thing like launch date, for example: this has to be governed by all kinds of pressure including confirmation of funding decisions, commitment by artists etc. But our audience research showed clearly that it is was incredibly important that ENF as a rural festival announced its programme as early as possible This allows the audience to plan their attendance, book accommodation and travel, hook up with other friends who might be attending: generally it contributes to the audiences’ sense of pleasure and relaxation about the festival. So we as an organisation accepted that we would have to launch annually without fully knowing all funding decisions etc. But we are rewarded by a sales pattern that sees 80% of the ENF tickets sold in the first month of sales.  This gives us plenty of time to address any over or under capacity.”

Q: How do you gather your data? 

“We depend on the tried and tested routes: box office data, audience survey, analysis of FB and twitter streams, analysis of media response.

“In an ideal world we would have a one to one relationship with every audience member, be able to see ourselves through their eyes. Until that happens, these simple means serve us well.”

Many thanks to Svend for sharing insights into East Neuk Festival’s approach to audience data and decision making. Find East Neuk Festival online and @eastneukfest.