Catherine Wheels is a small, active, artist-led company that tours internationally, playing to an audience of children and families. They see festivals and theatres as their main ‘audiences’, rarely selling directly to the public and rarely dealing in transactional, box-office type data. Key to success in this approach is their focus on relationships with programmers and festival managers, who represent their main conduit for audience data.

Producer and joint CEO Paul Fitzpatrick notes that a particular challenge for the team at Catherine Wheels is the lack of a consistent offer. Their touring schedule means that they may not return to a particular venue for two years, by which time the audience from their last show will have grown up. As a result it’s important that they’re active in developing those relationships that can be relied upon, year on year – for instance, ensuring that they always have a tour available for schools at the same time every year.

The Catherine Wheels team focuses on measures such as overall performance numbers, attendance, and total numbers of performances in key venues and schools. They hold data from rural and urban settings stretching back 12 years, allowing them to measure trends and identify deviations. Paul stresses the need to temper any review of data with a clear understanding of the work, the setting, and the population itself – where a population is small; an audience of just 30 could be the equivalent to a sell-out show in the city.

The strategic strength of Catherine Wheels’ proprietary database of venue and production information comes into play when, for example, a venue may ask for additional performances. By interrogating previous years’ data, Catherine Wheels can project likely ticket sales based on whether those performances sold well with family audiences, and through trying various approaches, they have found that basing decisions on data of this kind is more practically useful for them than box office data.

Catherine Wheels are highly proactive on the partnership front, and have found that mutual benefits flow from partnering with communities, independent theatre production groups, venues and other companies operating in the sector. They have also forged working relationships with rural training agencies, identifying opportunities to work with young people not in education, employment or training.

They actively share data sets with other companies making work for young audiences – Paul explains that, as neither Catherine Wheels nor their peers have access to tools such as segmented audience lists, this is an invaluable collaborative approach. Whilst one could argue that these companies are sometimes in competition for funding, Paul observes that they are never in competition over the work itself, noting that their particular niche of children’s theatre in Scotland is simply not big enough at the moment for that to present a problem.

The team at Catherine Wheels have enthusiastically embraced social media which is delivering some excellent results on both the audience engagement and strategic data collection fronts. Where comments cards were once the sole source of feedback – and Catherine Wheels still distribute these, erecting a banner saying ‘Tell us what you thought’ to encourage honest feedback – young social media-savvy parents are now proactively tweeting and posting their comments, waxing lyrical about their experiences and encouraging others to attend. Social media tools are empowering Catherine Wheels to develop and maintain ongoing relationships in locations where they may not return for some considerable time – whether that be Thurso, Taiwan or Tasmania. Paul notes, with interest, that the majority of social comments and feedback are now emanating from audiences where previously conversations were largely peer-to-peer.

A key target for Catherine Wheels, going forward, is to develop a nucleus of committed champions for their work, and they already have some contenders in place for these roles. They perceive this approach as a logical extension of their overall strategy – far more useful than, for instance, harvesting thousands of emails. And, as in everything that Catherine Wheels do in the field of audience data, the key consideration is to ensure that every single resource is focused in such a way as to deliver maximum return.

Thanks to Paul Fitzpatrick for sharing insights into Catherine Wheels’ approach to audience data and decision making. Connect with Catherine Wheels at @cwheelstheatre.