From January 2016 Culture Republic will launch a new audience research pilot project in partnership with the Audience Agency, helping Scotland’s museums and galleries set their audience profiles in context alongside peers across the UK. Now’s the time to get involved! Read on to find out more, and contact us now to take part. 

Museums, galleries and visual arts exhibition spaces all over the country are invited to participate. Together, we will create a new resource for everyone who shares an interest in growing visual arts audiences in Scotland.

Combining postcode data, social media information and intelligence gathered through in-venue surveys, we will build a real-time, multi-dimensional picture of where, how and why people engage with the visual arts.

Take part

There are three ways to get involved: opt for one or all of them to start benchmarking your audience against your peers and colleagues in Scotland and beyond:

1. Profile your postcode data: if you collect postcode data from your audience, you can be part of a new national audience data set for the visual arts. Share 12 months of your visitor data, and it will be aggregated with data from venues across the country to establish patterns of audience crossover and repeat attendance across the country, building up a Scotland-wide picture of audience demographics and characteristics. Don’t worry, your postcodes are safe and secure– we’ll never use them for ourselves or share them in non-aggregated form.
2. Profile your online audience: if your venue is active on Facebook, twitter and/or Instagram, you can be part of our online profiling programme, mapping digital audiences and their engagement locally, nationally and internationally. You only need to give us access to your active social media accounts – we will do the rest.
3. Be part of our in-venue audience survey pilot: in partnership with the Audience Agency, we are piloting a short, in-venue audience survey that will explore visitor profiles and motivations, allowing participating organisations to compare their audiences with peers across the UK at the touch of a button. Up to 25 visual arts venues can participate in this pilot phase, and anonymised, aggregated survey findings will be reported back to all participating venues in a series of sharing events and briefings throughout 2016.

By getting involved, you’ll become part of a Scotland-wide network of visual arts venues and organisations, working together to grow our collective understanding of audience behaviours, profiles and motivations around the country. You’ll get:

• Early access to research findings;
• Regular project reporting and support with your data gathering;
• Invitations to sharing events and networking opportunities with fellow participants;
• Online dashboard access to your own in-venue survey data when 380 or more responses are collected from your venue;
• Opportunities to further profile your own audience data for bespoke insights and intelligence.

This is a not-for-profit project, and there is a small project fee that covers set-up, data analysis, project reporting and sharing events.

Contact Dianne at Culture Republic to take part or find out more.