Headline findings: 2023/24 Audience Experience results

Indigo CEO Katy Raines shares the headline findings from the first six months of data collection through the Indigo Share Audience Experience surveys.

We have just shared a six-month benchmark report with the cultural organisations who use our Indigo Share: Subscription. To create these reports, we aggregated results from over 20,000 audience responses to help organisations see how they are performing against others in the sector.

Only organisation on a paid Indigo Share: Subscription receive these interim reports (we do publish the annual reports for anyone to read). However, we know just how valuable this collective insight can be for our sector, so are sharing the headlines with everyone.

There are some real positives for organisations in 2023:

• Frequency of attendance is recovering well, with close to half of respondents saying they attend arts and cultural events/experiences at least six times per year.

• Although ‘entertainment’ continues to be the highest driver of attendance (74%), there are many who are looking for variety and adventure (61% like to see a ‘variety of things’ and 40% enjoy trying out ‘new or unfamiliar things’).
• With an average Net Promoter Score of 73, audiences continue to rate arts organisations higher than Apple (61*) and Amazon (64*).
• 91% of respondents agreed that the organisation they visited was ‘important to our local community’, with 90% saying they felt ‘welcome and included’ showing how well we’re all doing at connecting with people.

*Sourced from public information online

But audiences and organisations are reporting challenges too:

• The cost of living crisis is affecting three quarters of attenders (57% ‘a little’ and 18% ‘a lot’), with only 1 in 4 saying they are unaffected.
• Less than half of respondents felt that the organisations were ‘demonstrating a clear commitment to environmental responsibility’, despite 77% of audiences (in Indigo’s Act Green 2023 survey) saying that they wanted cultural organisations to ‘influence society to make radical change in response to the climate emergency’.
• Travelling by car is still the most popular transport method for cultural attenders (57%), with about a third travelling by public transport. (If you want to find out more about ways we’re helping to nudge audience behaviour on this one, look at the early results of our Act Green Travel pilot with the house theatre network and You.Smart.Thing).