Leeds Heritage Theatres runs three venues: Leeds Grand, City Varieties and Hyde Park Picture House. They have been using Indigo Share Subscription for some time, and approached us to help them work out how they could bring together their impact story.
The problem
Leeds Heritage Theatres (LHT) wanted to understand and demonstrate the true breadth of their impact across all their venues - not just ticket sales. They needed a clear, consistent way to capture the value they bring to audiences, artists, staff, communities, and the city. Without this, it was difficult to evidence the personal, artistic, community, economic, and environmental contributions of their three venues in a way that was manageable and clear.
What we did
Starting with a workshop to co-create a model that worked for them, we designed a bespoke Impact Framework, measuring Personal, Artistic, Community, Economic and Environmental impact. We logged practical metrics (from experience ratings to energy usage tracking) and helped to create a plan for where those metrics were sourced and who held responsibility for each element. The framework drew in results from Indigo Share Subscription surveys, social media, press, anecdotal feedback and business results and laid them out in a matrix against ticket bookers, participants, and non-attenders, ensuring that the framework reflected not only current audiences but also the wider community. Finally we made sure that there was a snappy, visual and memorable summary that could be referred to by everyone, so it wouldn't just sit on a shelf!
The impact
The framework now gives LHT a holistic picture of their role in Leeds:
Evidence that audiences feel proud to belong and value extraordinary stories.
Data showing how representative their audiences are of the city.
Benchmarks for economic and environmental performance to track progress year on year.
The LHT team refer to it in management and planning meetings and use it to frame their reporting, demonstrating their cultural, social, and economic value to funders, partners, and the public — while making evidence-based decisions for the future.
We approached Indigo to help us start to better understand our audiences and their motivations. What we ended up with was an incredible framework for evaluation across our key stakeholders, allowing us to benchmark against our priorities and build a strong foundation of data to support and inform strategic decision making across the organisation. The team were fantastic at understanding what we wanted and worked with us to unpick some of the complexities of a multi-artform, multi-venue organisation and the challenges that brings for holistic evaluation.
Amy Sanderson - Head of Communications and Commercial, Leeds Heritage Theatres