Last week we joined hundreds of cultural marketers, communicators and leaders at Leeds Playhouse for the AMA Conference 2026. The theme this year was a single word: Together.

Across three days in Leeds, “together” included conversations about income generation, access, digital confidence and leadership, and the same idea surfaced again and again: the challenges facing our sector are shared, and so the solutions need to be shared, too. No organisation can figure this out alone.

That‘s something we believe in at Indigo, and in fact the reason Indigo Share exists.

Insight is better when we build it together

For years, audience research in our sector worked in isolation: each organisation running its own surveys, asking its own questions, holding its own data, and then wondering how its results compared to everyone else’s.

Indigo Share is the collective approach to audience insight, built on a different premise that when cultural organisations gather and interpret audience insight collectively, everyone gets more. Organisations across the UK use the same core survey questions, so every response feeds into shared benchmarks that show each participant not just what their audiences think, but how that compares across the sector. The result is a genuinely collective understanding of cultural audiences: one that no single organisation could build on its own.

And this is the part we found ourselves coming back to during the conference: working together doesn’t just make the sector stronger, it raises the bar for every organisation involved. When you can see your post-visit scores alongside an industry benchmark, “good enough” stops being a guess. When another organisation’s results reveal what’s possible, it stretches everyone’s ambition. Collective insight turns individual data points into a standard we can all measure ourselves against, and improve upon, together.

A challenge from the keynote

The conference opened with a keynote from Shawab Iqbal, Executive Director of our host venue, Leeds Playhouse, for which I have the pleasure of serving as a Board member. He challenged us to think hard about the world our organisations now operate in: a more fragmented, more polarised society, where public trust can no longer be assumed and the political environment around arts and culture is shifting under our feet.

How do we respond to that? How do we make the case for culture to people right across the political spectrum, not just to the audiences who already agree with us? And where are our ‘red lines’ in terms of our values and principles and how we put them into practice day to day.

We left Leeds convinced that the answer starts with understanding. You cannot build connection and trust with people whose views you’ve never actually asked about.

Arts and Culture in a Changing Political Landscape

That’s exactly what our next Indigo Share: Hot Topic project is tackling head on.

We’ve partnered with More in Common, the research organisation behind the influential “Seven Segments” framework for understanding British society, to investigate how arts and culture fit into people’s lives right across Britain’s political landscape. By combining insight from Indigo’s UK-wide panel of 20,000 arts and cultural attenders with More in Common’s nationally representative polling, the project will explore how cultural audiences map onto the seven segments, how their attitudes compare with the general public’s, and what motivates engagement with arts and culture in every part of British society.

To make the case for culture effectively, to anyone, of any political persuasion, we need to understand how people across the full spectrum of British society think and feel about arts and culture.

We’ll be presenting the findings at a free webinar at 11am on Wednesday 2 September 2026. You can find out more and register via our website: Arts and Culture in a Changing Political Landscape: what does Britain think?

Stronger together

The AMA Conference continues to be a reminder of why we love this sector: the generosity with which people share what’s working (and what isn’t), the honesty about the challenges, and the shared determination to keep audiences at the heart of everything.

“Together” isn’t just a conference theme, it’s a way of working; and in a changing political landscape, it might be the most important one we have. If your organisation would like to be part of building a collective understanding of cultural audiences, we’d love to talk.

Find out more about Indigo Share, or get in touch with the team to join the conversation.