Tomorrow’s Audience: FAQs

We shared the results at a webinar, hosted by Spektrix, on 30 January 2024. You can download the slides and watch a recording here.

This survey has now closed. Results were shared in our free webinar on 30 January 2024 and the report will be published soon.

The survey covered the following areas:

• How new audiences might be defined: new to the performing arts or just new to you?
• The profile of new audiences, such as their age, family life stage and socio-economic background
• How new audiences behave: their general leisure activities, frequency of attendance of performing arts and the impact of broader lifestyle factors
• New audiences’ attitudes and motivations: what made them attend, and what they might be looking for in the future
• The impact that attending has had on these audiences: did they feel they belonged and did the experience align with their personal values?

The survey was used by performing arts organisation, including theatres, arts centres, festivals, opera companies, orchestras or ballet companies.

The survey was designed to be sent to new bookers since Covid: this means anyone who has booked since you re-opened post-lockdown but not before that time. As booking data cannot always accurately identify new bookers (e.g. someone may have changed email address and ended up as a duplicate record), we will also ask the respondents to tell us about their booking history so we know for certain they fulfil our criteria.

We recommended that you sent the survey to a sample of these bookers. Depending on your usual email open rates, we recommended sending to around 3,000 - 5,000 people, but don’t worry if your list is smaller than this. The collective approach of a Hot Topic ensures that we gather a robust set of data by all working together across the sector to reach these new audiences. Ideally you would generate at least 150 responses to be able to confidently draw conclusions from your own data.

We know that newer audiences may be less likely to complete a survey, so we are offering incentives for them to complete it. Audiences will have the option to enter a prize draw to win two prizes of £150 of high street shopping vouchers at the end of the survey.

The survey was open from 16 October to 5 November 2023.

We will provide you with a specific link for your organisation that you will email out to your new audiences. Once a respondent clicks on this link their responses are recorded in our survey software. The results for your organisation are available for you to see in real time through another link which we will send you for that purpose.

The results from your database are then aggregated with responses from all other organisations and used to create an overall benchmark data set, which you'll be able to compare your results with. We will not share the responses for your individual organisation with anyone else – the results we share will always be the aggregated results so that no organisation can be individually identified.

As you send out the link in an email from your systems, we have no direct contact with customer email addresses initially.

The data that comes back into our software is NOT regarded as personal data, as there is no identifiable data in the responses.

When respondents have completed the survey they will be redirected to a form to ask if they would like to enter the prize draw, or to get involved in further research. This data will be kept separately and securely in our systems, in line with Indigo’s privacy policy. If you, or any of your colleagues have any concerns about this, please get in touch.