Audiences
Understanding Every Individual to Engage and Grow Your Audience
Audiences don’t fit neatly into boxes.
Every individual has their own motivations, needs, barriers, and relationships that swap and change over time.
Connected CRM and audience engagement tools make it easier to personalise and curate messaging – provided we can cut through the noise to understand which signals really matter.
To understand one person better, start with the bigger picture.
This new report collates global research to build a complete, shared picture of audience behaviours and trends, identifying what motivates, inspires, and frustrates audiences today.
Wherever you are in your audience engagement journey, explore the big picture to frame more meaningful questions and understand how your own audience data fits with global trends.
- Global patterns in audience motivations, frustrations, and values.
- Actionable models to improve audience experience across your organisation.
- Success stories, examples, and inspiration from sector leaders and expert partners.
Audience Engagement expertise
Your audience does not experience ticketing, subscriptions, education programmes, and giving as separate relationships. The person who buys a single ticket to your holiday show may be the same person who subscribes next season, brings a child to a workshop, volunteers as an usher, or makes a year-end gift. To them, it is one relationship with your organisation.
Relationships grow deeper over time
There are three primary drivers that bring people to arts, culture, & in-person experiences: Social Connection, Discovery & Learning, and Entertainment & Enjoyment.
But the reasons people first engage aren’t always the reasons they keep coming back.
- Social Connection grows into Belonging & Identity
- Discovery & Learning grows into Challenge & Growth
- Entertainment & Enjoyment grows into Wellbeing & Escape
Loyalty is not a lost cause
Repeat attendance has been declining for at least a decade, but there are signs that decline may be slowing down.
Audiences are still making repeat visits to the same arts organisations. Reattendance is more stable than it has been for years.
That means this is a great moment to revisit your definitions of loyalty and frequent attendance. Understanding what those ideas mean to you – and to your audience members – can help you design messaging, reporting, and segmentation that’s ready for the next five years.
Relationships are built on trust
Audience experience is shaped by the invitation and welcome you extend; by a booking flow that feels clear and manageable; and by the belief that your organisation reflects people that they recognise and values that they share.
Different things matter to different people, and change over the course of their lives. There’s no single dimension that defines value for every visitor – but together, six intersecting factors influence the extent to which people trust an organisation, feel it understands them, and want the relationship to continue.
Welcome – Access – Value – Recommendations – Principles – Place
The Elgiva · Photo by Caroline Taylor
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good
Relationships are built on trust. But trust is quickly undermined by frustrations or blockers that may seem small in isolation.
Not every improvement is under your control. Older buildings, external programming, and complex internal structures can all make improvement hard to deliver. But often, small changes can make a significant difference to audience experience.
Bring teams together to focus on what you can do to build trust, understanding, and loyalty.
When programming, education, ticketing, fundraising, marketing, and community teams work together, you may be surprised how many hurdles you can remove.
Everyman Theatre Chelthenham
