The Audience Agency
The Audience Agency is a mission-led charity helping arts organisations deliver their creative vision, social purpose, and business resilience. We combine bespoke research and consultancy projects with data products and segmentation tools to help organisations understand their audiences and thrive.
Working with cultural organisations of all types and sizes, The Audience Agency has been a Spektrix Partner since 2016, and has served over 450 members of the Spektrix community through our leading data platform, Audience Answers, bespoke audience development and research projects, and our geo-demographic segmentation and profiling tool, Audience Spectrum. The most accurate segmentation tool in the UK cultural sector, segmenting the UK population by their attitudes towards culture, and by what they like to see and do and providing a common language for talking about audiences.
- Audience Answers: Audience Answers is the Audience Agency’s audience insight and development platform and toolkit that enables arts, culture, and heritage organisations to understand, apply, and share insights to increase understanding of audiences, audience development initiatives, and sales campaigns. Audience Answers integrates with Spektrix through an automated extraction feed, working alongside an internationally recognised survey template. Whatever you need, and whatever your organisation’s size or budget, this constantly developing suite of audience analysis tools and support is designed to help arts organisations gain a genuine and useful understanding of the audiences they serve.
- Audience Spectrum: Audience Spectrum segments the UK population by their attitudes towards culture and what they like to see and do, helping arts organisations profile their audiences and build deeper relationships to increase engagement and ticket sales. When used in conjunction with Spektrix, using the Audience Spectrum Enhancement in Spektrix, Audience Spectrum becomes a powerful tool for prospecting, profiling, reporting, and mailing, becoming an essential addition to your toolkit and one of the most effective ways to apply segmentation to your campaigns within Spektrix, by tagging your customer records in your Spektrix database at the individual customer level for the 1st- and 2nd-tier Audience Spectrum segments. Join Spektrix users, including Aberdeen Performing Arts, Hall For Cornwall, Edinburgh International Festival and Nottingham Playhouse, in using Audience Spectrum within Spektrix today.
- Audience Development Consultancy: Our comprehensive audience development consultancy services are enabled by a cross-cutting team of researchers and consultants working in a fully collaborative style. Our nationwide team of Audience Development specialists combine their detailed knowledge of audience engagement across a range of art forms with local expertise and insight to help you through every stage of your audience development activity. Our team have held senior positions in some of the UK’s most innovative and successful cultural organisations; we understand your challenges and know how to help you overcome them—specialising in everything from audience development, digital engagement and policy to access and inclusion. We work across the UK sector to push the envelope of best practice and encourage knowledge development through collaboration.
/ Audience Answers- Free to onboard | Audience Spectrum in Spektrix- From £1,500 as an annual subscription | Audience Development & Consultancy are project based with prices on application
Nottingham Playhouse has used Audience Spectrum as a key tool in its marketing strategy since 2016. It is embedded at both strategic and tactical level, from multi-year business plans to individual campaigns. It sits alongside and complements the other tools including our sales and CRM system (Spektrix) and one off research and data analysis projects. One of the many ways that we’re using Audience Spectrum is to support our approach for Levelling Up for Culture Places which, as an ACE NPO, is a key element of our 2023-26 business plan. At time of writing, we’re early in our 3-year business plan, the main outcomes have been the development of a set of ‘neighbourhood profiles’ for each of our target areas, setting annual targets and developing audience development and marketing campaigns for our projects taking place in 2023-24.
In 2020, EIF decided it was time for the organisation to become more data-led in its approach to all of its audiences - both local and visiting. They started by hiring a new team member, dedicated to data-led audience insights, who understood segmentation to be key to success. The team selected Audience Spectrum for the task, thanks to its flexibility and benchmarking ability against both wider arts engagement across Scotland, and the whole UK population. From 2021 EIF began using their Audience Spectrum License to tag bookers and survey responders. This allowed them to properly profile and evaluate their audiences, forming the cornerstone of campaign planning across all of the organisation's communications. The big trial of the success of the new segmentation approach came with rolling out its insights across the summer 2022 festival...