AUDIENCE DATA

In order that you get the message out about your event, you will need to decide on who will be the core audience for your event. This is called Target Marketing, which means segmenting your audience into distinct groups by the way that they take part in your events (what they are interested in) or through demographic information such as age, life-cycle stage or levels of income. You can read more about segmentation on: www.artscouncil.org.uk/audienceinsight.

Spending a bit of time thinking about what kinds of people will come to your event, or who you would like to attract can be very useful. Initially you might just want to think about the types of leisure activities they undertake, where they might live, their age, and family circumstances. This will help you decide on where you will put posters up, or send out potential bulk mailings of leaflets and the types of events you offer to them.

During your event, you can begin to collect some more data from your audience that will assist you in planning the contents of your future events, and planning your marketing activities in the future. Retaining detailed information will mean that you can target specific audience members with information on events they might like to attend.

There are a variety of ways to collect more information about your audience and develop a database of people that have been along to your event.

• Box office - the sale of tickets will help you collect addresses, and contact details, as well as giving you a record of which events people attended. The point of sale can also be a good time to ask customers some further questions about their interests.
• You can use a simple questionnaire for audience members to fill in as they leave an event, or during an event that lets them sign up to receive mail from you, gives you some feedback on their experience and about their interests. Volunteers could hand them out, or they could be made available in a meeting/eating/drinking area where people have the time to fill them in.
• You could have a section on your website that allows people to sign up to your mailing list and tell you about their preference.
• If you have a mailing list of previous customers, you could send a questionnaire out to them asking about their artistic and marketing preferences. You could do this at a quieter time of year in order that you can plan your marketing in advance.

You should try and collect people's names, address (make sure you get their postcode) and email addresses, ages, and how they found out about the event.

If you retain what information you gather about your customers, such as where they live, their interests, and how they found out about you, you can actively analyse it to see what marketing methods are most successful for people living in different areas, with different interests and of different ages. Analysing the data will also allow you to target audience members with information that they will be most interested in. For example, if someone attends a jazz concert one year, and you retain this information, you can mail them and others from the same concert, directly the following year. Or you could target a group that live in a certain area if an event is particularly near them.

If you plan to collect contact and personal information from your audience members, you must be aware of the Data Protection Act which means you have to tell your audience member or participant what you plan to do with their information, the legal name of your organisation and who else you might share their information with.

Have a look at the example audience questionnaire in the Resources section on the right hand side panel.

One-word Questionnaire
Here's an example of an extremely simple and unintrusive questionnaire, suitable for catching people's 'gut feeling' about an event. http://www.voluntaryarts.org/uploaded/map3619.pdf

Resources
You can find guide to data protection for small businesses on the information Commissioner's Office Site: www.dataprotection.gov.uk

If you would like to find out more about how to target audiences and work with different sections of your customer base, you can read about the recent Arts Council England arts-audience based segmentation research and how to use it by visiting http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/audienceinsight/home