thank-you

A huge thank you to all the wonderful people who took part in the first HI-Arts Audience Development Survey last month!

I have now finished the analysis and report, which you can download from the HI-Arts Research web pages.

Here is a quick overview of the survey findings.

• 51 different arts and cultural enterprises completed the survey.
• Of these 32% were individual artists or practitioners, 21% were voluntary or community groups, 20% were art centres or a venue, 13% were promoters, 6% were touring or theatre companies, 8% marked themselves as ‘other’.
• All the art forms were represented in the survey (music, craft, visual arts, theatre, film, writing, dance, heritage, and museums).
• All the areas across the Highlands and Islands were represented in the survey.

• All enterprises engaged with a variety of small, medium and large audience bases (from less then 500 a year to more then 15,000 a year).
• The key audience base for these enterprises were adults aged 31 to 59 years, the tourism market, families, other artists and those in the Arts Sector.
• The majority of enterprises said their core audiences were mainly local residents.
• Only 22% of respondents admitted to having a ‘living’ marketing strategy.
• The most popular marketing and promotion tools were websites, posters and flyers, print brochures and leaflets, and email campaigns.
• Only 24% of respondents have Access Policies, although 17% admitted they ‘were working on it’.
• Accessible websites were the most popular accessible resources provided to disabled audiences by both ticketed and non-ticketed events and sellers.

The Survey will remain open until the end of July and I will be developing a new audience development survey for the autumn.

If you have any thoughts or questions about this survey, future surveys or about developing your own surveys please do get in touch.