The Audience Finder program helps you to better understand audience behaviours, motivations, experiences and demographics. It provides valuable insight to help put that understanding into context for informing audience development activity and helping to increase and diversify audiences. If you are a National Portfolio Organisation (NPO), your funding agreement requires you to submit audience data to Audience Finder Data Tools, unless you have an official exemption from your Relationship Manager.


To fulfil their Arts Council England (ACE) annual reporting requirements at the end of the 21/22 financial year, all Band 2 and Band 3 NPOs are also required to submit data on the protected characteristics of their audiences using an Audience Finder survey which will allow them to create an Audience Report. The data on protected characteristics can be collected via the core questions in the Audience Finder survey.


Therefore, all Band 2 and Band 3 NPOs must contribute survey data, and also submit ticketing data where it is possible to do so. Submitting ticketing data in addition to the required survey data will allow your organisation to utilise all of the audience insight tools within the Audience Finder Data Tools, giving you a better overall picture of your audience.


Band 2 & 3 NPOs must contribute a survey data report and one of the below data sources if possible based on their organsation type:


  1. A survey data report produced through Audience Finder Answers of an Audience Finder survey with a total of 380 complete responses. If you feel you cannot collect 380 responses, please get in touch with your Relationship Manager initially, and the Audience Agency can then support you further in meeting these requirements.
  2. A ticketing data report produced through Audience Finder Answers of all your ticketing data for the 21/22 financial year with competed production categorisation of this data to maintain the national dataset for ACE.
  3. If a touring organisation, an Annual summary from Audience Finder Show Stats of all of your physical productions from venues within England.


Once your data has been collected you can produce your annual report using Audience Finder Answers and/or Audience Finder Show Stats.


Please note, all annual reports for 21/22 are required to be produced from Audience Finder Answers and/or Audience Finder Show Stats and not Audience Finder Original.