Regular e-surveying is an effective way to collect insight on an ongoing basis that can be used within your day-to-day activities and for continuous monitoring of your audiences.
Particularly as the arts sector continues to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, your Audience Finder survey can become an essential monitoring tool to see how your audience is changing and their opinions. Remember, you can add up to five free of charge premium questions to the core survey, and we have an individual survey available for England, Scotland, and Wales, the latter also available in Welsh language.
We would recommend e-surveying your audiences monthly or quarterly, depending on your capacity and program. This helps ensure respondents fill in a survey soon after their visit, increasing accuracy. It also allows you to analyse your data more regularly, comparing collection periods to monitor change and influence how you are communicating with your audiences and working as an organisation. Using these alongside your other data sources where applicable, such as ticketing data, analytics or social media data, and other surveying, allows you to be as audience-centred as possible.
We would advise against only e-surveying your audiences annually. Although this strategy can give you the number of responses needed for analysis and funder requirements, it involves surveying many visitors who haven't attended for over six months, meaning the visit is less familiar and the data gathered is, therefore, less robust. This strategy also limits your ability to quickly interpret and use insights, due to the longer time period of data collected and less frequency in collecting new data.
As you collect data through Audience Finder surveys, you can begin analysing, benchmarking and reporting on the results using your Audience Finder and Audience Finder 2.0 Beta dashboards.