Guide to Audience Development Planning

Written by:

Anne Torreggiani, Chief Executive

Pamela Pfrommer, Senior Consultant

The Audience Agency

August 2015

Guide to Audience Development Planning

Introduction

This guide to audience development planning reflects the views and experience of The

Audience Agency team and is based on a combination of documented theory and our

observations and experience of what helps organisations to develop thriving, sustainable

audiences.

It is vital to note that there is no single, right way to create an audience plan.

Organisations play different roles in the “cultural eco-system”, and any audience

development plan should reflect the scale, resources, personality and purpose of each.

Organisations try to reach different audiences for different reasons and do so in different

ways. This diversity is the sign of a healthy, creative and audience-focused eco-system.

What this guide suggests is a flexible process that can help organisations surface and test

its ambitions for developing audiences and then take realistic steps towards achieving

them with a good chance of success. The framework for building a plan is a simple one,

suitable for all sorts of experiences, artforms and types of organisations, regardless of

scale, resources or mission.

The audience plan – and phases of the planning process - can be more or less integrated

into other plans, as long as it is commonly understood and used. This process is

embedded in our online audience development planner. The tool offers a simplified 6-

step process (as detailed in this article) guiding users through the process of creating

their plan. Plans can be saved and downloaded as word documents in Audience Finder

which is available for all cultural organisations to access free at www.audiencefinder.org

What is Audience Development?

Audience development is broad in scope and covers a large number of activities,

approaches and philosophies, but is a term used to describe the way in which

relationships between audiences and cultural organisations are managed.

The Audience Agency definition: …a planned, organisation-wide approach to extending

the range and nature of relationships with the public, it helps a cultural organisation to

achieve its mission, balancing social purpose, financial sustainability and creative

ambitions.

What is an audience development plan?

We consider that an audience development plan is an explicit, suitably detailed plan for

achieving a range of audience aims. These might be social, financial, creative and/or

educational; most cultural organisations have the demanding task of managing all sorts of

competing priorities, and a plan can therefore help them to balance these. Actions listed

in the plan might combine programming, marketing and communications, educational and

environmental activities. However, such a plan requires collaboration between those

responsible for all these areas.

An audience development plan is therefore not a marketing or campaign plan for a

specific event, activity or season, nor is it a programme of special activities, nor an

outreach initiative but could set the context for such activities and inform a delivery

plan.

Why have a plan?

We place a strong emphasis on a clearly articulated plan, communicated consistently

across the organisation. Few cultural organisations have a long-term audience plan which

spans a period of years in the same way they have a long-term financial one. As a result

this can hamper genuine progress in growing and diversifying audiences. The process of

collaborating in a plan’s creation is a useful exercise in itself for an organisation to

undertake as it helps to:

 Define a well-framed purpose

 Create shared understanding of audience potential and what success looks like

 Provide a route-map for where an organisation wants to go

 Create a framework for collaboration between everyone planning and delivering

aspects of the audience offer, from programming to customer welcome

 Determine resources – budgets, people and skills.

Use of evidence

One of the defining features of an audience plan is that it is based on real evidence,

rather than untested assumptions. All planning benefits from evidence, but in the case of

audience strategy, it is particularly important to understand the world from outside in.

Without evidence - that the audiences we hope to reach are really within our reach -

without listening to their opinions, or tracking their habits, our efforts to reach them are

at best a shot in the dark, at worst a waste of our limited resources.

Different organisations however need different kinds of evidence, and there is a great

diversity in the level of resources and skill organisations are able to invest in this area.

Broadly speaking, the higher the stakes are, the greater the need for evidence. So large

organisations with high revenue targets and social expectations will need plenty, but a

small organisation planning a radical change will also need to think about investing at the

right level.

At each stage of the planning process that follows, we have suggested what kinds of

evidence would be helpful. There is further information at the end of this document on

the use of evidence for audience development planning and where that is located.

Planning process overview

Our planning process can be applied more or less explicitly and every organisation can

answer the questions in different ways. Many organisations will carry out aspects of this

process as part of their overall strategic planning and will not necessarily complete each

step, or necessarily in this order.

What you want to achieve

Agreeing where audiences sit in your mission and strategy -

articulating ambitions.

What is your potential, what are the limitations?

Using evidence to assess position, audience potential and to

understand audience barriers and needs.

How will you achieve success?

Choosing the main strategic approaches likely to meet audience goals

- capitalise on opportunities and mitigate risks.

What will success look like? How will you measure it?

Development of SMART objectives against chosen strategies

What will you do, when?

Timetabled, budgeted and resourced range of activities designed to

achieve objectives.

Is it working? What do you need to change?

Approach for monitoring success, review of progress and adaptation

of action plans.

Mission

Analysis

Strategies

Objectives

Action

Review

Mission Analysis Strategies Objectives Action Review

Your audience development plan: step-by-step

1. Mission: setting audience goals

The starting point is to identify the audience goals - implicit or explicit - in your

organisation’s overall mission and other strategic plans. At this level, though rooted in

reality, goals might also be aspirational and ambitious.

Your goals will probably be a mix of:

 Financial – income from ticket sales, secondary spend, membership, donations

 Social – involving specific communities, increasing less engaged audiences,

overcoming barriers, contributions to civic life or community-building,

instrumental impacts on communities, advocacy with stakeholders

 Educational or experiential – developing the range and depth of audience

engagement, the quality of their experiences, learning opportunities, instrumental

outcomes

 Reputational/creative – building audiences for specific types of work, gaining

recognition, collaborative ventures

Evidence to use:

Previous track record; key trends over time; headlines from audience feedback; internal

business plan review

Mission

Analysis

Strategies Objectives Action Review

2. Analysis: understanding your situation and potential

With aspirations in mind, you will need to assess the real potential for audience

development in your organisation. Which audiences do you need to engage and how to

meet those initial goals? Analysis should explore the opportunities and barriers you might

encounter, and test out the achievability of ambitions. Carrying out analysis requires real

evidence, more so here than in any other phase.

Useful analysis combines internal and external exploration:

 Internal: your organisation’s current activities and their success

 Current audiences: overall trends, patterns of engagement, knowledge of needs

 External: who does similar things, opportunities and threats, changing environment

 Potential audiences: location, profiles, preferences and barriers/motivations

One of the most powerful ways of analysing target audiences is to create a clear

‘segmentation’ which identifies distinct groups who will respond to different treatment.

Having a working segmentation as the basis for your cultural offerings for a range of

different people is critical to successful audience development.

Evidence to use:

Current audiences: box office data analysis; survey data; qualitative research; audience

profiles; postcode analysis (available through Audience Finder)

Potential: catchment area analysis population profile (Area Profile Reports); secondary

research; Audience Spectrum profiles; primary research or consultation with target

groups

Comparative benchmarks for area/artform (available through Audience Finder)

Mission

Analysis Strategies Objectives Action Review

3. Choosing your strategies

Having identified your audience potential, you can choose what approaches it will take to

engage those audiences and in so doing, reach your goals.

Essentially, these are likely to combine developing new and existing audiences by

developing new and existing programme offers.

It can be considered risky to focus too heavily on building new audiences for new

activities, so a measured approach is recommended, informed by a realistic assessment

of the resource implications of your chosen strategies.

The Ansoff matrix is an example of a tool that can aid planning for what your organisation

will do to retain and grow its core audience, while attracting new target audiences. When

using the matrix, consider the relationship between audiences and your product or

cultural offer, particularly with regard to whether they are: familiar or unfamiliar with

your organisation’s work. The completed matrix can then be used to inform objectives

that seem most meaningful to your organisation’s strategic goals.

A template for this is provided in our online audience development planner

www.theaudienceagency.org/products/audience-development-planner

Evidence to use:

Examples of effectiveness of strategies selected; cost-benefit analysis/ROI; evidence of

audience need, programme interests or preferences; evidence of interest among

potential audiences.

Mission Analysis Strategies Objectives Action Review

4. Setting clear objectives

Once you are clear about your strategic goals, specific objectives can then be set for your

chosen strategies, indicating expectations to engage new and/or existing audiences.

Objectives should reflect the organisation’s higher goals, translating them into

quantifiable, SMART targets for financial, social, experiential or creative achievements.

SMART objectives make action planning and monitoring easier and will enable your

organisation to clearly identify what evidence you need to measure achievement.

Useful framework: SMART

S pecific - The goal is clearly defined and unambiguous

M easurable - The goal uses concrete evidence to measure achievement, e.g. through

box office data, audience surveys etc.

A chievable - The goal must be something that may be challenging but isn’t out of reach

R elevant - The goal must matter to your organisation and relate to its mission

T imetabled - Goals need grounding within a time frame, incorporating a delivery/end

date

Evidence to use:

Trends, track-record and regional/national benchmarks (available through Audience

Finder)

Mission Analysis Strategies Objectives Action Review

5. Putting it into action

The action plan translates your thinking into every day, tactical practice. We often

recommend following a template that indicates how you will adapt the full “mix”

(commonly referred to as 4Ps) to suit the needs of each target audience. This includes

noting aspects of your programme which respond directly to particular audience needs.

Importantly, your action plan should make clear:

 Budget (based on real costings)

 People responsible for actions/strands.

 Partners and collaborators

 Staff with relevant skills and capacity

 Timelines

Useful framework: The Mix – ‘4Ps’

Programme/ product - the key elements of your programme offer for different audiences

e.g. Live / Digital, types of programming, participation

Place – Environment where your intended programme/product takes place, channels of

distribution, at what times, how people access it, booking facilities etc.

Price – What the value proposition is, paid vs free. Whether the target audience responds

to premium/discounts/offers

Promotion – Channels and methods to communicate messages to your intended target

audience

Evidence to use:

Evidence of success of previous tactics; evidence of audience preferences (reference

4Ps); pricing analysis

Mission Analysis Strategies Objectives Action Review

6. Review, evaluate and adapt your plan

The final step is to measure your progress towards objectives, with a view to adapting

approaches, or the goals themselves.

It is helpful to decide at the outset what constitutes suitable evidence, how to collect it,

and where and how to debate and review its significance.

We would encourage you to measure what you value (not value what you measure),

matching metrics to their original objectives.

Return on Investment (ROI) can be used to measure and evaluate the relative

performance of different projects or activities. Monitoring the difference between spend

and return as a regular metric can be helpful – e.g. marketing spend per £1 ticket

revenue earned. See this article for guidance on setting metrics

www.theaudienceagency.org/insight/using-evidence-for-effective-planning

Evidence to use:

Evidence from progress monitoring (metrics should reflect objectives set), e.g. Financial –

required revenue, margins; Social - specified communities (location or interest) and

Creative - achievements in creating particular kinds of quality experiences.

Glossary

Audience Finder

Delivered by The Audience Agency, Audience Finder has the aim of supporting cultural

organisations to reach more people, new audiences with greater efficiency. It is a

collaborative data-sharing and capacity development programme. Analysis combines

customer and behavioural data fed from box office systems, online interactions and a

primary research survey exploring motivations and opinions www.audiencefinder.org

Audience Spectrum

Audience Spectrum is a new segmentation of the English population with 10 segments

that categorise people first and foremost by how they engage with culture in a way that

is geographically locatable. Replacing Arts Audiences Insight, new developments include

profiles being as relevant to museums as they are to the arts, and accurately targetable

to postcodes.

One of Audience Spectrum’s primary uses is to enable cultural organisations to think

about working with less engaged audiences and to inform strategies to help build these

relationships www.theaudienceagency.org/audience-spectrum

CRM - Customer Relationship Management

Customer Relationship Management is the management process that uses individual

customer data to enable a tailored and mutually trusting and valuable proposition.

In all but the smallest of organisations, CRM is characterised by the IT enabled

integration of customer data from multiple sources.

This term is used as a description for seeking customers and developing relationships with

them. CRM also relates to the nature of systems that organisations put in place to capture

data and manage audience relationships.

Data Sharing

Audience data is not inherently useful and only becomes so once it is put to a purpose

and organised, analysed or processed to that end. We tend to think of data as

information from a box office system, or increasingly from online or social media, but it

includes any recorded information e.g. mailing lists, names in a CRM database, comments

in a visitor’s book or emails/data collected through surveys.

There are two main purposes which data serves, and any plan to share data should be

clearly geared to one or both www.theaudienceagency.org/insight/data-sharing

a) to provide actionable insight about audiences and non-attenders

b) to enable communication directly with audiences or participants

Least engaged / Lower engaged

This term refers to sections of the population least likely to engage with arts and culture,

as identified through population studies such as the DCMS’ annual Taking Part survey

www.gov.uk/government/collections/taking-part

Analysis suggests that not being engaged with culture (and indeed with many other public

services and aspects of leisure) is linked to other indices of deprivation, in particular

lower levels of educational attainment, a more significant factor than lack of wealth and

certainly than ethnicity or disability. Tools like Audience Spectrum are helpful in

identifying less engaged people.

Market Testing

A form of audience or consumer research which invites feedback on proposed activities

before they go to market. This is usually done through qualitative methodologies.

Segmentation

'Segmentation' happens when a given audience or market is broken down into distinct

groups that behave in similar ways or have similar needs. Segmentation can help

organisations to understand their audiences, identify a big enough group of people that

are locatable, and develop a cultural offer and tailored communications that are based

on needs. Population segmentation systems – like Audience Spectrum, Mosaic, Acorn or

Culture Segments can add depth to an organisation’s segmentation of its audience, and

enable organisations to identify a new, untapped audience for their work.

www.theaudienceagency.org/insight/segmentation-made-simple

Key resources include:

www.audiencefinder.org for tools and dashboard metrics on box office and survey data,

web analytics and benchmarking

www.audiencesontour.org site for touring companies containing best practice examples,

advice and guidance on engagement

www.culturehive.co.uk for case studies, articles, toolkits and a range of good practice

audience development, digital and marketing resources

What’s in Audience Finder?

Audience Finder resources

Purpose

Dashboard metrics

(Login required)

Audience profiles, behaviour, location and attitudes

from data banked with Audience Finder

www.audiencefinder.org

Sector / artform reporting

benchmarks

Available when logged in at www.audiencefinder.org

Geographic cluster trends and

benchmarks

Available when logged in at www.audiencefinder.org

Insight articles

www.theaudienceagency.org/insight

Audience Development Planner

template

www.theaudienceagency.org/products/audience-

development-planner

Google Analytics - Hitwise

Available when logged in at www.audiencefinder.org

Segmentation toolkits

www.theaudienceagency.org/insight/segmentation-

made-simple

www.theaudienceagency.org/insight/the-diy-guide-to-

devising-a-segmentation-for-touring-companies

Area Profile reports

http://www.theaudienceagency.org/audience-

research-and-insight/area-profile-reports/

Audience Spectrum profiling

www.theaudienceagency.org/audience-spectrum

Data sharing guidance

www.theaudienceagency.org/insight/data-sharing

Digital toolkits

www.theaudienceagency.org/insight/culture24-digital-

resources

Advice and guidance for touring

companies