More about measuring engagement

I have found myself thinking a lot recently about how cultural organisations can measure the way that audiences, visitors and participants experience what they have to offer. It all started when I discovered that Scottish arts organisations had asked a session on measuring public engagement at the Scottish Cultural Forum in February. We’re clearly interested but, as I said in my article in March, what we tend to measure is what we think they ought to be doing and feeling.

Researchers in Australia looked at the impact of pre-performances talks on audiences’ enjoyment and their confidence in interpreting the dancework. The only difference between audience members who had been to the pre-show talk and those who had not was that their interpretation of the piece more closely matched the intentions of the choreographer. They didn’t feel any more confident and rated their enjoyment in a similar way. So, pre-show talks are not an effective tool for audience development unless our goal is to ensure the audience thinks like us. What made the difference was the time spent after the performance thinking about and discussing what they had seen as part of the research methodology. The researchers suggest that post-performance discussions where the audience gets to do the talking rather than listens to an expert would work much better…

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How do the public engage with culture?

Heather Maitland explores what we know about the way people experience the arts and what we are learning from this …

Research into public engagement with cultural activities divides into four areas:
· What kind of people visit, attend and participate in culture and who is missing?
· What types of activity do they engage with and what is the crossover between them?
· What motivates people to engage, and what prevents them?
· How do people actually experience a particular cultural activity?


Taking Part is commissioned by DCMS, surveying 29,000 people each year to answer the first two questions. Detailed findings for different regions and artforms are useful for benchmarking our own research into public engagement with our arts organisation and can be downloaded from the Arts Council England website. You can download an annual report with data on visits to museums and galleries from the MLA website.

Research into motivations and barriers to cultural attendance is abundant. Arts Council England commissioned extensive research as part of their Arts Debate published in February 2007…

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Killer communication

Heather Maitland looks at using design to make your marketing communications more effective

Our potential customers need to understand our marketing communications and remember them positively when they make a decision about how to spend their leisure time. So how can we increase understanding and positive recall?

Both depend on how much attention our potential customer focuses on the communication, subconscious as well as conscious Everyone subconsciously scans their environment all the time. When they do focus conscious attention on something, the subconscious analysis can give it a feeling of familiarity. Their brains interpret this familiarity as approval which leads them to behave in a favourable way towards it. Marketers love this because subconsciously based preferences are easily formed, can’t be argued with and are relatively long lasting…

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Measuring engagement

For decades, marketers have been trying to understand their customers’ experiences. Mason Haire first talked about ‘selling the sizzle not the steak’ way back in 1950.

And it’s not just marketers. Retailers worry about their customers’ emotional experiences when shopping because they know that improving the ambience of the shop means people buy more. Designers worry about how people feel when they use their products because they want to create things that work. There’s a whole research field academics have named ‘funology’ that tries to understand what makes a computer game engaging. Producers of political documentaries have borrowed techniques from the researchers who test TV ads so they can measure the impact of their films on people’s political beliefs. There’s a big debate going on among the geeks who design social networking sites about how to measure the depth of engagement that people have with their sites rather than just its usability. Mark Ghuneim from Wiredset identifies four levels of engagement from bookmarking at the shallowest level to creating a fan community at the deepest…

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Complex relationships abound

Heather Maitland discovers that most research into brands is case-study based and here she explains why

Branding is well researched: Google Scholar comes up with over 6,000 books and articles published in academic journals with ‘brand’ in the title. Mark J Kay1 points out, though, that much of the research into successful brands is based on case studies. These case studies have shaped the way that brands are managed, emphasising the importance of differentiation and consistency. In effect, many researchers and commentators are saying to us, ‘This is self-evidently a strong brand. This is what the company did so we should do it too.’ But often, we have very different products, customers and contexts that make the specifics of the case study irrelevant. Mark J Kay says what is missing is a coherent theory that explains the processes managers and marketers can apply to ensure their own brands are different and consistent.

So why the emphasis on case studies? Much of the research focuses on the complex relationships customers have with brands. Franz-Rudolf Esch and his colleagues2 say most brand managers spend considerable resources on measuring brand awareness and brand knowledge (i.e. what the customer associates with the brand name). They argue that brand managers should focus on the brand relationship as this is far more important in the long term. Brand relationship, they propose, is based on satisfaction, trust and attachment – all emotional factors. Both researchers and brand managers talk about creating ‘emotional truths’ and ‘brand enthusiasm’. Dori Mellitor, for example, says: ‘getting at the subconscious drivers of consumer behaviour required a whole new approach that transcended the traditional sphere of sales data and focus groups. A more strategic approach – one that divines consumer behaviour and infuses it with intuition and imagination – was required…

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The art of collaboration

Heather Maitland considers the sometimes tricky relationships between arts practitioners and their partners, and offers some tips for keeping professional relationships on the right track

When did you last check the health of your relationship? Here’s a litmus test, Cosmo quiz style:

You like Top Gear and your partner likes cookery programmes. What do you do?
a) ¨ Give your partner the channel changer – it’s more peaceful that way
b) ¨ Give your partner the channel changer – they’ll owe you one
c) ¨ Give your partner the channel changer – but refuse to talk to them for the rest of the evening
d) ¨ Buy another TV.


Buying that extra TV sounds like a simple solution, but is it really such a good idea to be sitting in separate rooms all evening? In a healthy relationship the give and take goes almost unnoticed. So how do we create work partnerships where the compromises necessary for collaboration come as easily?

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Let’s walk before we run

Heather Maitland investigates how we are getting on with our e-mailing campaigns

Last autumn, my colleague, Beth Aplin, joined 13 venues’ email lists to see what happened. Although she was playing the role of a dance enthusiast, just five venues sent her relevant emails at an appropriate frequency. She got nothing at all from five venues and one venue sent her an average of two emails a week about everything from kids’ shows to musicals.
We hear a lot about the excellent results achieved by some of our colleagues but many of us aren’t getting the basics of email marketing right.

The research is clear and consistent. Email marketing works because it is low cost, easy to do and is customisable. Unfortunately, much of what we send out is ineffective because we ignore that third essential factor. Like any form of permission marketing, email must be ‘anticipated, personal and relevant’…

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Reaching the unreachable

Engaging with hard-to-reach groups is, after all, what tackling social exclusion is all about. But how do you reach the unreachable? Heather Maitland makes some suggestions.

Some arts organisations exist to reach people no-one else engages with. Engaging with hard-to-reach groups is, after all, what tackling social exclusion is all about. But how do you reach the unreachable?

The government has set its agencies working with young people the target of reducing the proportion of 16 to 18 year-olds not in education, employment or training (NEET) by two percentage points by 2010. NEET young people are by definition hard to reach as they are not engaged with any part of the formal infrastructure. It reports that “the reductions [to date] in the proportion of NEET young people are the result of a wide range of organisations working effectively together to target the issue.” This multi-agency approach is adopted by most arts organisations who form partnerships with groups already in contact with NEET young people. But this means that arts organisations only work with young people already engaged in some way with the support system. Should they be targeting the genuinely unreachable instead of focusing on partnerships?

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In the know

Heather Maitland advises you to think about what you want to know – it may be that someone already knows the answer

The point of marketing planning is to make informed decisions about what will get your organisation from where it is now to where it wants to go. So where can you get the information to support those decisions?

Wait before you reach for that questionnaire, because someone has probably done the work for you. There is such a lot of readily available information about audiences (by audiences, I mean readers, visitors, participants – whoever it is you want to engage with). The abundance of information has its down side. If you are not to drown in paper, you need to decide in advance what you need to know, why you want to know it and what you will do with the information.

Your shopping list will include two sorts of information: about organisations and audiences similar enough to yours for you to make parallels; and about the wider communities your organisation seeks to serve.

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What do we know about our culturally diverse population?

Heather Maitland on Britain’s increasingly multicultural society

Hardish Virk, this issue’s guest editor, asked me to research the answers to three simple questions:
• How have the UK’s demographics changed?
• What will be the impact of recent immigration trends?
• What is the impact of recent immigration from Eastern Europe?


I wish the answers were as straightforward as the questions.

How have the UK’s demographics changed?

In the simplest terms, we need the answer to this question because we want to understand the communities our organisations serve so we can see how those communities are reflected in our audiences, visitors and participants…

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