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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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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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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Customer experience

Heather Maitland warns about making assumptions when researching your customers’ experience

Researching how satisfied people are with the experience your organisation offers is not straightforward. It is all too easy to research the things that your colleagues think are important rather than what really matters to your customers.

Ellen Garbarino and Mark Thompson analysed the experiences of audiences at an off-Broadway repertory theatre to try and identify the factors that create customer satisfaction and loyalty.

They concluded that, for frequent attenders, satisfaction with the quality of the acting was the main factor driving trust and the preference for familiar actors drove commitment. The quality of the physical facilities affected their satisfaction but not their levels of trust, commitment or their future intention to return.

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