Audience Tracker for arts organisations in Northern Ireland
Audience Tracker for arts organisations in Northern Ireland
By
Audiences NI
A report illustrating how audiences engage with arts organisations in Northern Ireland. The Audience Tracker highlights customer behaviour and addresses the perennial questions of crossover. Issues addressed include whether audiences in Northern Ireland are loyal to just one organisation and to what extent they visit other cultural institutions. The report also uncovers to what extent the public are eclectic in their tastes or if the majority are aficionados of just one genre.
Arts bookers in 2008 were predominantly pre-existing bookers from previous years. The majority of households
attending the arts in 2008 only made one visit to an arts event that year. While this may seem disconcerting, it
accords with similar patterns in the UK1. Where households were attending more than once in 2008, they were
predominantly re-attending at the same organisation, but often at a different genre of event.
The idea of the eclectic arts attender who goes to lots of different events at many different arts organisations is
not a myth, as some of these customers do exist. However, they are the exceptional cases, with only 5% of
household bookers in 2008 attending the arts five or more times in 2008. Even these customers were inclined to
stick more to what they know, with only 1% going to five or more different genres and only 0.1% going to 5 or
more different arts organisations.
