Benchmarking audiences for London contemporary visual arts
Benchmarking audiences for London contemporary visual arts
By
The Audience Agency
Snapshot London: Visual Arts, is a visual arts benchmarking project. The Audience Agency undertook a scoping exercise to establish the amount and nature of audience data being collected and used by London contemporary visual arts organisations, and investigated the most appropriate and cost effective means of supporting these organisations in their ongoing audience research and development activities. Findings were put into practice, a framework was produced and a support system provided which enabled a wide range of galleries to collect audience data and contribute to a set of benchmarks.
Methodology: a face-to-face survey was administered by each of the 21 galleries in the project. At some of the larger galleries, the fieldwork was carried out by external fieldworkers as part of ongoing research. Elsewhere, gallery staff were trained in data collection and interview technique and conducted the survey themselves. All galleries also provided visitor figures for the period, to allow weighting of the overall results by relative number of visitors.
Sample sizes: sample sizes varied from gallery to gallery, largely due to differences in visitor numbers and resources available to conduct interviews. Galleries were provided with a target sample size in order to produce data with a margin of error of ±5%, and were advised on construction of a representative sample frame. The margin of error varies between benchmarks, due to different sample sizes, populations and percentage responses.