Impact of a Data-Scientist-in-Residence on The Audience Agency

Background and project partners

The Arts Data Impact (ADI) project was a collaborative project between The Audience Agency, three arts organisations, University of Ulster and Magic Lantern. ADI addressed how data-driven insight can best support arts organisations and have an impact on organisational change. This was delivered via consultancy and the employment of two data scientists-in-residence who developed software tool prototypes for the arts partners. The main objectives of the project were to:

• Test data-driven decision making in arts organisations
• Generate insight into new business and organisational models as a result of data-driven decision-making
• Facilitate a step change in the sector towards a more open and transparent sharing of data for the benefit of the entire sector

Arts partners: The Barbican, National Theatre, English National Opera and The Audience Agency were uniquely placed to initiate this project, poised at a point of major CRM development, and able to contribute thinking and experimentation, as well as large and robust data-sets. The arts partners hosted the Data Scientist in Residence for six months, test drove proto-types and played a leadership role in the sector.

Technology partner: Magic Lantern Productions provided the technical strategy and worked with digital agency We Heart Digital to develop and build the tools for the arts partners in collaboration with the Data Scientists in Residence. Led by Anthony Lilley, author of Counting What Counts, it is a long-established and leading digital media company.

Research partner: Professor Paul Moore was the Principal Investigator for the ADI project. Co-author of Counting What Counts, he is Head of the Schools of Arts and Computing at the University of Ulster and recognised as a leading exponent of ethnographic methodologies in the arts space. His research is focused on both the creative industries and the ways in which theory and practice can be brought together in training and education.

Outcome: The project has resulted in prototype tools that contextualise how data can be used to enhance business decisions. The tools provide intuitive push button reports that deliver insights about each organisation's data. The idea was not to replace people's decisions with data but to support decisions within a data-informed culture. The project's success has been less on what those decisions actually were but on the narrative around those decisions i.e. how the data has been used internally to develop understanding, tell stories and drive cultural change. While the tools represent the technical success of the project it is each organisation's story about their experiences on the project, with the Data Scientists and their responding internal shifts in behaviour around data that is the real success.

Why did the Audience Agency want to be involved in the ADI project?

Audience Finder has grown in volume with increasing velocity and different variety of sources - predominantly box office metrics, survey data and web analytics. Part of the opportunity with ADI was to look more broadly at what else could be developed and improve the speed at which data could be collected and analysed to optimise value for the agency and the sector. The ADI project has very much been a response to Counting What Counts. It was also an opportunity to make better use of data and explore what a data 3.0 approach might look like for them.

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