The Culture Insights Global Audience Research Initiative aims to enhance social and cultural impacts of museums, galleries, theatres, and libraries by increasing overall standards for audience research and impact evaluation within the sector.
This research initiative enables research and evaluation practice with provisions for arts and culture organizations to more effectively target their improvement initiatives while using real-time feedback from visitors about the impacts of such initiatives.
The Culture Insights research project aims to bring cooperative and supportive institutions towards common goals into an improvement-oriented ecosystem. It is envisioned that collaboration and sharing among arts and culture stakeholders will encourage institutions to collectively improve to meet or raise to the overall quality of visitor experiences and education globally.
Facilitate sharing information community.
Improve community with good information.
Report findings through publications.
The Culture Insights initiative provides research and evaluation tools to individual institutions that facilitates real-time and ongoing visitor experience and impacts monitoring, with relevant benchmarks based on aggregate results from other participating arts and culture institutions around the world and prior research.
The ongoing evaluation results will provide insights of high value across arts and culture operations.
Education
Fundraising
Retail
Membership
Marketing
Catering
Services
Events
Participation in the Culture Insights audience research project includes the following project features:
The survey system used in this project has been built to enable best practice for research and impact evaluation. Therefore, participation in this project includes impact evaluation as a standard feature, allowing pre-visit and post-visit data collection at a minimum. As well, long-term follow-up surveys are possible with additional consideration that, for example, are sent to visitors three, six, or nine months after their initial visit. The system is fully user-friendly and accessible to institutional users with no previous research expertise.
The cornerstone of Culture Insights research is its benchmarking capabilities, which is made possible through expert-designed questions and survey methodology. The Question Bank used for this project is available to participating arts and culture at sign up.
Support is provided for developing the methods and survey design to best meet your institution’s research and evaluation needs. Project advisors help to provide practical expertise and the Culture Insights delivery team implements the survey and technical systems.
Your institution's stakeholders should collaborate on the survey design and provide measurement objectives to help guide data collection in areas of interest.
The survey design can address a range of interests including visitor experiences, service quality, and educational impacts. If impact evaluation has been communicated as the central concern of your institution's stakeholders, then items may be exchanged to include emphasis on emotional, attitudinal, learning or behavioral impacts pertaining to conservation and biodiversity education. In particular, these impacts may include the following:
Survey elements focusing on marketing and service elements (e.g. food and facilities) would be included in this survey design to the extent it is relevant to potential educational impacts.
The audience intelligence generated can be used to inform internal improvement efforts at your institution and help support claims of educational impact in response to public request for evidence of impact and relevance in relation to cultural awareness and participation. It may also provide a means to demonstrate particular standards in relation to arts associations and licensing agreements.
All data, analytics and reporting are accessible at all times through an integrated dashboard provided to stakeholders. Where applicable, elements are also benchmarked against other participating institutions at an aggregate level. The following methods are standardized, but can be adjusted based on specific request from your institution's stakeholders.
Three different surveys are used for the data collection:
The enrollment survey is designed to gather a few details quickly from visitors, including name, e-mail and visitor type. This is also an opportunity for asking impact items pertaining to a key concept, such as ‘conservation’. Options to enroll visitors include:
Entry Point Data Collection | |
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Option 1 | Visitors are invited to participate upon entering the facilities, either at a ticket desk or just past the entry gate. |
Option 2 | Systematic sampling should be used. Examples include selecting every other visiting group or every 5th visitor. |
Option 3 | Data can be entered by either visitor or staff, using an iPad or Android tablet to register data. A wide range of low cost devices can be used. |
Booking/Ticketing System Integration | |
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Option 1 | An integration (“hook point”) can be set up between the enrolment survey and your institution’s booking system to gather visitor Name and Email. |
Option 2 | Other information can be gathered at your institution’s discretion (e.g. ticket type or purchase amount). |
Option 3 | This add-on can run parallel to other collection methods, such as face-to-face (may incur an additional setup). |
Your audience can access the main survey after their visit to your institution or event. Invitation e-mails for the main survey are batched at the end of the day (EoD) and sent by the survey system automatically to visitors’ e-mail accounts, inviting them to participate. Visitors can use their preferred electronic devices, such as personal computer, tablet or smartphone.
We enable longitudinal impact evaluation with the survey system, whereby a third and final survey invitation is sent to visitors up to 9 months after their visit (this timeframe should be discussed).
This survey asks visitors to answer parallel impact questions and, in accordance with your evaluation requirements, focuses on the de-facto impact regarding arts and culture engagement that your audiences have taken after their visit.
Data collection and analytics are provided as part of the survey system. The proposed costs include all consultation, project management, and system implementation.
The initial setup and design includes all costs for project management, business analysis and consultation to ensure methods and survey design fit your institutions needs, as well as the build and delivery of the survey system for visitor impact evaluation, real-time analytics via online Dashboard and other features noted in this proposal. The initial set-up includes services and support for one year from system ‘go-live’ and support for Entry Point data collection option with tablet(s) and offline data collection capabilities.
Once the digital system is in place, data collection from visitors, analysis and reporting are included under the ongoing service costs. The service costs are included for the first year as part of the initial design and set-up costs. From Year 2 of the system’s operation onwards, continued services, automated data collection, storage and analysis through the Dashboard are covered through service costs charged either monthly or yearly at the same rate as setup.
From Year 2 and beyond of core service, the on-going services cost is based on up to 5 changes to survey questions each year (there may be a small additional fee for further support).
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Using the calculator:
The tool above will estimate participation costs for your institution. Simply select your institution type and an estimated annual number of visitors per year that visit. A quote will be prepared for you.
These costs are per site of data collection. Proposed costs are valid for up to 30 days.
The timeline for this work is estimated based on feedback and consultation through five stages of design, setup, and delivery. Estimated durations for these stages can be completed more promptly with institutional feedback through the delivery and implementation can be expedited.
Project Stage | Estimated Duration | Stage Requirements | |
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Stage 1 | Project Initiation & Proposal | 2 weeks | Review participation provisions, identify costs, sign proposal & delivery agreement. |
Stage 2 | Survey Design | 2 weeks | Communicate any specific inquires and collaborate on survey design. |
Stage 3 | Build Survey System | 2 weeks | Review of survey & system “draft” handover. |
Stage 4 | System handover and project launch. | 1 week | Collaboration on implementing within institution. |
Stage 5 | Project involvement and ongoing maintenance. | Ongoing | Ongoing participation to review results, contribute feedback and collaborate with Culture Insights research and community. |