Audience Finder is a national audience data collection and development tool delivered by The Audience Agency, enabling cultural organisations to understand, compare and apply audience insight. With support of CVAN, galleries across England are starting their second year of audience survey data collection using Audience Finder.

With over 25, 000 audience surveys collected so far, you can download the Year 1 report (see left) to find out more, but we've summarised the highlights for you below:

Galleries role in the visitor economy

One in three visitors who visited galleries had planned their trip to that area especially to visit that particular gallery, and those visitors generated an estimated £25 million total new spend in those areas in 2014/15.

Regular, loyal, local

Galleries play an important part in their local communities, with visitors from a 15 minute drive-time making up on average 35% of visitors. The are also regular, and in 2014/15 around half of visitors surveyed had visited previously within the last 12 months.

Who are they?

Galleries outside of London proved to be particularly effective at reaching medium engaged audiences; using Audience Spectrum this equates to the Trips & Treats, Home & Heritage and Dormitory Dependable segments. Whilst galleries in the capital attract a significant proportion of visitors who regularly attend arts and culture events, in particular Metroculturals. That said one in every six London gallery visitors are from the three lowest engaged Audience Spectrum groups.

How to get involved

Many galleries are still collecting audience surveys using Audience Finder and we will continue to publish results about the overall picture of visitors across England as well as support individual to use their own findings to develop their own audiences.

Collecting audience survey data within Audience Finder is free and gives you standardised methodologies with results in an easy to use dashboard helping you to put your audience data in context of the population and other arts audiences. To find out more visit the Audience Finder dashboard or request survey set-up using this webform.

In August 2019, The Audience Agency published the Visual Arts Audience Report, using audience data from 2018 - 19. This more recent report gives an encouraging picture of audiences' enegagament with the art from.

See Visual Arts Audience Report, 2019