Frequently Asked Questions

What’s involved in 2023

What is involved as a participating organisation – and what’s new?

Your organisation will need to send the survey to your audience sample on just one occasion this year – 2 August 2023. You’ll follow a very similar process to past rounds. What’s different this year is that we’re inviting participating organisations to help us chart the recovery story and offer a ‘reality check’ about what’s happening in the sector.

After registering your involvement, you’ll be invited to opt-in to share audience figures with Patternmakers in a confidential form. Your organisation will be anonymous, but by sharing your figures from 2019 and 2022, it will help you and other organisations to see how they’re tracking relative to the wider sector.

What will the study cover?

In 2023, the core study will provide data related to:

  • Current confidence levels and readiness to attend cultural events

  • Barriers and inhibiting factors preventing attendance at the moment

  • Spending, consumer confidence and decision-making factors in the current economic climate

  • Audience tastes and preferences over the coming year

  • Insights into how attendance behaviour and decision-making has changed since previous rounds and pre-pandemic.

The optional benchmarking will provide data related to:

  • To what extent organisations have rebuilt audiences following the pandemic

  • How the rebuilding trajectory varies across different artforms, geographic areas and organisation types.

Alongside the reporting of the full round results in August, Patternmakers will also be producing two Pulse Check reports in 2023:

  • May 2023: How audiences are responding to rising inflation

  • November 2023: A profile of regional and remote audiences.

What’s the timeline for 2023?

  • Tuesday 20 June at 5:00 pm AEST: Deadline for registering as a participating organisation

  • Tuesday 27 June: Deadline for providing benchmarking data

  • Tuesday 25 July at 12:00pm AEST: WolfBrown/Patternmakers provide instructions for survey deployment, outbound email language and survey hyperlinks to all participating organisations

  • Wednesday 2 August at 12:00 pm AEST: Phase 9 survey opens - All participating organisations send invitation emails to the agreed sample of their database

  • Sunday 6 August at 11:59pm AEST: Survey closes

  • Thursday 31 August: National results available

Creating a database sample

How many audience members do I need to have in my database to participate?

You need between 500 and 5,000 audience members in your database to participate. We are currently only asking organisations who have at least 500 recent audience members to deploy this survey. However, all organisations will be able to access results from this study.

Bianca from Patternmakers will reach out to you if we are able to accept organisations with less than 500 audience members in the future.

Who counts as an audience member?

An audience member is anyone who has purchased a ticket or attended an in-person event from your organisation since 1 January 2018. You need to include all segments of your audience database: donors, single ticket buyers, subscribers etc. so that you can pull a random selection representative of your full audience base

The people you contact must be audience members/attendees of your events. Please exclude education audiences, including teachers or school contacts

If you have the capability to suppress staff and board members from your sample, please do.

Which audience members will we be emailing in 2023?

Organisations that participated in 2020/ 2021/2022 can use the same lists to participate in 2023. You would be contacting the same audience sample you emailed in Phase 3 (September 2020) and/or Phase 6 (November 2021).

Otherwise, if your organisation has a large database, or if you have the capacity to extract a new list of 5,000 audience members who have attended an in-person event since 1 January 2018, you are welcome to do so.

If you have a smaller database, you can add recent attendees to your audience sample, based on audience members who have attended an event from your organisation since 1 January 2018.

If my organisation participated in the past, do we have to participate in 2023?

As a tracking study, the more consistent the cohort is, the more reliable the findings are. We hope that participating organisations will continue, however we acknowledge that some organisations have particular challenges and may not have capacity to continue in 2023.

If this is the case, or if you need assistance of any kind, please let us know by contacting info@thepatternmakers.com.au.

This is my organisation’s first time participating in the Audience Outlook Monitor. How many audience members should be in my sample?

You need a minimum of 500 and a maximum of 5,000 email addresses for recent ticket buyers/members/attendees to participate.

If you have a large database over 5,000, you can draw a random sample of 5,000 past attendees.

If your audience database is large (over 5,000) you will need to randomly select 5,000 email addresses for recent ticket buyers/members/attendees to contact in August 2023.

How do I randomly select audiences for my list?

Different organisations use different software for managing their audience database, so you are welcome to apply your own method to ensure a balanced list of single ticket buyers, donors, subscribers, members etc.

However, a simple way that we recommend is to put your list of audience members into an Excel spreadsheet and follow these instructions.(Note: you can use Excel to randomly select audience members – please contact bianca@thepatternmakers.com.au for any questions about this)

Do I need to send you my list?

No. You only need to prepare and divide your list of audiences members, ready to send the invitation to their email addresses on 2 August 2023.

What happens if we don’t have enough audience members in our database?

Unfortunately, if you have less than 500 recent audience members in your database, you won’t be eligible to participate in this study. This minimum is in place to ensure we have a stable cohort to track over time.

Bianca from Patternmakers will reach out to you if we are able to accept organisations with less than 500 audience members in the future. If you are unable to participate, you will still be able to access the results through the dashboard. Results will be shared in aggregate, and you will be able to filter the data to find results that are relevant to your artform and region.

My organisation shares audience members with other organisations – will audiences receive more than one survey link?

It is possible that some of your audience members may receive an invitation to complete the survey from two or more organisations.

This is one of the reasons why we are limiting the audience sample for each Phase at 5,000: so that large organisations are not sending the survey to their whole database.

We will include clarifying instructions for respondents in the invitation email, which explains that they only need to complete the survey once.

There have only been a few instances of this reported to us, and most audiences understand the need for the research and the value in collaborating. The data is collected once but shared for everyone to use, so it prevents audiences receiving invitations to a lot of different surveys about the same topic.

Survey Questionnaire and Deployment

How long is the survey?

Each phase, the survey will be designed and tested to ensure it’s an appropriate length. We’ll be providing respondents with information about the length of the survey in the survey invitation. We aim to keep it as short as possible, while addressing the complexity of some of the issues.

Can I see the questionnaire before I register my organisation?

Unfortunately, we can’t provide you with any part of the survey questionnaire before registering to participate. However, after you register to participate you will have an opportunity to view the questionnaire. From here, you are welcome to get in touch if you have any queries, and you can choose to withdraw from the study if needed at that point.

Can we apply our own branding to the survey invitation?

Yes, you may follow your usual approach to design and branding, so the email is recognisably from your organisation.

However please ensure that you include all content from the survey invitation provided, including the link to the study partners and the study’s Privacy Policy.

Where are the terms and conditions for the prize draw?

The prize draw Terms and Conditions are displayed within the survey, at the point where respondents can opt-in to enter the prize draw. They are also available here, and this link will also be included in the survey invitation email template if you want to include a link in your campaign.

For Phase 9, the prize draw closing date is 6 August 2023, and the prize will be drawn on 8 August 2023.

Registration & Privacy

Is it necessary to use an offshore software provider?

In this case, to participate in what is an international study, we need to use an offshore software provider. However, both Patternmakers and WolfBrown, our partner research agency, are committed to the Australian Privacy Act.

Together we have worked hard to minimise the personally identifiable information that will be stored in software offshore to just the IP address.

The study’s Privacy Policy has all the information regarding data collection and storage related to the project, if you’d like to read more.

What personally identifiable information are you collecting from audiences?

In terms of participant contact details, nothing will be collected in main survey. The survey software does record IP address, like many websites that use cookies etc.

However, we are using an incentive to motivate participation, as it's important the survey gets a strong response within a short timeframe, and we want to motivate participation by people who may be less engaged with the topic.

We're also giving people the option to opt-in to further research, if they want to. As this study is entirely new, we may decide there is a case to conduct follow up online groups, or do a follow up survey down the track to probe further on a particular finding.

Both are completely optional, and in the case of opting in, their email address would be collected using CheckBox, a separate platform with their data stored securely on an Australian server. It would only ever be used for research in the public interest and would never be used for marketing or fundraising. It is not able to be connected with their responses.

Accessing the Data

When and how can I access the results?

The results will be available in the online dashboard tool within two weeks of the survey closing. Patternmakers will also be analysing the data and disseminating snapshot reports through its communication channels and study partners’ networks.

Will I get to access data related specifically to my organisation?

Australian results will be reported in aggregate on the online dashboard tool. You will be able to access aggregate data, and filter the data to access results that are relevant to your artform and region.

You may also request an Excel file with responses from members of your database within four weeks of the survey closing. However, please note that sample sizes may be small, and the study is designed to provide insights at the aggregated sector level.