The Audience Outlook Monitor is a collaborative study of arts audiences, designed to help guide decisions about programming events in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Made possible with support from the Australia Council for the Arts, and state arts agencies around Australia, the Audience Outlook Monitor will have three waves of data collection and reporting: May, July and September 2020.

Over 150 organisations are participating by sending a survey to a sample of their audience. This data is being collated and aggregated in a cross-sector dashboard that will be available to everyone in the sector.

Who has participated and why?

Participating organisations range from the Sydney Opera House, to Adelaide Fringe Festival, the State Library of Victoria and Cairns Indigenous Art Fair.

The participating organisations were invited in consultation with our supporting partners. Rather than ask every organisation around the country to participate, our approach was to select a sample of organisations from each State/Territory, and get a balance of regions, artforms, types and sizes.

Selected organisations needed to have a minimum number of audience members in their database to participate, so that there would be stability in the cohort across all three waves of the study.

Our team liaised directly with the participating organisations to help them extract a random sample of audience members from their database, and set up the survey invitation as an email campaign.

You can read more about the participating organisations, and the breakdown of the organisations by State/Territory, artform and size in ‘Fact Sheet: Participating Organisations’.

Are the findings nationally representative?

This is not a study of the general population. It is designed to deeply understand a particular segment of the population: those who attend arts and culture events like concerts, festivals, museums, galleries, author talks and art workshops.

The data was collected from recent attendees of participating organisations. The findings are reflective of the databases of arts and culture organisations.

With a total sample of over 23,000 respondents, the findings provide a large dataset for analysis. The size of this dataset enables us to breakdown the findings at the State/Territory level, and filter by different artforms.

Will participating organisations see their own data?

In Australia, the Audience Outlook Monitor has been designed as a cross-sector collaborative study that will be available to all, including independent artists and organisations without large audience databases.

Individual respondents and organisations will not be identified in the dashboard. However, it will be possible to filter the data to access a detailed picture of different artforms, regions and demographic segments. Combining the data in this way allows us to more clearly identify trends affecting different parts of the sector.

While individual organisations won’t be identified in the dashboard, participating organisations can register their interest to access a de-identified CSV file showing the results collected from their specific sample of audience members.

Is international benchmarking possible?

Our research partner WolfBrown is spearheading an international effort to monitor audiences’ readiness to attend arts and cultural programs. They are currently working with cohorts of organisations in the USA and Norway, with more countries to be announced soon.

To stay in touch with news about the international study, you can visit the global Audience Outlook Monitor homepage, and register to receive updates from WolfBrown.

How will the results be shared?

As a priority, the dashboard will be launched along with a short set of headlines on Monday 18 May 2020.

The findings will be available here on the Patternmakers website, and on the websites of supporting partners. Participating organisations will be directly notified.

As much as we love writing long, beautiful reports sometimes, it takes months. In this case, we will be publishing a series of short Snapshot Reports and Fact Sheets, illuminating key topics within the findings. These will be made available on a rolling basis in the coming weeks and months.

State snapshots will be distributed by supporting partners in each jurisdiction.

Where can I go for further information?

To be the first to hear of future announcements about the study, subscribe by entering your email address below. You can also opt in to Patternmakers’ regular Culture Insight & Innovation Updates, which cover research, tools and resources from around the world.

If you have a question or an idea to share regarding this data, please contact us at info@thepatternmakers.com.au.