Audience Answers – Free for SCAN members

We are pleased to be joining forces with The Audience Agency to help SCAN members access the Audience Answers programme. 

If organisations and venues can collect visitor data in the same format, we can then start to gather collective insights about visitor trends and needs across visual arts venues. It will also help us to advocate for our members by demonstrating impact within the contemporary art community. All SCAN members are welcome to take part in this programme at not cost to your organisation. 

 What is Audience Answers? 

The Audience Agency have been funded by Creative Scotland to run the programme, which works with cultural organisations across Scotland to support the use of data within their audience development strategies and data driven insight. A range of free resources are available to SCAN members, including tools for ticketing analysis & survey collection as part of Audience Answers & population reporting. 

In a recent presentation with SCAN members, Ben Jeffries, Head of Audience Agency for Scotland, mentioned previous work that they had done in England with CVAN and other visual arts organisations  pre-pandemic. If you are interested in the sort of insight collective working can deliver, you can see this 2019 report on Audiences for Visual Arts Here (Audience finder mentioned in this report has now evolved to become the new Audience Answers) 

Ben has also updated the survey example we used in the session adding the two suggested shared questions we would use for SCAN’s  Scottish Visual Arts Audience Network so you can see what it would look like here 

How to Sign Up for the SCAN Network Audience Survey 

To register your interest just fill in this form and The Audience Agency will be in touch to set up a network survey for your organisation  (or adjust your existing survey if you are already use Audience Answers Surveys) 

How to Join Audience Answers   

You can sign in to Audience Answers on this link  (If you are new to Audience Answers you can register on the same link) Audience Answers is free and gives you access to all sorts of sector evidence about audiences even if you do not provide audience data or surveys to the Audience Agency. 

More info about Audience Answers Surveys 

You can read more about Audience Answers, Surveys and Networks  here on The Audience Agency website. 

Once you have filled in the form to register interest The Audience Agency will be in touch to set up your survey. At this point you will be able to choose up to 3 free additional questions for your organisation. You can be prepared by reading this guide to selecting questions here (ignore pricing info – the Essentials survey is free in Scotland) and you can explore the full question catalogue here (you will need to be signed in to Audience Answers to access these links)  There is of course no need to select any additional questions  if you would like to keep your survey simple – only ask what is useful to you. 

If you have any further queries, you can contact Ben at the Audience Agency here. 

Image: SCAN Summit 2024. Credit: Tiu Makkonen