Case study
Audience Analysis and Strategy for Northern Stage
Northern Stage closed for 2.5 years for a major capital refurbishment and re-opened in Autumn 2006 with new systems and teams. However upon re-opening Northern Stage discovered that its previously held audience data was no longer current and accurate and this was leading to poor attendance. A decision was taken after six months to carry out a complete re-brand to re-establish Northern Stage as a premier venue.
Two years later Northern Stage wished to undertake a project review to understand how it could obtain maximum audience knowledge from its software packages and data, and to plan to achieve its future communication goals.
Susan Coffer, Administrative Director at Northern Stage had previously worked with Beth Aplin of Aplin Partnership and was extremely keen in recommending Beth to lead the project.
Beth undertook an audit and review of Northern Stage’s current requirements and put forward the following actions to achieve the desired goals.
- To review the competency and expertise of use of the key customer facing software packages used within the organisation, recommending and undertaking the support of transfer of knowledge as appropriate.
- To review the knowledge about audiences held throughout the organisation and how this knowledge is used, with a view to expanding the depth of knowledge and breadth of usage.
- To consider the structure and practices of the Communications, Sales and Operations departments with a view to proposing refinements and enhancements
- To collaboratively assess the current customer loyalty strategies and explore how these can be enhanced to increase customer/donor loyalty and increase attendance/fundraising capacity.
Beth then ran a series of workshops with staff from across the organisation. The initial workshops focussed on sharing knowledge regarding the Box office system and obtaining audience knowledge from all departmental systems. Issues were discussed, worked on and noted by members of the team and supporting processes were introduced.
Subsequent workshops built on what had been learnt in the first workshop and also reviewed the teams existing knowledge of their audience data. Beth carried out research on what were commonly held ideas regarding their audience data e.g approximately 60% of bookings were made online, and then implemented a program of obtaining accurate data to compare with the expected levels for Key Event Indicators.
The workshops enabled the teams from differing departments to talk more freely to each other, they discovered common threads in pre-conceived thoughts and devised strategies to increase the effectiveness of both interdepartmental working and obtaining accurate audience data.
Beth led the project team in creating and delivering a powerful presentation to the board, where preconceptions of audience behaviour were explored, actual findings constructively presented and a route planned for ongoing audience analysis.
Susan Coffer found that Beth’s approach to the project empowered the team to be able to take ownership of the issues, ensuring they knew the reason behind the issue, remained focussed and continued to steer the resolution of the issues forward.
