Are you looking to find ways to measure a gallery audience?
Under Arts Audiences’ Build Your Audiences Scheme, The Butler Gallery received free marketing consultancy to undertake a extensive study in this area, and the findings have been of great benefit to the organisation. Under the guidance of Heather Maitland, Jean Tormey, Education Curator in the Butler Gallery, has compiled a report on the findings, to download this, as well as the following;
- The Galley’s action plan
- the research plan
- 3 questionnaires
- audience observation sheet
click on this link: Measuring a Gallery Audience – Butler Art Gallery report
All combined, this information provides a significant resource for similar organisations considering a similar study.
Some notes from Jean on the body of work;
“We wanted to get involved in the Build your Audience Project to devote some dedicated time and energy to finding out more about our audience, and to thinking about how we communicate with both our existing and potential audience. One of the major reasons for this is the Gallery’s long-term aim to relocate to a new facility within the next three years to better accommodate our collection, exhibition and education programme.
In our current location [Kilkenny Castle] we attract a significant, transient, international audience who visit us as part of their tour of the castle. Our move to the new venue means we cannot rely on this particular tourist audience to automatically attend the Gallery as is often the case at present.
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image courtesy of the Butler Gallery
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This project was an ambitious one that could not have been undertaken without our committed group of volunteers. In retrospect, we were somewhat over ambitious in the questions we asked at the outset. More time spent honing the ‘real issues’ would have been beneficial. However, a study of this kind has never before been undertaken by the Butler Gallery or any gallery in Ireland for that matter, and was an eye opener for the Gallery in many ways.
Through the street and castle surveys, we discovered that many more people than we realised knew where we were, and a lot of people had complementary and positive things to say about the Gallery. The Project confirmed our prediction that much of our audience are attending as a result of a visit to the Castle – half of our audience comes directly to see the Gallery.
Furthermore, there are not as many young people or family groups as we would expect visiting the Gallery – reflecting a trend that visitors with children (particularly under 5) are apprehensive about attending galleries and museums. Equally, the fact that people above 60 do not appear to be visiting as much as we thought. The results encourage us to develop pointed programmes for people within these age groups.
In terms of how people use the space and our mediation of exhibitions (types of interpretation etc.), we have come to the conclusion that each exhibition needs a range of messages and channels of communication and interpretation – so that we are viewing each exhibition as having a diverse potential audience, with each segment having different needs.
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