Audience Finder is nominated for a Ticketing Technology Award

We are pleased to share that Audience Finder—a “big data” project delivered by The Audience Agency and co-created by Baker Richards and JCA—has been nominated for the Ticketing Technology Forum’s CRM/Data Tool Award.

Originally commissioned by Arts Council England and provided by The Audience Agency, Audience Finder enables cultural organizations in England and Wales to understand, compare, and apply audience and visitor insight. The program includes an automated box office data-sharing platform—powered by Baker Richards and JCA—which collects, standardizes, and aggregates data from over 200 organizations using a wide range of ticketing systems. The platform is growing every day but already includes:

• Sales data on over 1 million performances including over 56 million transactions and 160 million tickets, representing over £3 billion of ticket income.
• Data on over 15 million households (that’s the equivalent of 58% of UK households).

Audience Finder program has over 5,000 registered users in the cultural sector in England and Wales.

Arts organizations use Audience Finder dashboard to better understand existing audiences and non-attenders, and where they fit within a local, regional, and national picture. This is underpinned by the data warehouse developed by Baker Richards and JCA which also profiles bookers using The Audience Agency’s Audience Spectrum tool which segments the UK population by their attitudes towards culture. The insights derived from the box office data-sharing platform available to organizations in their online Audience Finder dashboard can then be supplemented with information derived from primary research surveys.

When Audience Finder was launched, Alan Davey, then CEO of Arts Council England, said: “This is a game-changing piece of work that will get more people to engage with arts and culture … this will be done by helping arts organizations—big and small, regional and national—to work together and share their data and insight to become better at reaching and targeting more people to build bigger and new audiences for the arts. Which in turn will help them and the sector as a whole become more resilient. A great example of ‘knowledge is power’ in action.”

Lindsay Cook, Head of Marketing & Communications at mac Birmingham says of the Audience Finder “it is a marvelous tool for cutting through the swathes of data.”

Adam Buss, CEO at QUAD says “Audience Finder for me is one of the most exciting and potentially powerful forces in Arts Marketing that has ever existed … the robustness of the data is crucial to make data-driven decisions; these are many and varied and are used in the context of board discussions, development of strategy, and for making the case to funders and sponsors.”

The CRM/Data Tool Award will be presented as part of the 2017 Ticketing Technology Awards, and recognizes best integration or application of data analysis to an entertainment ticketing challenge. The award ceremony will be held April 5 in Dublin, Ireland. We at JCA, Baker Richards, and The Audience Agency are honored to be nominated for this prestigious award.