Audience Answers surveys for organisations in Scotland

The Audience Answers survey is designed to help cultural organisations gain valuable insight into their audiences by asking them about themselves and what they think. 

Responses are displayed in an easy-to-use dashboard; providing your team with insights to support marketing strategies, report to your board and senior management, and to help you make a case to funders and other stakeholders. The Audience Answers survey will also support you with your audience reporting requirements for Creative Scotland (if applicable).

All organisations in Scotland can access the Essentials survey package free of charge (usually £1440 annually). This includes up to three extra questions of your choice from our question catalogue, which you can add to the core questions on your survey. The In Depth package is also substantially discounted. 

Get started – request your Audience Answers survey by completing this form, and we'll be in touch.

All Audience Answers surveys include a set of ‘core’ questions; these cover areas such as age, ethnic background, disability and gender, and are asked in the same way as the UK census to allow for comparisons with the wider population.

The core questions also ask audiences about their opinions and how they would rate their experience, as well as providing a space for any open-text comments.

If you like, you can add optional extra questions from our extensive catalogue of templated questions 

If there is a question you’d like to ask that isn’t included in the question catalogue, you can add bespoke questions. 

This will incur an additional cost of £475 + VAT for up to three bespoke questions. 

A number of survey collection methodologies are possible:

• A post-visit e-survey: this may be most suitable for organisations who collect email addresses as part of a ticket-booking process. We will provide you with a link to embed in emails and send to your audiences after their visit.
   
• In person via a tablet: a good option for organisations who don’t issue tickets (and therefore don’t collect email addresses) eg museums and galleries. Responses can be collected offline, and then easily uploaded to Audience Answers when in wifi range.
   
• In person on paper: we will provide you with a printable PDF, and instructions on how to input your survey responses into Audience Answers.
   
• Via a QR code: we will provide a url which you can then convert to a QR code and include on your printed materials - respondents then complete the survey on their smartphones.
   

Survey responses will appear in your Audience Answers dashboard, formatted into charts and tables.

You can filter the responses by date, and will have access to a downloadable csv file of all responses if you want to explore the data in more depth. You can also download all the individual charts and tables.

The dashboard is accessible to as many of your colleagues as you’d like – just contact us to set them up with an account.
 

We recommend that organisations should aim to collect a minimum of 380 surveys, ideally spaced evenly across the usual range of your public activities e.g. not all during the run of a Christmas show, or only at weekends. 

This number will give results at around the 5% margin of error at the 95% confidence level – in other words, a sample of this size can be relied on to be a representative picture of your audiences.

For more on margin of error and confidence level, read our article on the topic here.

All Audience Answers web-based surveys are designed to conform to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 meeting level AA compliance and Section 508 Standards. 

The survey template is based on an accessible standard theme, which includes a reasonable colour to text contrast and brightness, to ensure our surveys are accessible to most people, including those with colour blindness. Audience Answers surveys can also be completed by a respondent using a screen reader with a text-to-speech (TTS) system.

As standard, Audience Answers paper surveys are published in minimum 12pt font and do not rely on colours or images in any way. If your organisation requires a larger font size, please let us know when you request a survey via the survey set-up request form. 

The Audience Agency is committed to supporting organisations use surveys that are accessible to all audience members, however we know that our technical and design considerations for accessibility are by no means exhaustive. If you have feedback on how we can do better, please contact us