Audience Spectrum shines light on arts audiences

UXB have helped The Audience Agency bring their new audience profiling tool, Audience Spectrum to life.

How do you represent detailed, nuanced segments of a population? By appearance, location, motivation, behaviour, all of the above? A key part of the brief from The Audience Agency as they prepared to launch Audience Spectrum, was to answer this question.

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Audience Spectrum is a population profiling tool which provides powerful insights and practical information on cultural audiences in England. At the heart of the tool are ten audience segments defined by cultural activity and based on rich, cross-referenced data. We looked at the characteristics of each one and set about developing a series of images that would help people easily understand and engage with the data.

Nice cup of tea

Within recognisable cut-out shapes we combined illustration, written text and images of objects to bring a human touch into data segments that represent different people.

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Audience Spectrum was introduced to an invited audience of arts organisations in Manchester in June 2014, with presentations and workshops. To support this event we designed the launch print materials, the centrepiece of which were the ten population segments. As well as the lead images, the information for the segments included pen portraits and helpful statistics as well as practical advice on how to engage each segment plus useful case studies.

AudienceSpectrum-template

"At launch it was vital that we engaged arts and cultural organisations in the rich data and huge potential of Audience Spectrum. UXB's designs introduced the tool clearly and simply and got the discussion flowing just as we'd hoped."

Cimeon Ellerton, The Audience Agency