AEE Forums

In my experience its easier to get a response from people with multiple-choice rather than open-ended questions. Depending on the choices, you may have to take the results with a grain of salt ... people may like to think of themselves as “intellectual” or “risk-takers” when really they’re not! I’m curious though—what will you plan to do with the results?

Thanks for your thoughts Maggy!

We’ve been working to analyze our brand, and identify the characteristics of our core audience.  We’ve had a lot of internal conversations about our brand attributes and what we think our audience looks like, but have no real audience data to back that up.  So, we’re hoping that the information we collect from this survey will help to either confirm our thinking, or show us that we are complete off base.

what if you also tried some multiple choice questions that play on the creativity that folks associate with the arts/theater?

like…  On a Saturday afternoon, which would you choose—a kite, a basketball, a lawnmower or a laptop?

or…  My ulitmate birthday would be - dinner for two, a surprise, a big bash, family and friends, or a getaway vacation?

or my favorite…  If you could be really really big, or really really small, which would you choose?

You might be able to make some useful characterizations and your audience will have fun too!

Eva,
If you’re planning on doing your audience survey on site, you might want to try a two-step approach, asking basic questions of the people present in the audience, and then asking them to provide an email address if they are willing to participate in a longer survey. Then, you can use Survey Monkey or another online survey resource to ask more detailed questions on psychographics, attitudes, feelings about the organization, etc. This will prevent having a questionnaire that is too long for people to complete easily. You should also mention the survey in your curtain speech if at all possible, telling the audience why you need the information and encouraging them to help you out by completing the survey.

One important point, no matter how you conduct the survey, is the question Maggie raised.  You need to know in advance how you are going to use the results or the question isn’t worth asking. Setting clear and specific objectives is the most important part of any research project.

I haven’t tried questions like those before. I will have to give that a shot. We always work with very specific things that are telling about their behavior (and are rarely any fun). Multiple choice questions like:
Where did you first hear about this show?
Where else did you hear about the show?
How often do you go to the theater?
What was your favorite part of the show?

I like the two part approach. Our survey return rate has been dropping the past few years, despite us offering the same prize. (Returned surveys are entered in a raffle for free tickets to a later show).

Focus group research, especially among core users, is a great source for information and insights that can identify those behavioral and psychographic attributes that you can later quantify through surveys. But if that isn’t an option, consider using scales rather than forcing respondents to choose static attributes. After all, it really isn’t whether you are cautious or ambitiious, etc., but to what degree you have these qualities. Using an odd number scale of 5 or 7 points should allow people to differentiate themselves. The question could be phrased: How well do the following characteristics describe your personality? Check/circle a number from 1 to 5/7 for each characteristic where “1” = Not at all and “5”/“7” = Very well or Exactly. This approach also allows each person to respond to every characteristic rather than skipping those that don’t apply—or that they just forgot or neglected to check! You won’t know what a non-response really means if you use the approach you mentioned. You could also poll your staffers and volunteers and get them to generate (open-ended) 10 words that they feel best describe the personalities of your audiences. Then use the ones that occur most frequently or are most unique as your list. The results of a scale will serve you much better to help psychographically identify and segment your audiences.

Thanks for all the great advice!  Our survey is in use now, and I will report on the results when they come in.

We did what Deborah suggested and polled our staff and board members for words that best describe tour audiences. We chose the ones that were mentioned most frequently and included them as options on our survey.  We also included words that were quite different from the words we came up with.  For example, we included the word “adventurous” which was on our list, but also added “cautious.”  We thought this would help to test whether we are correct about our sense of our audience.  What do you think?

I like the idea of using a scale instead of a check box.  We’ll try that next time. 

We are collecting email addresses as part of the survey.  So, we could follow up with a longer electronic survey.  Good idea!

Adding words that are opposite what you think is your image is a good idea. You might also think about adding words that represent the negative side of what you would interpret as a positive quality. For instance, what you think of as ‘adventurous” audience members might regard as “too far out for me”  or some other less favorable interpretation. Providing the possibility of negative responses is just another way to make sure you are covering all the bases.

Eva, I’ll be very interested in what your survey shows—and even more importantly, in how you use the information. Please do post something when it’s finished!

Thanks for posting this, Eva! All of your comments were really useful. I look forward to seeing how our audience responds. We can then determine if our first go at this was helpful toward defining the company. Thanks, everyone!

Reporting back on the progress of our audience survey.  We distributed the survey at our fall show and enticed audience members to enter with a drawing for a beautiful handmade mask.  We had a response rate of 57%.  Should we consider that a good response?

We found out that we had a pretty accurate sense of our audience psychographics, but learned a few interesting things:

We assumed that many of our audiences members are affiliated with colleges or universities as students, faculty or staff, but only 20% of those surveyed identified themselves as a “student or academic.”

37% of the audience identified themselves as “foodies,” which has inspired us to plan an event combining a culinary experience with a performance.

Exactly 50% of the people surveyed said that this was the first time at a Blair Thomas & Co. show, and 86% said they heard about the show from a friend.  Wow!  Seems like there’s an opportunity there somewhere.  Any ideas for how we can take advantage of word-of-mouth to promote our shows in the future?