Audience mapping for visitor attractions
Spirul Ltd are a market research agency specialising in visitor attractions, festivals and events. They conduct surveys throughout the arts and culture sector to help organisations develop their audience understanding in order to plan growth, new projects and to develop brand strategies and value offerings. They have a wide range of clients from fixed venues and museums to seasonal festivals and events.
They came to us looking for a simple way to include a spatial aspect in their qualitative-based research. This was in order to better explore audience geodemographic groups, journey time, and visitor catchments for their clients.
From survey response to geodemographic audience analysis
Spirul’s key role is visitor profiling, enabling their clients to work out who is visiting their venue or event. This allows their clients to shape future exhibits and offerings to better fit their audience. In addition to tailoring a client’s value offering, it lets them improve their marketing through geo targeting and audience segmentation to attract more of this identified audience.
Previously, the team at Spirul had to manually run through spreadsheets and annotate respondent location based on postcodes before results could be summarised. Since Excel does not include a native mapping tool, results had to be summarised as a graph. This was not the ideal way for clients to visualise, and understand their audience data.
They came to us looking for a simple way to geocode and map responses to these surveys. Very quickly we identified MapVision as the best mapping platform for their needs. Since they began using MapVision, Spirul has continued to increase the depth of geographical intelligence and the value that they offer their clients. Let’s take a look at a few specific cases where they have given their clients a geospatial edge in the marketplace.
Building a business case for wildlife park expansion
Yorkshire Wildlife Park (YWP) approached Spirul to help them focus their £50 million planned expansion, focussed solidly on the needs of their audience, and ensure that there was sufficient appetite amongst their catchment to make this investment sustainable.
Exit surveys formed a core part of the initial research for this project. They involve stopping visitors on the way out of an attraction, and are an important part in assessing what an audience finds important in a day out. Each survey asked core satisfaction-based questions but, importantly, it also asks for key demographic details. These responses were aggregated into spreadsheets and then imported into MapVision in order to geocode them.
Yorkshire Wildlife Park also benefits from having an on-site hotel. Hotel visitors are emailed surveys following their stay to gain additional insight. This increases the sample size - more than 5,000 responses - and, therefore, reliability of project results.
This simple process gave a number of advantages in building a plan for growth:
- Plot how far people were willing to travel and map a realistic catchment for the park
- Build a fuller picture of YWP’s key demographic groups by bringing together geodemographic data and the demographic results from questionnaires
- Identify key geodemographic groups and plot hotspots of these within the catchment to quantify total potential visitors
For a more complete, well-rounded analysis, Spirul also looked at like-minded competitors such as zoos and family adventure parks in the North of England. They applied the same travel radius that they’d used for their own site to these competitor locations. Looking at the demographic make-up within these areas and identifying high-indexing groups gave a comparison of the size and type of audience expected by YWP.
The resulting information was used to tailor final business plans for the park and shared with potential funders to validate their business case and turn their ambitious plans into reality.
Audience mapping as part of a theatre’s business review
A South Yorkshire Arts Centre undertook a major review of its audience and value offering following the appointing of a new Chief Executive. Survey data was central to this review but, additionally, Spirul were given access to the previous 3 years ticket sale data for a larger sample size. This allowed for a more accurate audience and drive-time analysis. This work is being used in feasibility planning for future projects and will help the venue to remain attractive to its audience and more sustainable in the long-term.
Assessing the feasibility of a new museum using geodemographic profiling
Most recently, Spirul approached us regarding an entirely new museum in the planning stages. A potential venue had been shortlisted and the project team commissioned Spirul to help complete a feasibility study. To assist with this, we were asked to identify demographic groups within a drive time of the potential new venue using our P² People & Places (P²) geodemographic profiling data. This visitor catchment could then be cross-referenced with other similar venues and indexed against the national average to predict potential footfall for the new museum.
We undertook this work as a consultancy job and used MapVision as the canvas on which to share the analysis with Spirul. They could then use MapVision’s online collaboration features to share the findings with their client in a format to suit them. Data maps for projects like this are typically downloaded from MapVision as an image that is then nested in the desired format within the feasibility report - in this case PowerPoint. Now that the report has been submitted, we look forward to learning the outcome of this project and, hopefully, visiting the new museum in due course.
Simple geodata tools to enable sustainable venues
As we have seen, Spirul’s use of MapVision has focussed on its drive-time and geolocation tools. These straightforward tools have, however, enabled them to help a variety of different clients to create, review and expand their businesses. Even when more in-depth geodemographic consultancy has been required, MapVision has provided a robust way to display the results and offered multiple ways to share data with their clients. Finally, the flexible subscription length of MapVision has enabled Spirul to incur cost for the tool only when it is required for a specific project, ensuring that their own operations are as cost-efficient and sustainable as possible.
"“MapVision has enhanced our previous Excel-based analysis and made visualising and understanding audience groups a lot easier.”"
Anthony Phillips, Director, Spirul
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