What do we mean by your audience?

The term ‘Audiences’ can be a daunting when you are not sure who they are. In this section we use the term ‘audiences’ to mean anyone who visits our site, enquiries about your heritage, participates in tour sport or similar. They are your users, supporters, fans, followers, participants and more! Essentially they are anyone who you think will be interested in your sporting stories.

Understanding your current and potential audiences is essential and should inform the development of all your activity from how you collect information about your collections to how you deliver a programme of activity.

Your audiences are unique to you and should be defined by you. Audiences are never everyone, they should always be clearly defined and reflect the priorities and vision of your organisation.

Collecting information

Collecting information about your current and potential audiences is a long term activity. You can break it down into manageable sections and it can take a variety of forms including focus groups, visitor surveys, comments books, face to face interviews, observations as well as counting the number of visitors. Data should be collected about both virtual and physical visitors. By using a combination of methods this will help you to build a picture of your audiences.

Undertaking research

Undertaking research and data collection will help you to understand who they are. By doing this the activities of your organisations can be planned and delivered to meet their specific needs.

Undertaking audience research forms part of the process of developing your audience development plan.  This plan should reflect your organisation, the detail and scale will depend on the size of your organisation. An audience development plan is your road map to knowing your audiences and how you will develop and deliver a programme, what the cost implications are and how it fits into your wider strategies.

If you do not have the capacity or resource to research all your audiences at the same time, you can identify one key audience group and find out more about them. Then at a later date you can choose another audience group. This way you can build up a picture of your audiences in a manageable way over time.