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“Culture Segments”

A couple of weeks ago, I referred to Culture Segments, which was developed by UK-based firm Morris Hargreaves McIntyre as a way of describing different audiences for the cultural sector.

It identifies 8 different audience segments, based on people’s interests, attitudes, and extent to which they value culture as a part of their day to day lives:

“the segments are distinguished from one another by deeply-held beliefs about the role that art and culture play in their lives, enabling you to get to the heart of what motivates them and develop strategies to engage them more deeply.”

Briefly, the eight categories can be described as:

  • Enrichment: an older more mature demographic; most likely to visit heritage sites and gardens; relatively conservative and fixed in tastes and habits.
  • Entertainment: younger adults who are less interested in the arts; most likely to frequent ‘must-see’ events, theme parks and sporting events; tend to stick with what is seen as ‘popular’
  • Expression: people with a wide range of interests of which arts and culture are an important part; they enjoy intellectual stimulation and seek communal experiences in their leisure time
  • Perspective: home-oriented; mostly interested in outdoor-and nature based activites; they do not see arts and culture as important aspects of their lives but can be tempted if their relevance is made clear
  • Stimulation: active and adventurous, they like being at the cutting edge; innovators and early adopters; will seek out contemporary art forms like street art and music festivals in contrast to traditional arts and culture
  • Affirmation: view arts and culture asa way of spending quality time with friends and family; they actively seek educational experiences for their children; seek self development and peer affirmation
  • Release: younger adults with busy working and family lives; arts have moved down their list of priorities as they struggle to fit everything in; need convincing that arts can be enjoyable for children
  • Essense: active cultural consumers and creators; they avoid mainstream activities and like to be seen as discerning and sophisticated in their tastes; like to be the ‘first to discover’ the new and unknown

Each segment is described in further detail in the Culture Segments document (downloadable as PDF), including education levels, age profiles, cultural spending habits (split between tickets, food & drink and souvenirs) and ways to target each group more effectively. It’s based on the UK population but I imagine the general principles would be applicable elsewhere, if not the specific stats.

These audience segments are different from the visitor identities I have written about earlier – they are describing different things for different purposes.

The principal difference, as I see it, is that visitor identities are based on the circumstances of a particular visit to a particular site; these may change from visit to visit and from site to site. (For example, the same person can be a ‘Facilitator’ when taking their children to a Natural History museum, but an ‘Experience seeker’ when visiting The Louvre on holiday.)

By contrast, the audience segments are intended to be a measure of how likely you are to be a visitor to a cultural venue in the first place. (This is in keeping with my definition of ‘audience’ as being a bigger population than ‘visitors’ – your audience comprises all your potential visitors.)

Having said that, there might be some patterns and relationships between the two: I could imagine ‘Stimulation’ and ‘Entertainment’ segments being more likely to be ‘Experience seekers’, ‘Affirmation’ more likely to be ‘Facilitators’, and so on.  It would be interesting to study this in more detail.

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Visits to UK Museums and Attractions: 2010

My April edition of Museums Journal arrived in the post late last week, which included a report on UK visitor statistics that have recently been released by the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (ALVA).

Topping the list was the British Museum, with over 5.8 million visits, up 4.9% on the previous year. Coming in second was Tate Modern, which saw a 7% increase to see them topping the 5 million visitor mark.

Below are the ALVA figures for (its member) sites attracting over 1,000,000 visitors in 2010 (the full list is here):

  SITE TOTAL VISITS CHARGE/ FREE % +/-
1 British Museum 5,842,138 F +4.9%
2 Tate Modern 5,061,172 F +7%
3 National Gallery 4,954,914 F +3.7%
4 Natural History Museum 4,647,613 F +13.2%
5 Science Museum (South Kensington) 2,751,902 F -0.5%
6 V&A (South Kensington) 2,629,065 F +16%
7 National Maritime Museum 2,419,802 F +2.19%
8 Tower of London (HRP) 2,414,541 C +1.04%
9 St Paul’s Cathedral 1,892,467 F/C +4%
10 National Portrait Gallery 1,819,442 F -7%
11 Tate Britain 1,665,291 F +11%
12 British Library 1,454,612 F +5%
13 Westminster Abbey 1,394,427 F/C -3.8%
14 National Galleries of Scotland (Edinburgh sites) 1,281,465 F/C +10.18%
15 Old Royal Naval College Greenwich 1,274,957 F +28%
16 Edinburgh Castle (Historic Scotland) 1,210,248 F/C +1%
17 Chester Zoo 1,154,285 C -6.8%
18 Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 1,141,973 C -12.19%
19 Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum (Glasgow) 1,070,521 F -21.75%
20 Imperial War Museum (London) 1,069,358 F +21%
21 Roman Baths & Pump Room, Bath 1,054,621 C +2%
22 Canterbury Cathedral 1,033,463 F/C +2%
23 Merseyside Maritime Museum 1,027,475 F +9%
24 ZSL London Zoo 1,011,257 C -4.95%
25 Stonehenge (EH) 1,009,973 C +2%
26 Eden Project 1,000,511 C -2.7%

Overall there is an increase in visitor numbers, but there is considerable variation across sites. The Imperial War Museum,  Natural History Museum and the V&A have all seen large increases (perhaps there were significant redevelopments which opened last year?); others were relatively stable (e.g. the Science Museum and the Tower of London), and others again saw significant decreases in attendance (e.g. National Portrait Gallery and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew). I was particularly surprised to see the drop in visitors to Kelvingrove Museum (down 21.75%)  – perhaps there is a rebound effect if 2009 was an unsually high year for some reason? If anyone has some details which can help explain the numbers (I feel I’m a bit out of the loop with UK happenings these days), please add your comments below.

It’s probably also worth noting that eight of the top ten attractions have free entry, and apparently UK Culture Minister Ed Vaisey has released figures showing a trebling of visits to free museums since 1990 (MJ, p7).

ALVA do not report whether the increase in visitors is primarily due to local or international visitors (this is probably not recorded at many individual museums). It would be interesting to know whether the increase in museum visits is a manifestation of the ‘staycation’ phenomenon – more people holidaying closer to home in a tighter economy, or more international tourists taking advantage of the relatively weak GBP and visiting the UK.

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Australian attendance at cultural venues: trends 1999-2010

Continuing from my last post on the ABS Report: Attendance at Selected Cultural Venues and Events, I’ve now had a look at the historical trends data comparing surveys from 1999, 2005-6 and 2009-10.

First, some caveats: the ABS acknowledge some methodological differences between the three surveys from which these data have been drawn, which may affect the validity of internal comparisons. Also, the report notes that only a minority of the differences between years are statistically significant (more on that later).

Historical attendance trends across selected cultural venues by persons over 15 years of age. (Source: ABS) Figures in red are statistically significant increases.

From 2005-6 to 2009-10, there were statistically significant increases in attendance to Art Galleries, Museums, Botanic Gardens, Performing Arts and Cinemas.  I’ve also represented these historical trends graphically:

Historical attendance trends across selected cultural venues by persons over 15 years of age. (Source: ABS)

This shows that attendance to Art Galleries and Museums is similar, as is that to Zoos, Botanic Gardens and Libraries. Most changes over time are relatively modest, even if some are statistically significant.

However, the state-by-state breakdowns reveal a more complex picture, particularly for museums:

Historical attendance trends to museums by State (Source: ABS)

So while there is a statistically significant increase in attendance overall, the only individual states to show a statistically significant increase from 2005-6 to 2009-10 are Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania. The differences between states are quite stark when shown graphically:

Historical attendance trends to museums by State (Source: ABS)

This graph would seem to suggest that there are long-term, stable differences between states and territories with respect to museum attendance. ACT is the only one to show dramatic changes between time points. (I wonder if the opening of the National Museum of Australia is a contributing factor to the jump from 1999 to 2005-6?) While there does seem to be an upturn in NT attendance, apparently this is not statistically significant.

There were also noticeable state-by-state differences in Art Gallery attendance:

Historical attendance trends to art galleries by State (Source: ABS)

Again, ACT residents appear to buck the national trend. However, it is the increases in the NSW and Qld figures which are statistically significant:

Historical attendance trends to art galleries by State (Source: ABS)

There were no dramatic differences between states with respect to attendance rates to either Zoo & Aquaria or Botanic Gardens. While there was not a statistically significant increase in visits to zoos at the national level, the NT had a statistically significant increase:

(This would appear to go against the theory I had in my last post, that there had been a “Panda effect” increasing zoo visitation in South Australia since 2009.)

For Botanic Gardens, NSW and Victoria had a significant increase; the nationwide total was also statistically significant:

Age breakdowns also give a bit more of an insight as to who the additional visitors are – for Art Galleries, there are statistically significant increases for all the older age brackets (age 45+) . Interestingly, the increase of visitation by the 18-24 age bracket is also statistically significant.

Meanwhile, for museums and zoos, it is only the 35-44 demographic that shows a statistically significant increase. Botanic Gardens, meanwhile, show statistically significant increases among 15-17 year olds, as well as 45-54 year olds.

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Australian attendance at cultural venues: state-by-state breakdowns

Last year, I wrote a series of blog posts about the ABS report: Arts and Culture in Australia – a statistical overview. This report did have museum attendance figures, but focused primarily on the funding mix of museums and other cultural venues.

A recent article on the Perth Now website, lamenting the relatively low levels of cultural participation and funding in Western Australia, alerted me to the release of a more recent report, which looks at museum attendance in more detail and gives a state-by-state breakdown.

The full report is available on the ABS website as always, but I thought I’d again take a look at the numbers and give my thoughts on what they might mean (and, as always, I appreciate your comments and additional perspectives!).

First, the headline figures – attendance numbers at cultural venues state-by-state:

Attendance at cultural venues and events 2009-2010 (source: ABS report cited above). *NT figures pertain only to urban areas. **Performing arts includes classical concerts, popular concerts, theatre, dance, musicals and operas. These are broken down in the full report but only the aggregates are used here.

Overall, over 85% of people aged over 15 in Australia attended at least one cultural venue or event for the year 2009-10. For people aged 15-17, participation rates were the highest at 97%. Participation decreased with age, and the lowest participation rate (64%) was that of the over 75s.

Total participation rates (Source: ABS)

Participation rates are also broken down by state and territory:

Cultural participation and attendance rates (percentages), by venue type and by state (Source: ABS)

Based on these figures, ACT residents are among the most active participants in culture, being the most likely to have visited an Art Gallery, Museum, Archive, Library, Performing Arts event or Cinema in the past year. With the high density of National Museums and Galleries in the Capital, the high attendance at these venues is not all that surprising – it’s a matter of availability. However cinemas, hardly unique to Canberra, are well attended as well. (Note that the data records people’s place of residence, not the venue they attended. So these numbers just ACT residents, not people from other states visiting Museums in the Capital. The report gives a breakdown of  where people attended venues in relation to where they live on pp 19-20).

As the Perth Now article said, WA residents are the least likely in the country to attend an Art Gallery; Museum attendance is also below average in that state. Having said that, WA is not alone: participation rates are below average in NSW (albeit slightly) across the board.

NT residents were the most likely to attend zoological parks and aquaria, by a significant margin. SA is above the national average for this year too and I wonder if this is a consistent figure or indicative of the ‘Panda effect’ (the Adelaide Zoo’s Panda Enclosure opened in late 2009 and there has reportedly been a jump in visitor numbers since then.)

Overall what these differences between states mean, it’s hard to tell: it’s possible that they are simply due other geographic and demographic differences between states. However, as the Perth Now article suggests, there could be genuine differences between states and their attitudes to culture. I’d be interested in hearing what you think.

One pointer towards a geographic explanation (at least in part) is the difference in participation rates between capital cities and elsewhere. This is possibly skewing the figures for those states which have a higher proportion of their population residing outside the capital:

Attendance to cultural venues by region (Source: ABS)

The report also gives breakdowns of visitation by age and sex, household composition, country of origin, labour force status, educational attainment and household income, but I won’t delve into those here – if you’re interested in these figures, go to the original report (see link to ABS website above).

Later in the report, they have some figures showing attendance trends over the past 10 years, which I’ll look into for a future post.

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Museum visits in Australia: breakdown by type

It’s taken me a while to get back to it, but here is another instalment of my review of the ABS Arts and Culture statistics for 2010 (previously referred to here and here).

Chapter 8 gets into museum attendance in more detail, breaking down visits to Art Galleries, Social History Museums, Historic Properties, and Natural, Science & Other Museums (in some cases categorised as ‘Art Galleries’ and ‘Everything Else’).

The ABS recognises a total of 1183 museums across Australia; 14% of which are Art Museums/ Public Galleries. The most common museum type is Social History Museums, comprising some 60% of the total.

In the 12 months leading up to when data were collected, 7.2 million people aged 15 years or over (45% of the population) visited museums or art galleries. (This figure and the age breakdowns are essentially the same as reported previously, so I won’t elaborate again here).

Approximately 55% of these museum and gallery visitors were women. The proportion of women rises to 57% in art galleries, falling to an average 53% to all other museums types.

The statistics also report total number of admissions to each museum type, and whether they are paid or free admissions, and I’ve reproduced and manipulated these figures (summarised below) to see what would emerge.

Australian museum types and attendance figures (Source: ABS, Arts and Culture Statistics 2010, Ch8)

NB: The base numbers this table is derived from came with a health warning, as things like free admissions are notoriously difficult to measure with confidence. There are also a number of caveats associated with the reported number of each museum type – so interpret these data with caution!

The first thing I did was take the reported figures for free and paid admission and see how the proportions of each compared by museum type. As you can see, Art Galleries lead the charge with 83% of admissions being free, whereas only 31% of entries at Historic Properties were free. (Given the typical operational and funding models of these respective organisations, there is no real surprise there).

Then I took the attendance figures and divided them by the number of museums in each category, to get a mean attendance for each. Taking this very crude measure, an ‘average’ Art Gallery attracts 78,500 visits a year and Natural/ Science/ Other museums attract 89,200 on average. This compares to 12,300 at Social History museums and 15,100 at Historic Properties. Again this makes intuitive sense, given the majority of the big state and national museums fall into one of the former two categories.

The final thing I did was to see what ‘share’ of the total museum attendance each museum type was attracting. This essentially reflects the same data but just in a slightly different way – and it shows that Art Galleries and Natural/ Science/ Other museums attract about 3x more visitors than if visitation were spread evenly among all museum types.

Ok, so no real surprises in those numbers. The real surprise for today came from back in Chapter 5, which was about employee earnings and hours worked in the cultural sector.

There are statistics for full-time adult non-managerial employees (i.e. excludes self-employed) in the broader ‘cultural’ sector. So pretty broad-brush stuff, but still some stark results. In the category of ‘arts professionals’  (which is not defined more specifically in this report), it reports that in August 2008 males were working an average of 33.2 hours per week, and earning $1,454 (in other words, $43.80/hr). By way of contrast, females at the same time were working 35.1 hours per week and earning $967 ($27.55 / hr). So for ostensibly the same category of work, women are earning only 63% as much as men.

The category is so general as to make it hard to draw conclusions, but the gap is so great it’s hard to interpret it in any other way but that women in the arts are being seriously underpaid relative to their male counterparts. And for a sector that has a reputation for being female-dominated, that really shocked me.

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Who’s visiting?

I’ve just started having a look through Arts and Culture in Australia: a Statistical Overview, which has recently been put out by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. (Download PDF via this page). Now, the ABS is hardly known for its page-turners, but it’s got off to a promising start with some intriguing figures.

In the first section, there are some stats looking at attendance to cultural venues according to age group (% visiting in the past 12 months). I wanted to see if there were any patterns in these data, so I took the numbers and graphed them out:

Attendance rate by age, using figures from table 1.4 in ABS report

It’s a bit hard to see what’s going on here, besides the fact that the cinema is very popular with teens and declines steadily with age (and I don’t think I needed ABS data to tell me that!). So to get a closer look, I took the same data and graphed just the figures given for the cultural / heritage venues (Museums, Art Galleries, Zoos & Aquaria and Botanic Gardens):

Attendance by age, Cultural and Heritage sites only (source: ABS)

This graph is a little more illuminating. Interestingly, despite reports that their audiences have distinct differences, Museums and Art Galleries seem follow a very similar curve – i.e. roughly the same proportion and age of people are visiting. And both show fairly predictable dip in the 18-24 age range (a notoriously hard group to catch).

Zoos also show a similar-ish pattern, although at a higher level of visitation in the middle range. This peak at 25-34 & 35-44 age groups is also not surprising, given these would be the peak age of people taking their children to visit the zoo.

The one that does surprise me out of all of this is the curve for Botanic Gardens – from a similar baseline at age 15-17, the curve defies the 18-24 dip of the others, and reaches a steadier, more sustained plateau.

The meaning of this – who knows? I just made up these graphs with the figures given, and it may or may not be appropriate to re-present the raw figures in this way. So yes, I could be over simplifying, or on the other hand this could be an interesting pattern to investigate further. If the report sheds any further light on the question, I’ll let you know!