Understanding audiences is essential to building strong, responsive, and sustainable arts and cultural organizations. Yet access to high-quality audience research has historically been limited by cost, capacity, and resources, putting it out of reach for many organizations.

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Audience Outlook Monitor (AOM) is a WolfBrown initiative dedicated to making audience research more accessible, affordable, and actionable for cultural organizations of all sizes. Through collaborative research, shared learning, and practical tools, AOM helps organizations better understand their audiences, respond to changing patterns of participation, and make more informed decisions.

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Participating organizations can gather audience feedback through low-cost surveys and access their results through an online dashboard, making it easier for staff across departments to engage with data and apply research findings to their work.

 

Our History

Launched in 2020, Audience Outlook Monitor brought together leaders from more than 660 cultural organizations around the world to study audience behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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What began as an urgent response to a period of extraordinary uncertainty helped establish a new model for collaborative audience research, built around cost-sharing, transparency, rapid deployment, timely access to results, and shared learning.

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Today, AOM continues to build on that foundation, exploring important questions about audience engagement and development while strengthening the cultural sector's capacity to collect, interpret, and use audience data.

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What We Do

Research and Learning Community

Through our free AOM community, we bring together arts and cultural professionals, researchers, and others interested in understanding audiences. Webinars, research briefings, publications, and discussions offer opportunities to explore emerging research, exchange perspectives, and consider how new insights can inform practice.

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Our goal is to foster an ongoing conversation about audiences and the changing cultural landscape, while making valuable research findings available to the broader field.

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Accessible Audience Surveys

AOM offers low-cost survey opportunities that help arts and cultural organizations gather essential information about their audiences without the expense of fully customized research.

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Through shared research tools and accessible reporting, participating organizations can better understand audience experiences, motivations, behaviors, and relationships with their organizations.

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Building Research Capacity

Beyond collecting data, AOM is committed to helping organizations make sense of what they learn. We aim to strengthen research literacy across the cultural sector, encourage evidence-informed decision-making, and support more thoughtful and effective approaches to audience engagement.