Membership and Affiliations Survey

Welcome to the Membership and Affiliations Survey, 2025 Cohort!

Please bookmark this page, as it is not publicly accessible.

This page contains key information about the study for participating organizations. Here you’ll be able to access an archive of recorded cohort sessions and other survey resources as they become available.

Cohort Membership

The following organizations are in this cohort.

League of American Orchestras Sponsored Organizations:

Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra
Dallas Winds
Madison Symphony Orchestra
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (Australia)
Minnesota Orchestra
Phoenix Symphony
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra
Richmond Symphony
San Diego Symphony
Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra
Tucson Symphony

Other Organizations:

Celebrity Series of Boston
City of Tempe
New 42
Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Key Dates

All organizations send emails requesting cooperation with the survey on Tuesday, October 14. The precise time of deployment is up to you.
All organizations send reminder emails on Friday, October 17. The precise time of deployment is up to you.
The survey closes on Monday, October 20, 11:59 pm PT.

First Steps

If you haven’t already, please immediately fill out the participation form, which identifies the individuals in your organization with whom WolfBrown will liaise on all matters related to the survey cohort. You can also use this form to let us know if you’d like us to give additional people access to the dashboard and/or invite them to the online sessions.
Look at the Customizations tab on this webpage for instructions about customizations and survey incentives.
Please make sure you've added our domain to your email's allowlist and added erin@wolfbrown.com to your contact list, as sometimes emails end up in your spam folder otherwise.

Customization

There is limited customization in this survey. You may choose to include or exclude certain questions on the survey. In addition, you are allowed to customize one question asking your patrons to identify which series/program category/product line/venue they have attended (for organizations with multiple product lines or venues), for the purposes of filtering your results by this variable.
Please fill out our customization form in order to include any of these questions, if you haven't yet. Your customization details must be submitted to WolfBrown by Monday, September 29.

Incentives

You can include an incentive for the survey if you’d like to increase response rates. You’ll need to choose the incentive and create a form to collect email addresses from respondents at the end of the survey. Email Erin Gold at erin@wolfbrown.com for more details and to get it added to the survey.

Deployment Logistics

Email List Selection (Sampling Plan)

You’ll want the results to be as representative as possible of your total (recent) audience. We’ve seen response rates averaging 5% and ranging from 1% to 10%.
In light of this, you’ll want to send out a minimum of 1,000 and a maximum of 10,000 randomly selected emails representing a natural mix of ticket buyers. Shoot for at least 3,000, if possible. The more, the better. In the end, you want to be looking at a respondent pool of 150, at minimum, and preferably 400 or more.
Generally, we suggest a look-back period of transaction activity from 9/1/2023 to the present date. Smaller organizations might extend the look-back period to 9/1/2022. If you have more than 10,000 ticket buyers in that window, bring the look-back date forward in order to reduce the sample size and target more recent ticket buyers.
In any survey of this nature, there is a natural bias towards more recent buyers, and more loyal patrons in general. Subscribers typically respond to surveys at twice the rate of individual ticket buyers.
Once you’ve assessed your counts, complete the sampling form to report your counts to WolfBrown. We need this information to calculate response rates.
Note: A minimum of 100 responses is necessary to view and analyze your respondents’ data in the dashboard. Organizations with less than 100 responses will be offered the option of remaining in the cohort with less than 100 responses in the dashboard (understanding that results may not be fully representative of your audience) or a credit towards a future survey.

Review the Protocol & Test the Survey

Familiarize your team with the survey protocol.
We strongly encourage staff of participating organizations to take the online survey as part of your preparatory efforts.
A test version of the Performing Arts-based organizations survey is available here.
The protocol was designed by the WolfBrown team in 2025, based on industry best practices and decades of experience with this line of questioning. Skip logic is used to shorten the length whenever possible.
Questions marked “Optional” may be included in the survey, at your discretion. We recommend including as few optional questions as possible, to minimize length.

Download and review the protocol

National Panel

All survey respondents, after completing the survey, will be invited to opt-in to Audience Outlook Monitor’s National Panel.

Exit Dashboard

Upon completing the survey, survey takers will be redirected to an “Exit Dashboard” – an abbreviated, static dashboard page that provides results for a small number of survey questions for your organization (only), so that respondents can see how their answers compared to the answers of others.
No open-ended questions are included in the Exit Dashboard.
We feel that providing instant access to selected results will add an element of transparency to the process and help to maintain the goodwill of survey takers.

Suggested Email Language

We provide suggested language for the two outbound email messages. Use your own branding and design. Feel free to adapt the language to fit your voice and to what you’ve found best engages your audience or visitors.
On Friday, September 26, WolfBrown will provide the liaisons from your organization with the survey hyperlink to be included in your outbound email message. The liaisons should first test the survey themselves.
View suggested language for outbound emails here.

Dashboard Access and Sessions

Schedule

Your participation in the various cohort learning activities will greatly enhance the value you get from your investment in the survey cohort. Calendar invites with a Zoom link will be sent to all liaisons and contacts who requested them. All activities are optional. Recordings will be posted here on the cohort webpage within several days of each event, and they may be shared with anyone within your organization.

Would you find captions, visual descriptions, or other accommodations helpful during the session? If so, please write to Erin Gold at erin@wolfbrown.com, so we can do our best to make necessary arrangements to ensure your full participation. If you need transcripts or closed captioning after the recording is published in the archive section of this page, you can find options on the Vimeo recordings.

Deployment Logistics Session

Topic: We will cover list selection criteria and email deployments. This session is your chance to ask questions about the details of deployment.
Date: Monday, September 29 at 2:00 pm-2:45 pm ET (45 minutes)

Opening the Conversation

Topic: Meet and greet your fellow cohort members and discuss how you plan to use the results.
Date: Monday, October 6 from 2:00 pm-3:00 pm ET (60 minutes)

Dashboard Orientation

Topic: A guided tour of the dashboard, tips on filtering data, tagging open-ended responses, and other technical information on the dashboard tool.
Date: Wednesday, October 22 at 2:00 pm-2:45 pm ET(45 minutes)

Study Session

Topic: After a short orientation, cohort members will break out into small groups to discuss a specific module of survey questions and generate takeaway observations, followed by report outs. Takeaways will be compiled in a shared Google Doc for all to see.
Date: Wednesday, October 29 from 2:00 pm-3:30 pm ET (90 minutes)

Culminating Session: What have we learned? Part 1

Topic: WolfBrown staff will synthesize the takeaways from the small group work. Cohort members will be invited to reflect on next steps for their organizations.
Date: Monday, November 24 from 2:00 pm-3:00 pm ET (60 minutes)

Culminating Session: What have we learned? Part 2

Topic: WolfBrown staff will synthesize the takeaways from the small group work. Cohort members will be invited to reflect on next steps for their organizations.
Date: Thursday, December 4 from 2:00 pm-3:00 pm ET (60 minutes)

Dashboard Access

You’ll have access to your results in your dashboard as they come in on the deployment day. This will be your first chance to see the number of fully completed survey responses from your own patrons and everyone else’s.
To access the dashboard tool, please create a password using your email as your username. If your email is not set up as a login, fill out our participation form to be added as a user . Once you’ve created a password, we recommend you bookmark our login page, so you can easily log into the dashboard directly.
We highly recommend the Dashboard Orientation Session for anyone in your organization who is new to the dashboard or needs a refresher. Calendar appointments with a Zoom link will be sent to all liaisons and contacts who requested them using the participation form. The recording of this session will be posted on this page.
A successful learning experience depends on your efforts to make sense of the results. This is not a typical process where the consultant conducts a statistical analysis and prepares a lengthy report several months after data collection. Instead, results are available through the dashboard, and the time you spend in the dashboard will reap benefits for your organization. After deployment, you will have a chance to meet with a WolfBrown consultant to review your results.

Tagging Your Data

In order to identify trends in the survey's qualitative data, quantify the frequency of certain responses, and find notable responses in the future, we encourage all organizations to add tags to their respondents’ verbatim responses in the dashboard. Responses can be tagged by clicking on the response in the dashboard and typing the tag in the box below the response. We will guide you through the tagging process during the Dashboard Orientation Session.

Questions?

Please reach out to Erin Gold with any questions.

Email: erin@wolfbrown.com
Phone: 415.796.3060

Email Language

Tagging Scheme