Communications and Media Use Survey, 2023 Open Cohort

Welcome to the Communications and Media Use Survey 2023 Open 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 recordings of online sessions in the archive section at the bottom of the page and other survey resources as they become available.

Cohort Membership

The following organizations have opted into this cohort:

Alley Theatre
The Ark
Ars Nova Singers
Boyce Thompson Arboretum
Des Moines Community Playhouse
North Carolina Symphony
Northrop, University of Minnesota
The Old Globe
UMS
UPenn Live Arts

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.
There are a number of optional questions on the survey that you can chose to add. In addition, you are allowed to customize many questions to identify local media sources used by different segments of your audience. Please fill out our customization form in order to include any of these questions. Your customization details must be submitted to WolfBrown by August 1.
Fill out this contact form if you want us to invite additional people to the online sessions.
Please make sure you've whitelisted erin@wolfbrown.com's email and added to your contact list, as sometimes emails end up in your spam folder otherwise.

Key Dates

All organizations send emails requesting cooperation with the survey on Tuesday, August 15 at 12 pm noon.
All organizations send reminder emails on Friday, August 18; the precise time of deployment is up to you. The survey closes at 11:59 pm PDT on Monday, August 21.

Deployment Logistics

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, July 31 from 2 – 2:45 pm EDT / 11:00 – 11:45 am PDT (45 min)

A link to the recording of this session (and all future sessions) will be added to the bottom of this page shortly afterwards.

Email List Selection (Sampling Plan)

Given the goal of obtaining an accurate media profile of your ticket buyers, 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 9/1/2020 to the present date. Smaller organizations might extend the look-back period to 9/1/2019.
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 are not stable) or a credit towards a future survey.

Suggested Email Language

Suggested language for the two outbound email messages may be found here. 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.
Before Thursday, August 3, 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.

Review and Test the Protocol

Download and review the protocol

Familiarize your team with the survey protocol (located on the right of this page).
We strongly encourage staff of participating organizations to take the online survey as part of your preparatory efforts.
A test version of the survey (formatted for the University Musical Society) is available here.
The protocol was designed by the WolfBrown team with extensive input from leading arts marketers. Skip logic is used to shorten the length whenever possible. We are indebted to the staff of University Musical Society for their cooperation with validity testing and pilot testing the protocol.
Questions marked “Optional” may be included in the survey, at your discretion. We recommend including as few optional questions as possible, to minimize length.
All survey respondents, after completing the survey, will be invited to opt-in to Audience Outlook Monitor’s National Panel.
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.

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 contact 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.

Dashboard Orientation

Topic: A guided tour of the Communications and Media Use Cohort dashboard, tips on filtering data, tagging open-ended responses, and other technical information on the dashboard tool.
Date: Wednesday, August 23 at 2:00-2:45 pm EDT | 11:00-11:45 am PDT (45 minutes)

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 contact form. The recording of this session will be posted on this page.
A successful learning experience depends on cohort members’ 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 sense-making process is crowdsourced by the cohort over a period of several weeks after data collection. The time you spend in the dashboard will reap benefits for your organization and for the cohort.
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.

Learning Sessions

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Cohort Learning Session 1: Opening the Conversation

Topic: Meet and greet your fellow cohort members and discuss how you plan to use the results.
Date: Monday, August 7 at 2:00-3:00 pm EDT | 11:00 am-12:00 pm PDT (60 minutes)

Cohort Learning Session 2: Small Group Study Session

Topic: After a short orientation, cohort members will break out into pre-assigned 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, August 30 at 2:00-3:30 pm EDT | 11:00 am-12:30 pm PDT (90 minutes)

Cohort Learning Session 3: What Have We Learned?

Topic: WolfBrown staff will synthesize the takeaways from the small group work. Cohort members will be invto reflect on next steps for their organizations.
Date: Wednesday, September 13 at 2:00-3:00 pm EDT | 11:00 am-12:00 pm PDT (60 minutes)